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What The Hell Is A Literary Thriller, Anyway?, Derek Nikitas

Derek Nikitas

’ve been trolling. Saw some blog chatter re: the endless debate over literary fiction versus genre fiction. (what’s to debate, except that lit fiction gets more prestige, genre fiction sells more books; seems to me an even tradeoff.) One guy’s got this long-winded theory about literary fiction being all logical and grownup and staid, while genre fiction is primitive, ritualistic, fantastic, appealing to the child-mind inside us all. This was his advertisement for genre fiction: reintegration of the child with the adult to become the fully self-actualized self, or something like that. I didn’t get it. He quoted Freud; I …