Vampires at the DMV! The Genre of Magical Realism

Eric
Czuleger

I don’t know anything about literature but I know I like vampires. I also like ghosts, giant wolves, and I love pretty much anything involving an apocalypse. When I sat down to write my first novel, "Immortal L.A.", I put one word in front of another without giving much consideration to what genre it would call home. What came out was a novel about how the San Andreas Fault is actually the gateway to Hell, and Los Angeles is full of supernatural creatures living lives interconnected with the real world.  Upon giving it to my first round of readers I was told that I had written a "magical realist" novel. I pretended that was exactly what I meant to do. I then promptly went to the dictionary and looked up “magical realism.” Sitting somewhere between, horror, fantasy, and kitchen sink realism, Magical Realism combines supernatural elements and characters in a realistic environment (or so says the dictionary). Writers like Franz Kafka, Isabel Allende, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Haruki Murakami are paragons of this style. Magical Realism emerged out of Latin America in the early 1920s and went on to be popularized in Europe. Many theorists believe that the genre was a reaction to the surrealist movement, which it closely followed. However, Mexican literary critic Luis Leal is quoted as saying, “if you can explain it, then it’s not magical realism.” Touché, Mr. Leal.

Read the entire article in the March 2015 issue of InD'Tale magazine.

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