urban fantasy

[egypturnash]

I just finished re-reading China Meíville's first book, King Rat. Like his later books, Perdito Street Station and The Scar, it's set in a fabulous city, which is described with loving detail, and is in some respects one of the major characters of the book. Except the fabulous city in his first novel is London. Ancient, dirty, layered London.

And I started thinking. Dark urban fantasy is in a particularly English genre to me. Certainly all the recent examples of it I can think of are English - Meíville's work, Gaiman's Neverwhere... it's something that goes back to Peake's Gormenghast books, and it's always had an... English... flavour, wether the city is London or some fictional place. I've seen urban fantasy set in American places, but it's always humorous stuff. I vaguely remember a book called Down Town that was set in a weird magical halfworld beneath New York, complete with weird intersections at the subways and other places, but I seem to remember it not being sure if it wanted to be dark and dank, or silly and happy.

How would a particulary American dark urban fantasy read? Is there simply not enough history in the country's cities yet - only a few hundred years of urbanization - to really have any cities with life? Is America too young to really have nasty things lurking in the forgotten corners of its cities, half real, that were born and raised there?

---

I'm free of it finally, in this car, on the highway, becoming one with the highway, my fingertips the tires kissing the asphalt, feeling the road ahead, knowing the best way through the standing waves of traffic jams, dodging without thought, the music pounding in my veins, mixing with the song of the engine and the wind and the strobe of the white lines flickering past... I could drive forever. Away from magic and strangeness and maybe I'd become myself again on the road, no more monster, just a girl going somewhere, a dream the Interstate's having.

Or maybe the nasty things and the country's soul lurk out on the roads, always migrating, never at peace with where they are?

Reading suggestions are welcome. It may be that there's a lot of uniquely American urban fantasy lurking out of my sight over in the "horror" section...

Comments

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

Actually, America's urban fantasy is right under your nose... Stephen King. ^_^

[bryant]

King's all about the suburbs and towns. Castle Rock, Salem's Lot... not a city in the bunch.

Thomas Ligotti, on the other hand...

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

That is true, King doesn't really go for metropolitan settings.

[postrodent.livejournal.com]

Dude. John Shirley could kick Stephen King's ass into next week without breaking a sweat. :) He generally writes horror with a strong urban-fantasy bent, he's extremely smart, and oh, by the way, he invented cyberpunk. :) His themes and ideas have wandered all over, from deranged mystical near-future SF and fantasy in the 70s to a brilliant and hard-edged cyberpunk trilogy in the 80s and all of the above in the 90s. His recent book, _Crawlers_, isn't his best; see if you can pick up his collection of stories, _The Exploded Heart_, _Wetbones_ or, better yet, the _Eclipse_ series.

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

I adore John Shirley, he's a brilliant writer, but 200 years from now, people are still going to reading It. ;-) Stephen King has totally been overexposed from here to hell and back, but there's no disputing that the guy can write characters, and nails vintage Americana in a way that I don't know that any other horror or fantasy writer has.

[postrodent.livejournal.com]

I admit the overexposure biases me. :> He does do the retro well, and he's inventive when he pushes a little. I quite liked _Tommyknockers_ and some of the early science-fictiony stuff from the '70s and early '80s. But nobody does what Shirley does... I mean, I'm ripping him off in three or four places for Puzzlebox stuff. :)

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

The trick with King is to go for the underexposed works. Nobody's going to make the Dark Tower books or Insomnia into movies, and they're the most interesting stuff. (I would argue that the best King story ever made into a film is "The Body" which moviegoers would know as the movie Stand By Me) Besides being Gwyn's favorite writer, Stephen King has the honor of having covers done by my three favorite artists (Phil Hale, Rick Berry, and Dave McKean) so I gotta go to bat for the guy. ^_^

I do need to read more Shirley...I'm currently (slowly) getting through James Morrow's trilogy about the death of God (literally, a giant 2-mile long bearded white guy falling out of the sky) but making games unfortuantely leaves me with very little free time that isn't compromised with drink. ;-)

[mattlazycat.livejournal.com]

I'm starting to wonder if there's an author out there that hasn't invented cyberpunk before all the others. :)

[eselgeist.livejournal.com]

H.P.Lovecraft's Boston/New England setting is simply terrifying.

And i'm in the middle of Titus Groan at the moment; it's such beautiful language.

[barberio.livejournal.com]

Neil Gaiman's "American Gods"

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

Neil Gaiman isn't American, but yeah, I almost posted that. :D

[jonasbagel.livejournal.com]

Have you read Gaiman's American Gods? It's kind of an American-dark-fantasy sort of thing, and exceptionally well done. It still has a bit of his British style, but he delves deep into American mythology and history in that book.

[jonasbagel.livejournal.com]

...damn, guy above beat me to the punch. ^_^

[barberio.livejournal.com]

I Am Winnar!

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah. It felt... empty... to me. But all his prose does - he works much better for me as a comics author than a solo novelist.

[defenbaugh.livejournal.com]

King's "Dark Tower" came to mind first.

I dont consider myself well read any more, though. So I cant really offer much beyond that.

[kamenkyote.livejournal.com]

Charles DeLint is exactly what you're looking for. He's done a series of short story collections set in his own city, Newford. While they're not novels, the stories interconnect as do the characters. What he tends to do is to mix mythology the same way that the country was built; as a melting pot. Some of the mythos is from Europe, some from Native American cultures (which have been here lots longer than us Anglos). He also uses the whole sprawl of Metro culture, including suburbs and rural areas outside. The collection I just read, "Tapping the Dream Tree" was very good.

I think that American urban fantasy would read like its inhabitants; sort of punkish, the new, snot nosed kid kind of fantasy. Not necessarily like the White Wolf games stuff, not exactly like the fiction written for Shadowrun, but something like that. Rules breaking instead of rules remembering. I see a disdain for a past that's only twenty years old, instead of spitting on the Greek gods.

And actually, Peggy, I can easily see your work illustrating such things. It's wild, on the cusp of the new, breaking boundaries with little obvious respect, but lots of hidden. Ever thought of writing, or illustrating something like that?

How's that 24 hour comic coming, and what happened to taurgirl? :"D

-T'

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Mmm. I've vaguely known about deLint for ages but never read his stuff (this happens, yknow?); I may have to grab some.

Also... I've thought of such things; that's sort of what my stewing-for-several-years-now Drowning City is about. Old myths, new myths, mutations thereof. The text about highways in this entry was written in something like the voice of the lead character!(and I'm not sure if she'd decide to turn around and return to the rained-on, changing city to finish things up, or find herself unable to escape it...)

24h comic is tentatively scheduled for this weekend. Really!

[milkpanzer.livejournal.com]

I'll put in a second vote for De Lint. Memory & Dream (or is it Memories & Dreams...) is probably my favorite but I like the short story books as well. They might be a good start, at least. Someplace To Be Flying is a pretty good read, too. I love the Crow Girls. ^^

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

I second (third) DeLint. Memory and Dream kicks ass, and is exceptionally creepy and fucked upnear the end. :D

[xiombarg.livejournal.com]

De Lint is urban fantasy, but not dark urban fantasy. There are darkish elements -- enough to keep things interesting -- but I find him much "peppier" than, say, Gaiman in Neverwhere.

[koogrr.livejournal.com]

Damn, beat me, I was going to say Charles De Lint.

[ovon.livejournal.com]

One that springs to mind is Nalo Hopkinson, a Caribbean-born local writer. I've only read her first novel, Brown Girl In The Ring, but it's pretty cool.

It's set in Toronto - the reason I picked it up in the first place, of course - but actually, the setting was the part that was hardest to believe for an urban planning geek like me. (It wants to be a gritty near-future US-style urban dystopia, see, and it doesn't quite make sense here.) But I suppose this is the sort of thing scientists have always gone through when reading science fiction... and that aside, it's a nice little SF/horror number with deep Afro-Caribbean roots.

Funny thing, though - now that I think back to it, the supernatural stuff in it is not specifically of the city, rooted in the city for generations and all that... it's all imported. It's African ghost stories played out in a new setting (how very Canadian).

Yeah, North American cities are very young on a world scale - less layered, less patient, less rooted. They came of age at a time when getting from one place to another was easy. North Americans are less likely to live in one place for a long time, and develop a deep relationship with it (though that's increasingly true of the rest of the world, I think).

On the non-fiction side, you might get a kick out of How Buildings Learn.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

African stories played out in a new setting sounds like the place I grew up in. And... New Orleans is one of the few places in the US that might be old enough that some parts of it could be alive in and of themselves. New England is like this, too, I'd imagine. But the Midwest and the West? Nothing. "Fly-over country". Places to pass through and happen to be from, not vast slow-growing creatures of brick and mortar with people for blood...

Place-as-character simply not be possible with most of America, due to the youth and the lack of psychic investment people have in these cities. Which is sort of the hidden question I was thinking about when I wrote this: can American cities be a character in a book the way European ones can?

Both links here seem interesting, too. *grin* Reading outside the usual channels (and Nalo has some points on those channels in one of her essays on why you only seem to find SF/F written by male honkies) of reflexive genre and random data-gathering. I keep on wanting to get a digital camerea and start an archive of the tops and backsides of buildings, too... the unpretty sides, the working sides, the interesting places to set stories.

[gatcat.livejournal.com]

You're living right in the middle of one hell of a character city. Or at least on the fringes of it. When a story's set in LA, readers know what to expect--the unexpected. The bulk of her history may be more recent, but look at that history. LA is that place where lost and lonely people gravitate, where people with dreams come to flip the big coin of life, where anything's possible, even the highly improbable. Raymond Chandler wrote LA pretty well for the time, though his city took on most of its character from the situations and people he portrayed without too much direct description of the place itself.

LA has plenty of "...nasty things lurking in the forgotten corners of its cities, half real, that were born and raised there...", and plenty of imported nastiness too. Hollywood, when the big steel grates are down and the homeless are out, is no place for tourists. Downtown has nightmares oozing out of its alleys and parks, if you just keep your nose open for the lingering smell of blood and decay in the still patches of too-cold unCalifornia air. The old homes in South Pas, up in the hills and canyons, Boyle Heights, West Covina, are horror stories waiting to tell their tales. The more time I spend in LA, the less certain I am that there's no supernatural, and I'm the biggest skeptic I know.

Sure, LA is a newcomer on the scene, her peeling paint fresh compared to the caked residue of centuries you can find elsewhere. But she's got more than her share of character, and as long as people flock here from all over, she always will.

[ashcake.livejournal.com]

Try Emma Bull's War for the Oaks. It's not particularly dark or gothish, but it is urban, and it is fantasy.

[minakawa.livejournal.com]

One could probably trace the idea of the urban landscape of London as a kind of fantasy to Charles Dickens, especially Bleak House.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

This is quite possible. As I said, it does seem an especially British genre, an especially London-centric one. I must admit that I've never felt brave enough to plow through Dickens paid-by-the-word prose...

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

American dark fantasy tends to be rural, doesn't it? Deliverance... The Texas Chainsaw Massacre... Friday the 13th...

...all of which are movies rather than books, but then that's America for you, isn't it? :}

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

Deliverance is such genius. ^_^ I still can't believe that dude directed Zardoz!

[holohedron.livejournal.com]

Heeeey. I liked Zardoz. Even if it did fall back on the "immortals are EVIL WHITE MEN" cliche. I dug the SFX and sets in that film.

Very good source of speech samples, too. ^^

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

Dude, I own the DVD of Zardoz. :D I love it, but it's totally insane. "Convicted of psychic violence!" Giant stone heads! Mud wrestling! Crystal computers! Connery in a wedding dress! Insane old men! It's a labor of love gone totally off the deep end. And watching it with Deliverance back to back, nobody would ever know Boorman directed both films.

The head spewing guns is one of the best sci-fi movie images of all time, though. :D

"THE PENIS...IS EVIL..."

[holohedron.livejournal.com]

That'll teach me not to jump to conclusions. ;p "I couldn't believe it, it was SO BAD!" is the usual reaction I hear. Which I can kinda understand. ;p

But Connery trying to rouse the "apathetics" is Comedy Gold. =)

[koogrr.livejournal.com]

I'd have to suggest House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski, and also anything by Christopher Moore. Granted, his stuff is more humorous than dark gothic, but he has odd little towns down.

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Lankhmar...

[(Anonymous)]

..."the City of a Thousand Smokes," the stomping grounds of Fritz Leiber's Fahfrd and Grey Mouser.

Psychopomp

[acertaindoebear.livejournal.com]

His official home page
http://www.sfsite.com/charlesdelint/

I recommend starting with his short stories, as they will give you the 'flavour' of his world (especially of his city of Newford--which is based on his home city of Ottawa--and he constantly jokes how Canadians think Newford is in America while Americans think Newford is in Canada. The only thing he'll say for sure is that the Legal system of Newford is American) without having to go 'huh?' at all the in-jokes.

Look for 'The Ivory and the Horn' and 'Dreams Underfoot'.

But he isn't 'Dark Fantasy'. He's more into the sense of wonder and uplifting look at reality.

Maybe you could look at Mike Swanwick's 'The Iron Dragon's Daughter'. That's pretty darn dark (BLEAK even) urban fantasy.

K.W. Jeter's 'Noir', while having SF trappings, I found to be quite American Dark Fantasy (Satirical for me, because moments were way over the top).

Harlan Ellison has a whole bunch of American Dark Urban Fantasy stories.

I so love King's Dark Tower series. It lingers with me.

And about America's 'nature': I've always been pulled by it's wide open spaces, feelings of where anything can happen.

Re: Psychopomp

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Fuckin' Ralph Bakshi. I loaned him my copy of 'Noir' when that sf-noir project was starting, then he went bugfuck and pulled out of it and never gave it back to me. 'Neuromancer' I gave him a used-bookstore copy to read, but you can't find 'Noir' easily.

Mostly I'm thinking of a certain sence of presence of the place - it's more than just where the story happens, it's a quiet character in its own right. The book's as much about the place as the leads, and you don't mind because it's such a fascinating place...