The Verostic Genre
verostic /ˈvɛr.ɒst.ɪk/ adj.
Origin: Latin veritas (truth) + stylistic suffix
A literary genre or descriptive tone characterised by raw emotional realism, unflinching psychological depth, and grounded human truth. Often gritty, sometimes painful, but always sincere. The hallmark of a story that bleeds... and still finds beauty.
Definition
Verostic fiction is a genre defined by emotional rawness, psychological intensity, and unfiltered human truth. It explores trauma, morality, resilience, and connection through unapologetically honest storytelling. Gritty, intimate, and unflinching, Verostic works don't shy away from darkness... yet always make space for tenderness, hope, and truth.
Verostic fiction doesn’t just tell the truth, it makes you feel it.
Neoverostic (adj.)
From neo (Greek: new) + Verostic
Definition:
Neoverostic fiction applies Verostic principles to modern contexts, exploring contemporary trauma, digital identity, intersectionality, and generational tension with the same emotional honesty. It often experiments with form, voice, or structure to reflect fractured lives or shifting perspectives.
Expect raw emotion filtered through today's chaos: fractured families, economic precarity, gender politics, mental health, loneliness in the age of connection.
Neoverostic stories are razor-sharp and present-tense, burning with modern truth.
Postverostic (adj.)
From post (Latin: after) + Verostic
Definition:
Postverostic fiction interrogates or deconstructs the Verostic mode. Often reflective, ironic, or stylistically fragmented, it explores what happens after trauma, truth, or confrontation, the silences, the scars, the reconstruction of meaning.
These stories may feature unreliable narrators, metafictional layers, or broken timelines. They don’t abandon emotional realism but question how memory, narrative, and identity distort it.
Postverostic fiction doesn’t just explore the truth, it wonders whether truth survives the telling.
Aeverostic (adj.)
From aevum (Latin: era, lifetime) + Verostic
Definition:
Aeverostic fiction is a time-rooted subgenre of Verostic storytelling, most often set in the 1980s. It captures emotionally raw narratives within a specific cultural and historical moment, where truth is shaped by the era’s unique pressures: repression, rebellion, subculture, class division, family shame, and gender expectation.
The term is not nostalgic. Aeverostic fiction does not look back fondly, it digs into the past with clarity and courage, reanimating the emotional texture of a generation.
Aeverostic stories live and bleed in their time, but their truths still echo today.
Read The Alpha Flame: Discovery, a work of unapologetically Verostic fiction, and feel the fire for yourself.
The Verostic Manifesto
Visual Genre Chart
Modern emotional realism, digital identity, intersectional trauma
Reflective, fragmented, aftermath of truth
Era-rooted (1980s), cultural grit, timeless emotional truth
Verostic isn’t a style. It’s a vow.