This study investigates syntactic complexity in fiction and news genres by analyzing mean dependency distances (MDD) across controlled sentence lengths in English and Chinese corpora. Results show that English fiction exhibits greater MDD than news, while Chinese fiction shows the reverse. More complex syntactic structures, i.e., complex coordination structures, are found in English fiction texts than in news writing. In contrast, Chinese news writing relies more on nominal modification and prepositional phrases that create long-distance dependencies than fiction texts. These findings show deviations from uniform correlations between genre formality and syntactic complexity across languages.