Book Blogger Hop: Urban Fantasy Or Horror?

This week’s Book Blogger Hop asks about your Halloween reading - do you prefer urban fantasy or horror? And why?

Urban fantasy, of course, any time of year. I won’t be going into too much detail here, firstly because it’s not Halloween, and I want to keep a proper post for then, secondly because I have two Halloween posts, or rather, one Halloween post and one simply written that day to celebrate a family birthday of my bookliving great-niece Dezzy. Expect more.

Did you know, by the way, that the Aztecs had their own celebration of their beloved dead around that time of year? It went for two weeks and when the Spanish came, and Aztecs converted, they talked them into cutting it back to two days. 

And in Malaysia they do it in August? And bobbing for apples was Roman? They brought the apple tree to Britain, along with the custom. 

Now, urban fantasy vs horror. I’m not a great horror fan. There are horror writers I respect greatly, such as Stephen King and Dan Simmons. I don’t read much of their fiction, though. I read Simmons’ Hyperion, a wonderfully atmospheric novel which has been called horror despite being set on another world in the 29th century. I’ve also read his science fiction. But Carrion Comfort, which featured mind vampires, was so very good that I decided horror fiction was not for me. If I care about the characters, I really prefer them not to be killed off unless there’s a very good reason other than “that’s what you do in horror fiction.”

 I’ve read only a small amount of Stephen King’s work - short fiction and a couple of novels - but I actually prefer his non fiction. He does some wonderful introductions and I loved his history of horror fiction, Danse Macabre. 

Of course I love some of the classic horror fiction I’ve read, such as Dracula - and did you know children’s writer Edith Nesbit wrote horror fiction for adults, as did Rudyard Kipling? More of this on Halloween. 

But urban fantasy is much more for me. I discovered it through Charles De Lint. His Newford stories have European fairies sharing the streets with Native American creatures. In Moonheart, which is set in Canada, where he lives, we learn that the Native American spirits were given the boot by European fairies who came with the European humans, and have withdrawn into an Otherworld. Also, the bard Taliesin sailed to North America and is still around. The heroine is a chain smoker, which works out well when she meets a Native American spirit and offers her a cigarette! It’s considered a sharing of sacred smoke. That book also had its heroine listening to folk bands I hadn’t heard of at the time. 

In Jack The Giant Killer (Jack is a girl), the fairies and other spirits are all over the city of Ottawa. There are giants living in a skating rink and the Seelie Court is under Parliament House. How could I not be delighted and enchanted at the notion of sharing a city with creatures of the Otherworld? 

Newford is the most amazing, though. It’s a city somewhere in North America which has both fairies and Native American beings - the local park is also a forest of the fairies. You sort of step sideways from one into the other. And it’s a city of the arts. There’s folk music of all kinds being played regularly in its cafes. There are artists - painters, musicians, writers. I’d move there tomorrow if it was real! And the Newford stories did get me into bead looming, using Native American designs. 

Barbara Hambly wrote a trilogy of portal fantasies, the Antryg Windrose Chronicles, featuring a wizard inspired by the Doctor(Tom Baker incarnation). By the end of the trilogy, he was stuck in our world with his human lover, a computer programmer called Joanna. So the author has written and self published some shorter pieces about their adventures in this world, and those are certainly urban fantasy. 

When I was working on my YA novel Wolfborn, which was not urban fantasy, I did a lot of research about Celtic folklore - and discovered the urban fantasy of Melissa Marr, the Wicked Lovely series. These Faerie folk are punks. They aren’t always nice, and that includes the good guys! Actually, they’re mostly not nice, even the good guys. They’re scary. (Scary is what folklore fairies are, by the way. Traditional fairies would eat Tinkerbell for breakfast) And they have a tradition of wearing tattoos. That last part was made up by the author because she likes tattoos, but the rest of it was well researched, and the bibliography she provided at the end of her books included the books I’d been reading for my Wolfborn research. It helps that Melissa Marr is a PhD. 

I suppose you could think of Melissa Marr’s work as horror, but I’d call it urban fantasy on steroids. And there’s enough romance that teenage girls love it. Those at my school did, certainly. 

There’s more, which I’ll leave for a later post. But yes, urban fantasy, please!