If there’s a distinction between “genre fiction” and “literary fiction,” it’s certainly not that the former isn’t literary and the latter isn’t generic. It’s mostly that the generic conventions of the latter are those that critics and professors are trained to value most.

Megan Abbott proves this by writing complex thrillers that roll their eyes at the distinction. Her novels excavate the ecstasies and agonies of adolescent female friendship, but that wan description doesn’t begin to capture the grit and song of “Dare Me” or “You Will Know Me.” Each is a murder mystery in which the murder is almost a MacGuffin — not nearly as terrifying as the pressures of high school ambition, all bloody hearts and busted souls.

That those pressures never fully let up is the premise of Abbot’s new “Give Me Your Hand.” In a bygone flip-phone era, Kit Owens scrapes chicken fat at the Golden Fry and doesn’t bother to dream of escaping her drab small town. Then the brilliant transfer student Diane Fleming is assigned to be her lab partner. Kit learns from Diane “what it was like to care about so much about ideas from books” — about Marie Curie and gas chromatographs. But Diane has a dark secret, which she tells Kit one night as they study in Kit’s “pocket-size house” and which Kit will regret having heard “more than anything else in my whole cramped life.”

Several academic degrees later, Kit and Diane meet again in the lab of their teenage heroine, Dr. Severin (yes, it’s a bit on the nose), where they research premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Kit longs only to be “a part of the grander seeing, the illumination of darkness.” But soon she and Diane share another dark secret — “partners in crime,” as Kit wryly puts it.

Abbott can write up a storm, weaving spell after spell out of the jangle and dross of middle America, its Flying Js and Cinnabons, cherry slush and drag races under the viaduct. An affection for these details, an abhorrence of condescension, pulses through the novel, which is devastatingly canny about gender relations. It’s also as suspenseful as any best-seller you’d care to name, and as sad.

Speaking of spells, I was skeptical when I saw that Ursula K. Le Guin had recommended Naomi Novik’s fantasy novel “Uprooted.” I’m not big on dragons or Patrick O’Brian novels, so I’d avoided Novik’s “Temeraire” series, an alternate history that answers the question “What if the Napoleonic wars, but with dragons?”

Well, who am I to gainsay Ursula K. Le Guin? After ascertaining that “Uprooted” involves a wizard called Dragon but no dragons, I inhaled it.

“Spinning Silver” isn’t strictly a sequel but a return to the magical setting of “Uprooted.” The fates of three young women are bound together as winter descends upon a medieval kingdom.

As befits a story with a climactic battle between an ice king and a demon tsar, Novik grounds her story in folklore and fairy tales, quicksilver allusions to Grimm and Andersen. But this fairy land is all too human, riven by misogyny and bigotry, poverty and oppression. Novik has constructed a social whole whose contradictions feel lived in, in which the “rising price of salt” is no less a concern than magical raiders and children cowering in basements during pogroms.

Genre? Literary? Like Le Guin and Abbott, Novik writes fiction, full stop.

Michael Robbins is the author of two poetry collections and the essay collection “Equipment for Living: On Poetry & Pop Music.”