WHAT DO YOU GET WHEN YOU CROSS WYATT EARP WITH COUNT DRACULA?

In Friday's post, I playfully asked if anyone out there wanted to write a cowboy vampire novel.

I'm pleased to say that someone has actually done this. Meet Clark Hays and Kathleen McFall, authors of The Cowboy and the Vampire. I wanted to give you links to the author websites as well as the book, but they don't seem to have one. Too bad; I'm dying to know what such a site would look like, and what the authors' backgrounds are.

More generally, Friday's post got me thinking about literary hybridization: the mingling of DNA from two or more genres into a new type of book. Hybrids like this are sometimes called "mashups," for obvious reasons.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith (with author credit to Miss Austen as well is such a book, as is his Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.So are Ben Winters' Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and Android Karenina, and Sherri Browning Erwin's Jane Slayre. So is Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next mystery series, which melds literary classics with sci-fi. (Sorry not to have hyperlinks in those titles; for some reason, Amazon's link system isn't working. (Perhaps it is a vampire, and it's asleep in its coffin this morning.)

If you're a literary purist, books like this could drive you crazy. I am not a literary purist, as you might have guessed if you've read my (well, Suzanne Scott's) single long-ago Harlequin romance, One Hot Summer (now available from Alibris for less than a buck, and hence, of course, a ginormous bargain). So I love this kind of cross-bred creature, even when it races right to the edge of absurdity and then falls off.

As a teacher, I would rather have young people read Jane Austen with Zombies than not read her at all. And as a writer, I love the freedom we all have to create whole new genres by mixing and matching older ones. It's worth noting, too, that "high art" writers can use this strategy as effectively as us ordinary scribblers. Modern fiction and metafiction does it all the time. My favorite case in point is Italo Calvino's extraordinary If on a winter's night a traveler. I would love to synopsize it, but I can't; suffice it to say that it's a fiction that combines a love story, a meditation on reading with a narrative that offers ten different genre/style takes on the same opening paragraph.

If you have a passionate love for two different genres—a passion so deep that both have become part of your DNA, so to speak, or at least your soul—it's worth considering how, and if, they might go together. (You can't do this well if you're just trying to combine genres salably; you have to really love them for the result to become a coherent whole of its own.) If not, just enjoy the knowledge that other writers are using literary hybridization to keep the wolf—the coyote, the sea monster, the masked intruder—from their doors.