“What we do as skateboarders is we fall. We get back up and we fall.”
–Rodney Mullen
Using genre tropes in your writing is a tightrope act between cliché and fresh angles, most of the time. But sometimes, when the story is right for it, you can use tropes to subvert their own genre.
I can explain… My new story, “Ouroboros” is written like a pathological serial killer mystery, but there isn’t a single body in it. The tropes of the serial killer genre are used to give the story a sinister texture and structure without ever being about a murder.
“Ouroboros” is currently in print in the new edition of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. It features a young man with a brain injury who inherits his estranged father’s estate.
The young man, Jon, just wants to go skateboarding but after taking possession of a house that belonged to the father he never knew, he finds himself embroiled in a deeply unsettling mystery.
Jon’s search for answers leads him into the past and into an oddball underworld of typewriter enthusiasts.
Excerpt:
Jon watched the car. Tinted windows. Glare. He couldn’t see the driver.
Jon was thinking about paranoia. Then the driver’s door fell open.
A brown chukka shoe hit the blacktop below the door. A very large man with a great big belly pried himself up and stood with his forearm resting on the roof. He scanned the parking lot and glanced at Jon’s pickup before banging the heavy door shut on his car. The large hard belly stretched the man’s brown polo shirt. His forearms were as big and firm as hams. His head was gigantic and covered in tight gray-black curls. He wore a large pair of tinted bifocals and an extra pair of drugstore readers hung from a neoprene lanyard around his neck.
The man came in and stood in the doorway. He scanned the room, his eyes hesitating only for an instant on Jon’s face before rolling up to the menu board. Jon was aware of himself intentionally not looking at the man, aware of his own apprehension. Then the big guy looked Jon right in the eye and started walking toward him.
The man said, “You’re Jon, right?” He stuck his hand out to shake and said, “I’m Wilbert Lyman.”
And Jon had seen this all before.
And Jon just wanted to go skateboarding.
Carl Robinette 
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