What Is Urban Fantasy, Anyway? Urban Fantasy in the Romance field Defined.

It seems like everywhere you turn, these days, you bump into Urban Fantasy. If you’re still trying to figure out what the hell it is, exactly, and are too embarassed to ask, you’ve come to the right place.

There’s a very good definition of classic Urban Fantasy on Wikipedia, and I encourage you to check it out. But the thumbnail sketch of classic Urban Fantasy is: Stories that features human characters who learn of fantasy creatures who inhabit (and try to assimilate within) our contemporary cities, who are fighting wars amongst themselves, and involve those human characters in these wars. The war(s) and character arcs nearly always extend over a series of stories (short stories/novellas/books). Urban Fantasy tends to be rich in back story, and taps in historical and mythical references.

The original urban fantasies that set the trend were the Harry Potter series and the Twilight series.

From this you can see that Urban Fantasy is actually a subset of classic Fantasy, and is the younger brother of Fantasy…it is a very recent development in the genre.

However, I’m widening the definition of Urban Fantasy a little further here. Urban Fantasy within the Romance genre has a unique meaning, and for romance authors, comes with some horrible challenges. :)

Classic urban fantasy often has a romantic subplot in it. Karen Marie Moning’s Darkfever series hints at one, for instance, but you have to hang in throughout the series for the pay-off at the end. Most romance readers aren’t that patient.

In the Romance genre, Urban Fantasy tends to trip over and knock knees with Paranormal Romance. It gets confused with it, because Paranormal Romance has been around for a long, long time, and established roots and built genre enclaves, RWA* chapters, publisher imprints, special sections in bookstores and more, while Urban Fantasy is the orphan left on the doorstep that no-one knows what to do with that has the same red hair as Paranormal romance, so everyone tries to put it on the same shelf as Paranormal, thinking it belongs there. Really, they’re only distantly related…although they’ll end up looking the same because of shared DNA.

Paranormal Romance began as a normal romance novel: That is, a romance relationship featuring a hero and heroine with a romantic conflict, and a resolution that resulted in a happy-ever-after ending by the end of the novel, with the added feature of a paranormal element. These paranormal novels were first produced by the traditional New York presses, and were mild renditions of what is available today, although paranormal was almost instantly popular. As the e-book and POD publishers started to open their doors, paranormal really took off. Erotic paranormal romances are wildly popular to the point where paranormal shows no sign whatsoever of slowing down in demand. Even the New York editors are still acquiring in steady numbers. But the key difference between paranormal romance and urban fantasy is the single volume story. Paranormal romances are traditionally single volume focused. While they might look like, smell like and feel like an urban fantasy in many ways, if the story is focusing in on that romance, and stops after one story, then you’ve probably just got a paranormal romance on your hands.

On the other hand, even if the hero and heroine are locked together having sex for most of the book that you’re reading, but there’s a war between species and races, and the story does goes on for two or three novellas/books or more, or the same characters keep showing up in different stories, or there’s back story that taps into history going back for millenia, then you’re actually reading urban fantasy.

Urban fantasy in romance has unique aspects. The same hero and heroine in one book become secondary characters in the next, but they still have major roles to play in the overall story arc. A good writer will have the reader still worried about what will happen to all the major players in the continuing series, and juggling all those characters without confusing the reader takes careful orchestration, especially if the writer has to stay within a pre-defined word count.

And that’s another aspect of Urban Fantasy that most readers don’t notice. It’s wordy. Urban Fantasy is mostly about the back story. The history. While the romance reader wants to know about the romance, dammit. And when it comes to erotic romance, the reader wants the sex, dammit! So romance authors tackling urban fantasy as their sub-genre are really picking up a challenge. If they can pull it off, it’s so worth it. The blend of romance and urban fantasy is fantastic. Just look at Twilight, which speaks volumes for the success of the blend — and also for how much room you need to do it well :)

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(*Romance Writers of America…and don’t get me started.)
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[First published as a post on this site in August 2009]