Genre Fiction at Its Best

So Myers, in the ages-old crusty article I linked to a few days ago, picked the nits off various passages from literary fiction, but didn’t cite the best examples of any genre fiction to support his argument that it’s just as good. Whine!

Now, I’m not near any of my books at the moment, but, I can recall a few passages that are marvelous from genre fic. I’ll have to transcribe when I’m nearer to my bookshelf and a keyboard.

But- what about you?

What’s your favorite excerpt from any recent genre fiction (and not just romance)? Please share, as a sample of “damn fine genre writing!”

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  1. RT says:

    Someone beat me to Dorothy Dunnett, but I just can’t help but post one of my favorites.  If you take the time to delve into her writing it is just gorgeous.

    This is from The Ringed Castle.  There has just been a small accident, and Lymond is holding an unconscious Phillippa in his lap on a boat while they take her home.  Kate is her mother. 

    Unlike Kate, this girl had broken from her setting.  All that Kate was, she now had.  And standing on Kate’s shoulders, something more, still growing; blossoming and yet to fruit.

    All that he was not.  He looked at her. The long, brown hair; the pure skin of youth; the closed brown eyes, their lashes artfully stained; the obstinate chin; the definite nose, its nostrils curled.  The lips, lightly tinted, and the corners deepened, even sleeping, with the remembrance of sardonic joy…  The soft, severe lips.

    And deep within him, missing its accustomed tread, his heart paused, and gave one single stroke, as if on an anvil.

    “We’re there, sir,” Nicholas said.

    What makes this work for me is that final “We’re there, sir.”  It’s the voice of a third character, but it ties what he’s feeling into a complete package.  Brilliant.  She does this over and over and over again in her books.

  2. Anything by Julia Ross. I love her writing style. The following is the beginning of THE WICKED LOVER (I hope my blockquotes will work!):

    He had a regrettable weakness for beauty: in horses, in clothes, in art, in women. He was known for it. That he was also generally considered dangerous amused him, though not because that assessment was false. He was just about to discover his mistress burning his clothes in the street in front of his townhouse. Yet Robert Dovenby’s first reaction was simply that it was a damned unfortunate moment to be riding a young, half-trained stallion in Mayfair.

    Cat Marsters wrote:
    Anything by Terry Pratchett

    Yes! Yes! Yes!

    Here’s my favourite bit: it’s an episode from WITCHES ABROAD, in which strong wind forces the witches to walk on a curiously yellow brick road, when suddenly a farm house drops onto Nanny Ogg’s head (which she survives thanks to the willow reinforcements of her hat). From inside the farmhouse the witches watch a bunch of dwarves sing a Dingdong song.

    There was a hammering on the back door. Magrat opened it. A crowd of brightly dressed and embarrassed dwarfs stepped back hurriedly and then peered up at her.

    “Er,” said the one who was apparently the leader, “is … is the old witch dead?”

    “Which old witch?” said Magrat.

    The dwarf looked at her for a while with his mouth open. He turned and had a whispered consultation with his colleagues. Then he turned back.

    “How many have you got?”

    “There’s a choice of two,” said Magrat.

    Hehe. 🙂 

    And of course, I second (or third) the mentioning of Dorothy Dunnett, though I wouldn’t have placed her in genre fiction. That woman was a fricking genius with words! Unfortunately, academia still hasn’t caught up. *sigh* I was thinking of teaching a course on Dunnett, but I’m afraid this would only end in tears and disaster. *sigh-sigh*

    One of my favourite Dunnett sentences is the first sentence of THE DISORDERLY KNIGHTS: “On the day that his grannie was killed by the English, Sir William Scott the Younger of Buccleuch was at Melrose Abbey, marrying his aunt.”

  3. Just need to add: Wheee! My blockquotes worked! 🙂

  4. Chrissy says:

    Lauren,
    It’s so weird you quotes Much Ado.  I just had to write a eulogy for a dear friend and quoted Beatrice and Don Pedro on my blog.

    http://christineolinger.blogspot.com

    That’s my absolute favorite play.  The Branagh production always leaves me weak and dreamy.

  5. Joanna says:

    I love the voice of the hero in Laura Kinsale’s Flowers from the Storm.  He has suffered an undiagnosed stroke and has been incarcerated in an asylum.  He can’t fully understand what the heroine – his nurse – is saying nor can he speak properly himself.  Kinsale lets us hear what he hears and also see his struggles to express himself.  It’s so well done.

    —-

    “…But he looked at her, Maddygirl, wih her red cheeks, her lifted chin, the narrow spinster nose with the stubborn bump in it, and if he’d laid down more times than he could count with women more elegant and comely, he’d never seen anything more beautiful than Maddy in her starched – thing – white – head – sugar? – than Maddy in this prison cell.

    ‘Love’ he said.  ‘Love’…..
    …. That serious, pensive mouth of hers took on a dry, uneasy curve….
    ‘Easy conkest thou’.

    ‘Friend’ he repeated with a hesitant smile.  ‘‘Maddy.  Friend?’

    ‘Only friend?’  She made a mock-pout.  ‘Thotow wert bow!”

    Beau?    “

    —————-

  6. Lady T says:

    I haven’t read alot of thrillers lately but just finished up Heartsick by Chelsea Cain over the Labor Day weekend and this passage really stuck out there:

    ”  He wakes up on his back.  He is still groggy and it takes him a moment to realize that the red-faced man is standing over him.  In this moment, the very first moment of Archie’s awareness, the man’s head explodes.  Archie jerks as the man’s blood and brain matter blow forward, splattering Archie’s face and chest, a vomit of warm, clotted fluid.  He tries to move, but his hands and feet are bound to a table.  He feels a piece of something hot slide down his face and slop onto the floor, and pulls hard against the bindings until his skin breaks, but he cannot budge them.  He gags but his mouth is taped shut, forcing the bile back into his throat making him gag again.  His eyes burn.  Then he sees her, standing behind where the man’s body has fallen, holding the gun she has just used to execute him.

            “I wanted you to understand right away how committed I am to you,” she says.  “That you are the only one.” And then she turns and walks away.”

    Gretchen Lowell is no joke,people!

  7. Qadesh says:

    SB Sarah??  You wrote:  What’s your favorite excerpt from any recent genre fiction (and not just romance)?

    I’m thinking we need a bit of a definition on the term recent.  Somehow I don’t think some of the choices provided quite qualify.  Not that they aren’t brilliant.  So care to give us a date range?  Pretty please?

  8. SB Sarah says:

    Well, Qadesh, recent is relative so it’s hard to limit it to a date. My recent would be the last 15 years or so, since I started reading romance novels regularly, but that’s not a long time to someone who’s been reading genre fiction longer.

    Really, it’s kind of open to how you want to define “recent” and how you want to define “genre” and “best of.”

  9. HMF says:

    Hello SBs,

    I’ve been lurking for months now, going through the archives with great pleasure, but this post finally brought me out of lurkdom.

    I second what Lisa said about GG Kay. In fact, when I saw this post I immediately thought about Tigana, my favourite of his novels (coincidentally, I’m just in the process of re-reading his Fionavar Tapestry *g*).

    I can only add my voice to those who mentioned Dorothy Dunnett and can’t resist quoting yet another example, this time from Scales of Gold, the 4th volume of her House of Niccolo series:

    “She saw, again, what had been given her from the deck of a caravel, which was a vision of space. The manuscript of the sky, stained with blue, franked by the seal of the African sun. Below it, a horizon so far that the haze of distance made it uncertain, a haze which lay not over the Ocean of Darkness but an ocean of light, of a fertile land of golden grain and green grass and the terracotta of alluvial soil, sprinkled with the deeper green of great trees and freckled with cattle. And through the plain ran a broad silver highway, rimmed on its far side by hills and edged by miniature townships, neat as constellations of straw.”

    Now to an author that has not been mentioned yet. Janny Wurts (Fantasy) writes some beautiful prose in her Wars of Light and Shadow series (although I feel she sometimes strays near purple territory). Here is a quote from Grand Conspiracy:

    “…the moment held the fragility of a bubble of blown glass, given the trembling promise of form, but no surety of survival through the punitive stresses of cooling…”

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