The public and filmmakers have started to shift their gaze from the more mainstream fiction novels.

There was a long period when local mainstream novelists ruled the best-seller list and the silver screen.

Indonesian novelists such as Ika Natassa (Critical Eleven), Ilana Tan (Winter in Tokyo), Erisca Febriani (Dear Nathan), and Risa Saraswati (Danur) have turned romance and horror novels into mainstream fiction that drew not only huge sales and bankable motion picture adaptations but also a flock of wannabe novelists who attempted to follow the exact blueprint. It is no longer a secret commercial viability has always been on any aspiring novelist's mind, and looking at the success of their predecessors, it is a no-brainer the former would immediately assume exploring romance or horror was the way to go.

However, a recent trend in the past couple of years has hinted at what is possibly a new dawn in the Indonesian pop-literature landscape. Local genre novels such as Anastasia Aemilia's Katarsis (thriller), Sabda Armandio's 24 Jam Bersama Gaspar (futuristic noir) and Eka Kurniawan's Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash (dark comedy) have finally entered the public's radar and gone so far as to receive media adaptations that, subsequently, enjoyed warm responses in their own right.

Be that as it may, the question remains: Are the flowers these local genre novelists received for keeps or simply for the time being?

How 'no ambition' leads to success

Sabda Armandio explained, in a chat with The Jakarta Post on April 11, that he understood how public reception could influence a novelist's creative decisions. Nonetheless, when it came down to writing his novels, the author had opted not to give in to the "pressure". It was a bold principle that, fortunately, paid off.

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