I’m behind on reading Publishers Weekly, so I’ve only just caught up with the November 5 issue, which includes the magazine’s choices for the 150 Best Books of the Year. The categories used are Fiction, Poetry, Mystery, SF/Fantasy/Horror (all rolled into one), Romance, Comics, NonFiction, Religion, Religious Fiction, Lifestyle, Children’s Picture Books, Children’s Fiction, Children’s NonFiction, and Children’s Comics. There were aspects of the list I found puzzling, but then, I always get confused when walls are built between genres.

Which brings me to a few questions:

If Ellen Datlow‘s state-of-the-art horror anthology Inferno is included in the SF/Fantasy/Horror category, why is Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box, indisputably a horrific ghost story, counted as Fiction?

What’s the reason that In War Times, Kathleen Ann Goonan’s WWII alternate history story, is considered SF/Fantasy/Horror, when Jamestown, Matthew Sharpe’s post-apocalyptic re-imagining of the Jamestown settlement, is considered Fiction?

Why is Kay Kenyon’s Bright of the Sky, about an accident that sends a family into an alternate reality, counted as SF/Fantasy/Horror, but Liz Maverick’s Wired, a cyberpunk story of a computer programmer hunted by strange men who can alter reality, painted a Romance?

Was J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows listed as Children’s Fiction rather than simply Fiction because you’re unlikely to ever see an adult reading it?

Elsewhere in the same issue, there’s a review of James Morrow’s new book, The Philosopher’s Apprentice, which includes “a talking iguana, a tree with a heart and an army of clones created from aborted fetuses.” You’d think it would be considered SF/Fantasy/Horror, but instead, it’s written about up in the Fiction section, while Hunter’s Run, a collaborative novel by George R.R. Martin, Gardner Dozois and Daniel Abraham, about an accidental murderer being chased by cat-lizards, is the one the magazine chose to review in that composite category.

It’s probably naive of me to even ask these questions, because it’s all a matter of marketing, and of how the publishers choose to label their books to help them (supposedly) find their intended audiences. But don’t all of these books I’ve just listed have the possibility of appealing to the same readers? By sequestering them in different categories like this, aren’t they instead being kept hidden from their likely audiences?

Labeling may have its uses at times, but I more often find it limiting. And silly as well.