Is this Slipstream or something else entirely?

25000 words into my very first novel, and today it occurred to me that I have no idea what I'm writing. I mean, I don't spend much time thinking about it, but it would be fun to be able to tell people what genre I write instead of just making something up .

So...

The story is about a guy who tries to fix corpses (for various reasons) so that they will be alive again, but in order to do that he has to mix and match parts from different bodies (for other various reasons). He tries to convince the real people in the small city he lives in that the persons they thought were dead are brought back to life, or that they were never dead in the first place.

I've always thought that it would be classified as horror, but someone told me that this one might not be a "real" horror story.
There are no ghosts, and the living dead people aren't really zombies.

I think of it as a mix between Frankenstein and Virus, except for the metall.

What do you think?

Thank you all for replying.

Sheila Muirenn said:

Look more at the writing style rather than story content to determine slipstream.

Is it characterized by dissonance? Does it question whether what happens is real?

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No, I don't think so? Everyone seems to accept that "this" is what it is. No need to explain how it's done. It's something you just don't do. It's the consequences that matter, not having a village/city with corpes walking about (or maybe I misunderstood the question? I might have, English is not my first language).

Is the writing stylized? Metered?

Does it appear experimental?

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No.

Is it character-driven, with the plot happening below the surface? (That meets the literary style in slipstream).

Now. Is it action-oriented, with the action happening above the surface? Then it's probably mixed genre/commercial fiction of some kind.

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It's all about the characters and hardly any action at all.

Tell them it's paranormal horror until you research it more.

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Glad you posted. It gave me something to think about.

Sheila Muirenn said:

Start reading about Magical Realism then, which is similar to Slipstream, the main difference being what I quoted. (Cough, according to some sources...).

You might want to read the stickied thread in Interstitial here at AW as well.

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I read some online articles about Magical Realism after you posted, and they were all more or less describing my story.

Thank you.