Real World Magic: Urban Fantasy & Why We Read It

A Quick Stab at Over-generalizing the Urban Fantasy Genre

What is Urban Fantasy:

Shortly, urban fantasy is what you get when you take magical elements and write them into the real world. Urban fantasy is most often contemporary and set in a city or town.

Side note: Years ago when I told a friend I was writing an urban fantasy novel, he asked me to clarify what that genre is. You see, he’d thought it was black fantasy. Because I’m a black person from an urban area. Bless him, I’m sure he’s encountered more diversity by now, wherever he is. No, not urban like the hood. Good lord.

Where high fantasy takes you out of this world, urban fantasy is rooted deeply in our own. As a sub-genre of fantasy, you can slice it up into even smaller pieces - there’s paranormal fiction, for instance. Paranormal romance can almost be excised altogether. Urban fantasy focuses more on plot and thrill mixed with overt magic, paranormal fiction often includes subtler influences like ghosts and possessions, and paranormal romance is a beast with many backs that doesn’t have a story at all without the romance.

How those paranormal elements are used determines which camp the story lies in more than that they are used - but some stories can be quite nebulous and manage to cover overlapping territory between definitions. And that’s okay because we LOVE THEM.

Why It Exists:

Fantasy is the first kind of fiction that we encounter as children. Through our cultural and religious stories, fairy tales, and talking-animal kids’ books, we’re taught to use fantastic elements as metaphors to learn and relate to a core value. As we get a bit older, those stories have darker lessons to teach, and those animals start looking much more like humans than makes us comfortable. Krampus that will punish bad little children, witches that will take you away, shape-shifters that seem very much like people but who are bloodthirsty and evil.

There are theories that certain types of urban fantasy follow the political flow - vampires emerging from a red fear of blood-sucking socialism, and zombies arising from the blue fear of mindless consumerism. And werewolves emerging from the white fear of people of color and also of being treated like a person of color. (I was going to go hard at this point, but I found this great blog post by Media by Stitch that gets IN it .)

Although Twilight thrust vampires (a more bloodless, sterile, preachy, impotent take on vamps than even Anne Rice’s fancy gentlemen) and werewolves onto the scene again, I don’t need to tell you that we’ve been obsessed with creatures for a long time. Creature stories have always been stand-ins for social issues. Walking, talking metaphors that an author can use to demonstrate their take on current society - or at least express their fears via the vilification (unwittingly or no) of these characters. Erotica gets into the mix here because eroticizing fears is expressly human: the unknown is in equal measure frightening and compelling. Risky, but maybe rewarding. The dark, for all its frights, offers an escape from the blinding scrutiny of the living daylight.

Less World-Building Leaves Room for Lore

Unlike high fantasy, urban fantasy doesn’t have to create an entirely new world to get the plot going. The beauty of urban fantasy is that it’s your world and it doesn’t take walls of text to describe it to you. From a writing standpoint, it’s much simpler (and fun as hell, too) to put that world-building energy into the mechanics of how this secret society of magic-bearing whatevers works while nested in our reality rather than creating a new reality altogether. We as readers understand the stakes without too much prompting.

In a world like our own, except there are witches and sorcerers and goblins and Fae, the question becomes: how the hell does this go undiscovered? That’s always the exciting part for me: the veiled secrecy, the hidden influence of the occult on history, politics, major world events - ! So exciting. Lather that up with some intense lore, and I’m hooked. Got a Creation story? Gimme. Got a world-ending prophecy? That is my jam. Is there a sometimes-violent ongoing struggle between opposing factions that our dear hero unwittingly finds themselves in the throes of? Yeah. All the yes.

Impure Escapism

The idea of being able to slip from beneath the daily grind of life, which can seem to so many overworked and underpaid people as farcical in the first place, is what urban fantasy has become all about. Urban fantasy stories used to try to teach you a lesson and scare you into obedience with magical monsters, but now you’ve grown up and maybe you think that the mundanity of the real world is the true monster. Urban fantasy taps into that discontent by opening a back door out of the ordinary and into the magic-drenched action-adventure that we crave. Where we are the hero. Where our talents are given merit and our powers grow in direct correlation to the work we put in. Urban fantasy speaks to the desire for self-empowerment, self-improvement, autonomy, and belonging to a group. Importantly, all of this happens in our world, where we want those things the most. In the place where we most want to be recognized as the powerful hero or villain we become. In the place where we instinctively know what the stakes are. In the place we relate to the most, and where those changes would have the most meaningful impact.

Urban fantasy lets you in on the secret that’s all around you, without you having to leave the comfort of your familiar society. You get to keep one foot in the door of reality while taking a good look around at the possibilities. In that way, it’s an impure kind of escapism. Why not go to space? Why not go to Middle Earth? Why do urban fantasy readers stick around, and come back for any version of it they can get their heads into?

Accessibility

It helps that there is an abundance of material in the urban fantasy genre. Urban fantasy readers are voracious. There’s little competition between authors - reading one book does not preclude a reader from taking in another. The opposite, in fact; when authors work together to keep readers busy going from book to book, literally everyone wins. From a production standpoint, (IMO) it’s simpler to write a story that is a tightly-plotted, gripping thriller with romance, action, and magic when it’s based in our reality. Readers can settle into the world easier, and it’s far less likely that they’ll be waiting years for another installment. (Looking at you, GRRM & Patrick Rothfuss! Enough already. Gimme the loot.)

Our world is very damn interesting and thrilling on its own, so adding magic is like finding the perfect spice blend for your favorite dish. It’s also fair to expect that an urban fantasy author will publish a book every year or so without fail. But should your favorite author take a break, there are plenty of other indies who’ve written equally as awesome stories waiting for you to pick up in the meantime.

Urban fantasy isn’t going anywhere, ever, because people like to write it just as much as they like to read it. It’s as simple as that.