Why Are All Urban Fantasies in First Person?

Don’t get me wrong.  I love first person viewpoint.  I really do.  I think I fell in love with it when I read The Chrysalids as a kid at school.  There’s something sexy and intimate about getting inside a character’s head and walking around inside their shoes, and it makes for great story telling.  You can do some fabulous things with narrative when you’re using first person.

But does every single urban fantasy have to use it?  And does every single urban fantasy have to have a cynical or quirky central character with a dry wit and insight, who spills pithy observations onto the page with negligent ease?

Once is charming, twice is nice, thrice is slightly boring.  I’m going on for about my fifteenth encounter with such a narrator and the charm is wearing thin.

It would be really nice to read an urban fantasy, just once, with a third person multi view point.  Why not?  First person isn’t written in stone.

Come to that, why not a shifting first person view point?  It’d take superior writing skills not to alienate the reader, but it could be done.

Or why not a first person viewpoint that didn’t feature a superior, dry witted, insightful and cynical central character reminiscent of Sam Spade or Rick from Casablanca?

Am I…I don’t know…sounding a touch cynical?

;)

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