GenresFiction
Speculative
The uncanny without a full secondary world.
Speculative fiction, in the way this shelf uses the word, is the strange book that doesn't want a full second world and doesn't want to file itself neatly under science fiction or fantasy either. Something in reality has slipped. The tone might be literary, the events might be impossible, and the book is often more interested in the feeling of the change than in building a system to explain it.
Readers who like this kind of book are willing to be uncertain, but they still need a thread. A person, a relationship, a town, a piece of technology that is only slightly ahead of us. Don't mistake vagueness for depth. You can leave the mechanism mysterious and still be precise about what it does to a Tuesday. If the oddness never touches the characters' choices, it is an ornament, and ornaments are not enough to hold a novel.
The kinds of book inside it
Slipstream
The realistic story keeps sliding into something else, and the slide should feel unsettling rather than random.
The weird
The strange element doesn't behave like a tidy metaphor, and the book is allowed to remain partly unexplained if the experience of it is vivid.
Near future
The world is ours, a few years on, and the invention or the social change is close enough that the reader can measure it against their own street.
When you want a first sketch, Storywell can draft a story summary in this vein. You are still the one who writes the book. Compose an idea.