Genre? by R. Thomas Brown

I love crime fiction. I like reading it, writing it, editing it. Really, I’m just a huge fan. Okay, maybe I’m not the target audience for PI stories, but the genre and I are good friends.

I also like speculative fiction. Epic fantasy, hard sci-fi from time to time. I like contemporary fantasy most (yeah, maybe it’s just urban fantasy, but I like rural settings, too.) And, sure, I like the blending of them as well. Chris Holm and Chuck Wendig in particular are doing some things that I just love.

So, I tried my hand at writing a story that pulled together the kind of crime fiction I like to write (some call it laconic, some overly violent, some weird people actually like it) with some paranormal elements. What came out of that was Confabulation, a story that centers on the paranoia of not being able to discern reality.

It’s still a fast moving tale (I think) and still works mainly with normal people struggling against assaults. This time, though, the assault aren’t guns and fists, but hallucinations, false memory, and the occasional brain melting.

I hope that people will like it, and I really hope that people who like my crime fiction will like it. However, at least one person who enjoyed Hill Country has commented that it wasn’t what they expected. So, I’ve chosen to work under the name of Ronald Thomas for the book. Not some secret pseudonym (obviously) but just a way for people to see a difference.

Will it matter? Who the hell knows, but it will let someone have a better sense of what to expect.