Author Peter Higgins on genre mashups: 'fantasy wants to break thriller apart'

The author of the Wolfhound Century trilogy describes the challenges of combining two different – and competing – genres in the same story

When I set out to write thrillers set in a fantasy world, I had a pretty straightforward idea of what I was getting into. I hoped to create a fictional world that reflects and reimagines the early years of the Soviet Union – that has the same relationship to 20th-century history as, say, A Game of Thrones has to the Wars of the Roses – and to combine it with tight thriller plots to keep the reader hooked. But as I worked on the idea, I found that the ground I’d opened up was much more challenging, intriguing and complex than I’d first imagined.

Bringing two different genres – fantasy and thriller – together in a single work turned out to be more like colliding them, with the different story elements crashing into each other, pushing back at each other and travelling in opposite directions. On the one hand were totalitarianism, surveillance, political police, dissidents, informers, deception and a government that routinely murders citizens; and on the other were giants, sentient rain, walking wind and shapeshifting wolves – glimpses of strange otherness.

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