Urban fantasy has a couple of obvious requirements: a definite location (usually a city) and magic. But it also has a few hidden ones. Sex. Crime. A tangled, ongoing drama of relationships that rivals Sex in the City or The Young and the Restless. A feeling that the location where the stories are set has somehow come alive and is taking action, sometimes helping the characters, sometimes making their lives hell.
You can wander a bit. There’s room for humor in urban fantasy; there’s always room for romance. Sometimes the stakes are life and death (literally, if you’re a vampire). Sometimes the stakes are nothing more than a good slice of pie.
As of 2018, over half of the world’s population live in urban areas*, including over eighty percent within the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, and most of Europe. Our case study today is the U.S., which became over half-urbanized all the way back in the Great Depression era of the 1920s.
Until the 1970s (at least), one of the major fiction genres of the U.S. was that of the Western. Westerns tend to be set in the American West in the latter half of the 1800s. The typical Western tale was this: Once upon a time, there was a lone and reluctant hero, often of questionable morals himself, who brought justice to a small town plagued by villains. It was not a courtroom justice, but one in which the hero was judge, jury, and executioner. Sometimes he could be merciful, though, and if he spent a night or two with a lonely widow before moving on, well, who could blame him?**
It’s hard to relate to that story, though, if you live in a city.
Slowly, Westerns faded from one of the major genres of popular fiction into a very small category today.
As a kind of contrast to Western genre sensibilities, “noir” emerged as a genre in the 1930s with tales of crime, violence, and doom. Some of the stories were set in the city; others, in the country. One of the things they had in common was a sense of location. The plot of a city noir story, like Cornell Woolrich’s “Rear Window,” could not be plunked down in a story set in the country, like The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson, set in a small Texas town. Where something happened mattered. It wasn’t all English la-di-dah country houses or anonymous Western towns.
But noir, too, faded, even if we can still see strong threads of it running through mystery, crime, and suspense tales today. People didn’t really want to think that the world was nothing but violence and doom, and that the only way to beat the bad guys was to become even worse.
Later, in the 1980s and 1990s, about the time that the U.S. was reaching about seventy to eighty percent urbanization, urban fantasy took up the reins that the Western and noir genres had let slip.
No longer did readers overwhelmingly want to read about rough justice in a rural area. (Although there certainly is still a market for Western stories, the tone has often shifted, with more diverse characters, storylines, locations, and time periods being used.) And no longer did readers wish to be told that the bad people out there were far more pervasive than most people suspected—they already knew.
Instead, what many readers began to crave was a different type of story, about what it’s like to live in a city. We wanted acknowledgment that things weren’t always what they seemed, and that traditional systems of justice weren’t always enough—but we didn’t quite want the in-and-out, isolated justice of a Western, or the doom and gloom of a noir story.
What urban fantasy tells us is that magic happens, too—that the rules we are told aren’t always all the rules, all the time. Sometimes the little grinning grandma walking along the dark alleyway is a bigger threat than the two nervous-looking teens. Sometimes the anonymous dance club isn’t so anonymous, especially when you’re one of the prey lured in by the predators. Sometimes you don’t just misunderstand another person’s culture—you take for granted that their monsters can’t affect you. And they can.
Sometimes magic helps; sometimes it hurts.
Life in a city isn’t about riding into a place, then being able to ride away again, leaving behind little more than your reputation as a quick draw. People’s relationships matter more in a city. There are multiple circles of influence, multiple sets of rules—and multiple loopholes to be exploited. Often the resolution of an urban fantasy story is more about who you know and how you get them to do what you want than about magic itself.
Urban fantasy isn’t just about people with magic and an attitude trying to find justice in their neighborhoods, but about how humanity is dealing with a shift from rural to urban life. Are we replaceable cogs in an anonymous machine? Does where we live matter? Do we have dull lives—or rich ones, in which our loves and hates and allies and enemies are more than just another checkbox on social media? How do we navigate an urban world? Should we follow rules straightforwardly, or should we follow the rules so well that we know how to break them without getting caught?
And, as always, extra bonus points for looking cool while asking the questions.
*According to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs & the CIA World Factbook.
*Side note: my best guess is that in Europe, this feeling of pursuing rough justice in an isolated area was satisfied by sea stories and adventure tales where the hero traveled to a less-populated area already inhabited by actual people, pretended they weren’t really all that important, and Did Heroic Stuff, a la Rudyard Kipling. I’m not hip enough to other world cultures to make even a tentative guess on how they’re handling this, although the glimpses I get are fascinating. –Ed.