Is this a Genre and if so what is it called?

[Jeffrey]

I have recently figured out I like a certain type of book but I am not sure if it is considered an actual "Genre". I do not need to classify everything (though I really do like to do that), I am trying to see if I can look for more books that would fall into this.

The type of books/stories I am talking about seems to border on the absurd, so something incredible is happening, either Swordy or Lasery, and the more mundane things are also being dealt with as being just as important.

To help illustrate here are some more concrete examples:
-The Rook
-The Utterly Uninteresting and Unadventurous Tales of Fred, the Vampire Accountant
-The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I hope this makes sense.

[Trike]

As far as I’m aware, it’s not a genre. Yet.

(My PhD thesis was in genres. I never finished it, but the info is still in my brain.)

If more works are published in that vein it might eventually get a name because it rises into the awareness of the general public. Sometimes the authors themselves call it something and that name catches on. Alternatively, someone in academia could quantify the various tropes and say, “These share this similarity, so we should call them X.”

“Cyberpunk” was the former. There were works similar to what we call cyberpunk before the 1980s, but between 1981 and 1984 there was an explosion of similarly-themed short stories, novels and films that came out and people recognized this was a thing. 1982 saw the publishing of Johnny Mnemonic and the debut of Blade Runner, but neither caused big enough ripples. (People forget that Blade Runner was a bomb.) However, 1984 had the twin hits of the novel Neuromancer and the film The Terminator, which cemented the style in people’s minds. Because punk music was still in its heyday, it was dubbed cyberpunk, based on the short story of the same name published the year before: Cyberpunk. (A competing name at the time was “Tech Noir”, named after the club in The Terminator.)

“Urban Fantasy” was the latter. The phrase itself has been around as long as “Science Fiction” has, but was only really codified into a discernible genre in the late 1980s/early 1990s when a whole slew of similar works were released and readers were like, “Hey this is a thing.”

So if you can come up with a dozen or so books and movies that share the elements you mean, you can potentially name a new genre.

Personally, although I love the Fred: Vampire Accountant series, I don’t really see the connection you’re making. I get what you mean by having an ordinary guy experience extraordinary things, but that in itself isn’t enough to distinguish a new genre. After all, almost the entirety of Steven Spielberg’s body of work concerns an ordinary man (or boy) encountering extraordinary events. Seen from that perspective, Duel, Jaws, CE3K, ET, War of the Worlds, Empire of the Sun and Jurassic Park are effectively the same story.

That said, if you can pull together some other examples that share more specific tropes, you might have something.

[Rick]

I was about to type "we need Trike here" and... there you are.

@jeffrey - in that list Hitchhiker's seems out of place. The first 2 are kind of 'workplace fantasy' where the main character is a worker in some kind of occupation that's recognizable to normals (i.e. they're not just a wizard etc) but there's an element of the fantastical present.

If that's what you mean, things like Stross' Laundry Files series might fit. Or Dave Turner's Grim Reaper series (https://www.goodreads.com/series/2341...). If you allow superhero into the line up, Hench

[Trike]

I’m like the Candyman, just sub in the word “genre” for his name and I appear.
😋

[Tamahome]

Is Legends & Lattes in that genre?