Subgenre deep dive: Urban Fantasy

In this latest edition of her regular column, Tiffani Angus—co-author of Spec Fic for Newbies—explores what makes fantasy *urban*. And why does it always seem to be set in London?!

Genre designations are a way for publishing houses and bookstores to market books, to help you find the book types that you like to read. Urban Fantasy is one of those subgenres that sometimes gets mislabelled because some people will think that anything contemporary and set in a city must be Urban Fantasy. But the focus here is on “urban”. Some contemporary fantasy is set in a city, but it isn’t necessarily Urban Fantasy. So, let’s take a deep dive into this subgenre to better understand why having an urban setting led to a new subgenre designation.

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This month is a look at… URBAN FANTASY

Urban Fantasy is just that: Fantasy set in a modern city rather than in the countryside where you’ll find much of our more traditional Fantasy. Because this is fiction, and Fantasy fiction at that, things can be a little loose, so while the city in question is usually in the real/primary world it can also be an imagined city/secondary world. The setting is the key: the place is of the utmost importance, but the time period is also influential, and together they affect how the characters act.

This subgenre contains magic and the supernatural rubbing up against electricity and the internet, cars and fast food. It’s fun to mix elements of folklore that we love, such as faeries and vampires, with our own boring-to-us urban surroundings. We can only travel to the (imagined) past in our minds, and most of us aren’t able to visit far-off castles or other fantasy-adjacent places, so Urban Fantasy is a way of bridging that gap. It provides us the chance to examine our own desire for something beyond our mundane, non-magical world via an outlet that allows us that investigation in a setting with which we are familiar.

Though Urban Fantasy is primarily a subgenre set now, there are some stories from literary history that we can look at as precursors. The London-set A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens was written when the modern, industrialised city was growing faster than people were used to. We all know the story about Scrooge being shown the error of his money-is-life ways by various ghosts; the pursuit of progress and money—the capitalist system—left a city’s population thinking they had a hold of something only to see that something become old and outdated in a flash, which led to anxiety.

Urban Fantasy solidified as a subgenre in the 1980s and 1990s as Fantasy itself began to stretch out of Tolkien’s Shire-based shadow. Old cities with long histories, such as London or Paris, were the most popular choices for Urban Fantasy because they are full of layers as people have built new buildings on top of—or right against—old, and those layers contain stories that we can’t help but want to uncover. This attention to setting turns the place itself into a character complete with numerous neighbourhoods (all with their own histories and cultures), alleyways that lead to nothing, doorways that open to greater mysteries, and more.

This is a London full of enchanted locations and supernatural creatures, but the stories aren’t Steampunk (a related subgenre) because they’re very much set in the present, taking advantage of the city’s stories and legends and the juxtaposition of then and now.

Add a bit of crime for fantastic genre bedfellows

Not only do we find many Urban Fantasy stories in series—because it’s easy to see how a city the size of LA or London can’t be contained in just one volume—but they also often contain mysteries to be solved, creating an Urban Fantasy/Crime combination.

This all coincided with the improvement of paper making, transport, and education systems, which resulted in the explosion of reading materials (books, periodicals, newspapers) that could be quickly shipped across distances to get into the hands of a growing reading public. And what sold those newspapers then, much as it does now? Titillating and shocking stories about robberies, murders, and other crimes! Added to the mix were advances in the development of psychology, sociology, and criminology, all of which contributed to the growth of Crime Fiction. So, you can see how nothing ever exists in a vacuum!

So, what does this have to do with Urban Fantasy? Well, Crime and Detective Fiction are about solving mysteries, and Urban Fantasy is about uncovering the supernatural secrets in a city that is logical, ordered, and runs according to timetables, unlike traditional locations linked to Fantasy (organic, out of time, and following more esoteric rules). Most of the Urban Fantasy titles provided here contain some sort of crime or even feature a detective, and often the conflict has to do with humans and non-human supernatural creatures living in close urban proximity with their own separate and even clashing agendas, making this a natural combination for exploration of how we live in such close quarters with people we don’t necessarily know and might never meet. 

Ultimately, Urban Fantasy lets us break out of the traditional Western medieval fantasy setting and explore our urban—and sometimes even suburban—surroundings. Cities are full of people, always busy, change constantly (anyone living in London will tell you that the skyline is never crane-free!), and have geographic and historic secrets and layers, giving writers and readers a new way to engage in their surroundings while adding in folklore elements to create a new place where the magical and the mundane clash. The Urban Fantasy story is a travelogue that crosses over the borders on a map, or app, into the imagined other place that’s always been there beneath the commute, down that dark alley, and on the other side of the door to the shop that’s always got a closed sign in the window. 

Some Recommended Reading/Viewing

• Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976; New Orleans), and especially the current TV series, which features the growing pains of an early 20^th-century New Orleans (pictured below)

• Laurel K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series (1993–2023; St. Louis, Missouri)
• Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (1996; London)
• Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series (2000–present; Chicago)
• Mike Carey’s Felix Castor series (2006–’09, and a brand-new instalment in 2023; London)
• Ben Aaronovich’s Rivers of London series (2011–present; London)
• Jonathan Stroud’s Lockwood & Co. series (2013–’17; London) plus the sadly cancelled-after-one-series Netflix show
• Mishell Baker’s Borderline series (2016–’18; Los Angeles)
• Bright (2017, dir. David Ayer; Los Angeles)
• Vivian Shaw’s Dr Greta Van Helsing series (2017–’19; London)

Images by Brian McGowan, Dawson Lovell, Jezael Melgoza, Valentin BEAUVAIS, Alexander London on Unsplash