R.R. Ryan

What is Transgressive Fiction? Good question. Glad someone asked me once a while ago so I can answer it here.

Transgressive fiction is a genre of literature that focuses on characters who feel confined by the norms and expectations of society and who break free of those confines in unusual or illicit ways. The name of the genre is a newish named category in the world of fiction. With that said, it is as old as the scandalous writing of the Marquis de Sade.

Not all of the fiction contains violence or rape. However, much of it does. One example from over a century ago is Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, in which a married woman, feeling confined by the gender constructs of her society and pressures imposed upon her by her family and friends to be keen in her duties as a mother and wife, leaves her family and pursues extramarital relationships.

Not a big deal these days. But it was huge in the year of our lord eighteen-hundred & ninety-nine.

A more recent example of the TF genre is American Psycho, a horror novel by author Bret Easton Ellis, published in 1991. The story features Patrick Bateman, an overarching antagonist of many Bret Easton Ellis novels. He also appears as a supporting antagonist in The Rules of Attraction and Glamorama, and a post-mortem antagonist of Lunar Park.

Rene Chun, a journalist for The New York Times, described transgressive fiction as, “A literary genre that graphically explores such topics as incest and other aberrant sexual practices, mutilation, the sprouting of sexual organs in various places on the human body, urban violence and violence against women, drug use, and highly dysfunctional family relationships, and that is based on the premise that knowledge is to be found at the edge of experience and that the body is the site for gaining knowledge.”

My stories explore deviant behavior by men with questionable morals and sanity. My work is not comparable to the other writers I mentioned in his blog posting. I’m not that good! I’m sure some of my works are and or will be too simple, too violent, and too Rapey for many people.

My first story in Bookappy is The Reckoning. You can buy it here or read it behind the play wall at Stories OnLine.