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ROMANCE
• Chick-Lit: often humorous romantic adventures geared toward
single working women in their twenties and thirties.
• Christian
• Contemporary: a romance using modern characters and true-to-
life settings.
• Erotica
• Glitz/Glamor: focused on the jet-set elite and celebrity-like
characters.
• Historical:
• Multicultural: a romance centered on non-Caucasian characters,
largely African-American or Hispanic.
• Paranormal: involving some sort of supernatural element,
ranging widely to include science fiction/fantasy aspects such as
time travel, monsters or psychic abilities.
• Romantic Comedy
• Romantic Suspense: a novel in which an admirable heroine is
pitted against some evil force (but in which the romantic aspect
still maintains priority).
• Sensual: based on the sensual tension between hero and
heroine, including sizzling sex scenes.
• Spicy: a romance in which married characters work to resolve
their problems.
• Sweet: a romance centered on a virgin heroine, with a storyline
containing little or no sex.
• Young Adult: written with the teenage audience in mind, with a
suitably lower level of sexual content.
THRILLER/SUSPENSE
HORROR
• Child in Peril
• Comic Horror: horror stories that either spoof horror conventions
or that mix the gore with dark humor.
• Creepy Kids
• Dark Fantasy: a horror story with supernatural and fantasy
elements.
• Dark Mystery/Noir: inspired by hardboiled detective tales, set
in an urban underworld of crime and moral ambiguity.
• Erotic Vampire
• Fabulist: derived from "fable," an ancient tradition in which
objects, animals or forces of nature are anthropomorphized in
order to deliver a moral lesson.
• Gothic: a traditional form depicting the encroachment of the
Middle Ages upon the 18th century Enlightenment, filled with
images of decay and ruin, and episodes of imprisonment and
persecution.
• Hauntings
• Historical
• Magical Realism: a genre inspired by Latin-American authors, in
which extraordinary forces or creatures pop into otherwise
normal, real-life settings.
• Psychological: a story based on the disturbed human psyche,
often exploring insane, altered realities and featuring a human
monster with horrific, but not supernatural, aspects.
• Quiet Horror: subtly written horror that uses atmosphere and
mood, rather than graphic description, to create fear and
suspense.
• Religious
• Science-Fiction Horror: SF with a darker, more violent twist,
often revolving around alien invasions, mad scientists, or
experiments gone wrong.
• Splatter: a fairly new, extreme style of horror that cuts right to
the gore.
• Supernatural Menace
• Technology: stories featuring technology that has run amok,
venturing increasingly into the expanding domain of computers,
cyberspace, and genetic engineering.
• Weird Tales: inspired by the magazine of the same name, a
more traditional form featuring strange and uncanny events
(Twilight Zone).
• Young Adult
• Zombie
• Action: a story that often features a race against the clock, lots
of violence, and an obvious antagonist.
• Comic
• Conspiracy
• Crime: a story focused on the commission of a crime, often from
the point of view of the criminals.
• Disaster: a story in which Mother Nature herself is the
antagonist, in the form of a hurricane, earthquake or some other
natural menace.
• Eco-Thriller: a story in which the hero battles some ecological
calamity - and often has to also fight the people responsible for
creating that calamity.
• Erotic
• Espionage
• Forensic: a thriller featuring the work of forensic experts, whose
 involvement often puts their own lives at risk.
• Historical
• Horror: a story—generally featuring some monstrous villain - in
which fear and violence play a major part, complete with graphic
descriptions.
• Legal: … generally putting his own life at risk.
• Medical: a thriller featuring medical personnel, whether battling
a legitimate medical threat such as a world-wide virus, or the
illegal or immoral use of medical technology.
• Military: a thriller featuring a military protagonist, often working
behind enemy lines or as part of a specialized force.
• Police Procedural
• Political Intrigue: a thriller in which the hero must ensure the
stability of the government that employs him.
• Psychological: a suspenseful thriller in which the conflict
between the characters is mental and emotional rather than
physical—until an often violent resolution.
• Romantic
• Supernatural: a thriller in which the hero, the antagonist, or
both have supernatural powers.
• Technological: a thriller in which technology - usually run amok -
is central
SCIENCE FICTION/FANTASY
• Alternate History: often featuring a profound "what if?"
premise.
• Arthurian Fantasy
• Bangsian Fantasy: stories speculating on the afterlives of
famous people.
• Biopunk: a blend of film noir, Japanese anime and post-modern
elements used to describe an underground, nihilistic biotech
society.
• Children's Fantasy
• Comic
• Cyberpunk: stories featuring tough outsiders in a high-tech near-
future where computers have produced major changes in society.
• Dark Fantasy: tales that focus on the nightmarish underbelly of
magic, venturing into the violence of horror novels.
• Dystopian: stories that portray a bleak future world.
• Erotic: SF or fantasy tales that focus on sexuality.
• Game-Related Fantasy
• Hard Science Fiction: tales in which real present-day science is
logically extrapolated to the future.
• Heroic Fantasy: stories of war and its heroes, the fantasy
equivalent of military science fiction.
• High/Epic Fantasy: tales with an emphasis on the fate of an
entire race or nation, often featuring a young "nobody" hero
battling an ultimate evil.
• Historical
• Mundane SF: a movement that spurns fanciful conceits like warp
drives, wormholes and faster-than-light travel for stories based on
scientific knowledge as it actually exists.
• Military SF: extrapolate existing military technology and tactics
into the future.
• Mystery SF
• Mythic Fiction
• New Age: a category of speculative fiction that deals with occult
subjects such as astrology, psychic phenomena, spiritual healing,
UFOs and mysticism.
• Post-Apocalyptic
• Romance
• Religious: centering on theological ideas, and heroes who are
ruled by their religious beliefs.
• Science Fantasy: a blend in which fantasy is supported by
scientific or pseudo-scientific explanations.
• Social SF: tales that focus on how characters react to their
environments - including social satire.
• Soft SF: tales based on the more subjective, "softer" sciences:
psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc.
• Space Opera: a traditional good guys/bad guys faceoff with lots
of action and larger-than-life characters.
• Spy-Fi: tales of espionage with SF elements, especially the use of
high-tech gadgetry.
• Steampunk: a specific type of alternate history in which
characters in Victorian England have access to 20th century
technology.
• Superheroes
• Sword and Sorcery
• Thriller SF: an SF story that takes on the classic world-at-risk,
cliffhanger elements of a thriller.
• Time-Travel
• Urban Fantasy: a fantasy tale in which magical powers and
characters appear in an otherwise normal modern context, similar
to Latin American magical realism.
• Vampire
• Wuxia: fantasy tales set within the martial arts traditions and
philosophies of China.
• Young Adult
MYSTERY/CRIME
• Amateur DetectiveChild in Peril
• Classic Whodunit
• Comic (Bumbling Detective) Cozy: a mystery that takes place
in a small town—sometimes in a single home—where all the
suspects are present and familiar with one another, except the
detective, who is usually an eccentric outsider.
• Courtroom Drama
• Dark Thriller: a mystery that ventures into the fear factor and
graphic violence of the horror genre.
• Espionage
• Forensic
• Heists and Capers: an "antihero" genre which focuses on the
planning and execution of a crime, told from the criminal's
perspective.
• Historical
• Inverted: a story in which the reader knows "whodunit," but the
suspense arises from watching the detective figure it out.
• Locked Room: a mystery in which the crime is apparently
committed under impossible circumstances (but eventually elicits
a rational explanation).
• Medical: generally involving a medical threat (e.g., a viral
epidemic), or the illegitimate use of medical technology.
• Police Procedural: a crime solved from the perspective of the
police, following detailed, real-life procedures.
• Private Detective: Focused on the independent snoop-for-hire,
these have evolved from tough-guy "hard-boiled" detectives to
the more professional operators of today.
• Psychological Suspense: mysteries focused on the intricacies
of the crime and what motivated the perpetrator to commit them.
• Romantic
• Technothriller: a spinoff from the traditional thriller mystery,
with an emphasis on high technology.
• Thriller: a suspense mystery with a wider—often international—
scope and more action.
• Woman in Jeopardy
• Young Adult: a story aimed at a teenage audience, with a hero
detective generally the same age or slightly older than the
reader, pursuing criminals who are generally less violent—but
often just as scary—as those in adult mysteries