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I am wanting to write a short story in the fantasy genre maybe genre blending. but I'm not sure if my idea is still considered fantasy. an example of what I was kind of thinking is:
a man is walking along late at night and sees a bright flash of light coming at him its moving around erratically but just when he thinks its about to hit him its gone. just when he starts to think he's gone crazy and imagined the while thing he catches some movement out of the corner of his eye. he then sees a mystical creature and has this whole interaction with it blah blah blah… then long story short it turns out it was kind of a dream? and he was actually hit by a car that was the bright light and the mystical creature represents the after life. and there will be things he sees in the "dream" that point to or symbolize what is really happening to him outside his mind so the reader isn't all confused by the switch to him being hit by a car but.....
as long as the creature and things that happen while he's "dreaming" are fantasy fulfilling does the over all story count as fantasy or does it fall into a different genre?
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Contrary to the answers claiming the contrary, this is in fact a well-recognized subgenre of fantasy, known as posthumous fantasy, a narrative whose most prominent fantastic element is that it takes place in an imagined afterlife. Although you might quibble with the categorization as fantasy, the fact remains, in the absence of any confirmed reportage from the "Other Side," any depiction of the afterlife must be speculative, and thus is necessarily in some category of speculative fiction (the larger supergenre including both fantasy and science fiction).
In addition, from a functional point of view, your story has recognizable, irreducible fantasy elements, and is therefore most likely to have fantasy fans as its core audience.
The whole idea idea of genre is to help reader have a quick idea of the book before reading/buying. It's generally decided by publisher rather than writer. I've seen books with multiple disconnected or sometimes even conflicting genres printed on their front page.
So, the real question is who are your target audience? Will a fantasy reader be disappointed after reading your book?
P.S: You can always insert genre in other ways like horror with fantasy elements, etc.
For the lack of separate "afterlife" genre, I would say the following:
If your plot takes place in fictional afterlife world, then it's likely a Fantasy.
If it happens in the real world, while the protagonist becomes incorporeal, then it's Paranormal.
If you put real effort into scientific explanation of all of this, the genre becomes Sci-Fi.
It's not fantasy, it is a different genre. In fantasy, the world and things in it are real, for the story, but not the same as actual Earth. So there doesn't have to be magic (that is called Science Fantasy), but the world and its contents (creatures, magical or not) has to be the real thing. Your magical creature is not real.
We might say the "afterlife" is a fantasy, but that is usually excluded.
That was not the case in the fantasy series "Dead Like Me", in which some select people, at death, become Grim Reapers; but nice ones: They are there to help dying people make the transition from living to dead and moving on. So in that case the afterlife is real for the story, some of the dead have jobs to do.
I'm not sure what your genre is; probably literary contemporary fiction.
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