"I think that people of my generation are more comfortable making the foray into genre," he said. "Because of macabre books, Stephen King, and probably cable. Culture changed in the '70s and '80s [...] Look at the phenomenon of the blockbuster, whether it's an adventure like Indiana Jones, or something like Star Wars and Star Trek. You're exposed to that pretty early. And you're supposed to walk away because you start reading Ernest Hemingway? It's just one of many influences that makes you into the writer you are today."

Justin Cronin agrees. In an interview on KRUI Radio in 2010, he told me that he enjoys genre works like Larry McMurty's Lonesome Dove every bit as much as literary novels. For him, writing The Passage was a way of interpolating two different types of influences. Like Chabon, he feels that both literary fiction and genre fiction are more robust when they cross-pollinate.

"There are indeed books that are clearly [genre] or clearly [literary], and it would be disingenuous of me to say that's not true," he said. "But the middle is really large. And the middle is where I've always found the books that were most captivating to me."

3. Literary tastes are increasingly global.

American literature has diversified as a broader pool of voices, within the country and without, gain mainstream cultural recognition. Latin American magical realism, as well as Japanese horror and science-fiction have already had substantial effects on American art; in recent years, Roberto Bolano (Chile) and Haruki Murakami have especially increased the writer's sense of novelistic possibility. The increased availability and viability of contemporary works in translation also opens up new avenues for innovation and exploration.

4. Stories with mythic dimensions are timeless.

We've been telling monster stories (Scylla and Charybdis) science-fiction stories (the Tower of Babel), superhero stories (the Epic of Gilgamesh), horror stories (Oedipus Rex), and apocalypse stories (the Book of Revelation) for a long, long time. Maybe the appearance of modern myths in mainstream publishing is not so new--in a sense, it's a return to form. Cronin insists that this is good for literature, and that the best mythic archetypes will continue to appeal to new generations of storytellers. In his view, they're just too good to leave alone.

"The traditional vampire story is a story of a magical creature, but I wanted to base mine in a sort of plausible physical and biological reality. That was my version of the story,

which is the best thing about these stories: you can go back and—not only can you, but you have to—make them your own."

5. Financially—and aesthetically—genre pays.

It would be naive to say that modern writers aren't aware of the potential financial gains of embracing genre. What starving artist, underpaid and under-read, hasn't at least once looked at J.K. Rowling's massive royalties—and throng of adoring readers—with envy?