Entertainment
V.E. Schwab’s Favorite Cross-Genre Fantasy Novels
The author, most recently, of “The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue” recommends books that weave the fantastical into mystery, horror, romance and more.
Whenever I talk about fantasy, readers hear it with a capital F. They conjure images of wizards and magic, dragons and fictional maps. And while there certainly is a section of the market devoted to tales with those traditional trappings, I imagine fantasy as far less monolithic — not a single furnished room but an entire house, full of strange wings and less-visited corners.
In my mind, anything that departs from the realistic world — and in so doing enters the realm of the fantastical — qualifies as fantasy. The books below represent some of my favorite intersections between fantasy and other genres or archetypes. You might not think of them as belonging under the fantasy label, but that’s the beautiful thing about a crossroads: It allows for disparate, converging paths. It is a place of more, not less.
Fantasy x Police Procedural
The Likeness
By Tana French
Let’s kick things off with arguably my most controversial pick. French is known for her Irish police procedurals. But tucked into most plots is a small kernel of the supernatural, so slight you could argue that it isn’t there — or you could let it creep in like a mist, adding a hint of atmosphere. In my favorite of her mysteries, a detective arrives at a crime scene to find that the victim looks just like her: not as in a passing resemblance, but a literal doppelgänger. This uncanny mirroring allows the cop to pose as the victim in order to find out who killed her.
Read our review.
Fantasy x Family Saga
The Immortalists
By Chloe Benjamin
My love of the literary gray zone continues in Benjamin’s best-selling debut novel, in which four adolescent siblings visit a fortune teller, who tells each of them when they will die. The book explores identity across generations, and asks both the reader and the Gold children to walk the line between choice and fate, fantasy and self-fulfilling prophecy. Is the fortune teller truly clairvoyant? Or is the potential of her power enough to change the course of four lives?
