What's Bred in the Bone is not easy to classify. When reviewing What's Bred in the Bone, Gerald Jay Goldberg called it "a peculiar amalgam of mystery story, family saga, espionage adventure and portrait of the artist." All of these are popular twentieth-century genres of which many examples may be found, but Davies's novel does not fit neatly into any of them. Jo Allen Bradham sees the novel as joining Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928), and Steven Millhauser's Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 19431954 (1972) as an example of biographical satire. Bradham also sees the novel as containing elements of allegory, a form which was "intended to explain man's journey" in such classic texts of the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance as Dante's Divine Comedy (c.1310-1321), Chaucer's uncompleted poem, House of Fame, Langland's Middle English alliterative poem, Piers Plowman, and Edmund Spenser's...