Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it. In the rallying cry that served as an introduction to McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, he professed his boredom with the literary, epiphanic “New Yorker short story,” longing for the days when masters such as Edgar Allan Poe, Edith Wharton, and Henry James wrote “ripping yarns” packed with “plot and color.” In the “lost genres”—horror, romance, detective, adventure—Chabon saw a tradition of “great writers writing great short stories.” Genre fiction, he argued, is simply fun to read, but it also enables a democratic reading experience, a necessity to the public that most contemporary writers have despaired of attaining. What Chabon seemed to long for most was a culture in which fiction, in whatever form, could permeate the national conversation and be essential to people’s daily lives.
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