Off the top of my head when it comes to the genres I read the most:

-The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The nordic thriller genre was highly prolific well before it, at least since the 1960s, but Larsson popularised it to a wider non-Nordic public by introducing cartoonish, exaggerated, violent, movie-like elements that contrasted with the tradition both of Nordic thrillers and of crime novels in general, and formed the basis for many successful writers that came afterwards.

-Battle Royale. Pulp, extreme and theatrical, it is a landmark of dystopian fiction that IMHO deserves to be in the same realm as 1984 and Lord of the Flies (not necessarily in prose quality, but part of it is because it’s not in English originally and the translation is bad) and is perhaps the single most important work of the whole “killing game” sub-genre.

  • Loramarthalas@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Gone Girl made domestic noir a mainstream genre and defined the basic parameters of it.

    The Road defined a type of climate based post-apocalyptic fiction that is now common place

    In Australia, The Dry reinvigorated rural crime fiction, a genre that had vanished. Now it’s everywhere here.

    Sally Rooney’s books brought literary romance fiction back to the mainstream.