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Introduction
Peter S. Beagle
I wish I could remember what writer or politician it was (we used to have remarkably literate politicians, even Republican ones) who said, “I am not an animal-lover. To me, an animal-lover is an animal who is in love with another animal.”
In the same way, my main notion of urban fantasy is fantasy that takes place in an urban. Which to my mind—conditioned by years of Pogo and Dr. Seuss—is what’s left when your favorite Sunday turban has gone one too many times through the wash.
But more seriously…
Jacob Weisman, Tachyon’s publisher, has selected me to co-edit this book and to write this introduction because I have an affinity for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and because I once wrote a story called “Lila the Werewolf.” That story, written long before the term “urban fantasy” would have meant anything to anybody, was about a New York werewolf, and the man who loved the werewolf, pursuing her late at night down mean, moonlit city streets. (I haven’t included that story here because it wasn’t written in the same spirit as the stories you’ll find in this collection. Instead I have chosen to include a somewhat more recent story of my own involving another of that narrator’s unusual girlfriends.) But as a subgenre, as a kind, as a trope, I still think that urban fantasy’s most important distinction is that it isn’t The Lord of the Rings: that is, it doesn’t happen in a comfortable rural, pre-industrial setting where people still ride horses, swing swords, quaff ale in variously sinister pubs, and head off apocalypses and Armageddons that would make a Buffy episode look like a tussle in a schoolyard. Not that that’s a bad thing…
What I am clear on is that, while I wasn’t looking, urban fantasy has become so vibrant, and has evolved so rapidly, that it has emerged as a distinct marketing category, often with its own section in the bookstore. Because of that rapid growth the term means different things to different generations of readers. There have, in fact, been three distinct subgenres of urban fantasy: mythic fiction, paranormal romance, and noir fantasy. Elsewhere in these pages Charles de Lint, Paula Guran, and Joe R. Lansdale, all greater experts than I, will explain these to you in more depth then I will here.
The first popularization of the term urban fantasy (later rechristened by Charles de Lint and Terri Windling as mythic fiction), appearing in the mid to late 1980s, was used to apply to the work of writers such as de Lint, Emma Bull, Windling, and Will Shetterly, who wrote contemporary stories in which myths and fairy tales intruded into everyday life. Just about every generation of writers with a natural bent for the fantastic vision, from George MacDonald to Robert Nathan to Fritz Leiber, has been redefining fantasy as long as I’ve been reading the stuff, but there was a more concerted approach employed by the first generation of urban fantasists. Speaking for myself, I’ve never based whatever it is I do on any particular theoretical structure, other than “it seemed like a good idea at the time.” These guys were thinking about it.
And then there was Buffy.
The much-deserved success of Buffy the Vampire Slayer meant that vampires, werewolves, and demons of all varieties—including the sort who were either as tormented about what they were as any teenager or as forlornly anxious to fit in—were suddenly fictional legal tender once again. A second wave of urban fantasy overtook the first: paranormal romance, in all of its dark, tawdry, and dysfunctional glory. These creatures of the night knew exactly what they’d become, and were at least half-aware that they were symbols and metaphors for the American experience. Our heroine, walking through the empty subway station, is no longer the meek shrinking-violet of previous generations. She is precocious, athletic, sexually aware, and regards kicking demonic ass, in Buffy’s words, as “comfort food.” (Okay, granted, Twilight and its sequels represent a decidedly reactionary backward step into the virgin-perpetually-at-physical-and-sexual-risk mode that began with in the eighteenth century with Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, but this too shall pass…) Around the time you have cheerful werewolf heroines running radio call-in shows—as in Laurel K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series—something has definitely changed.
The third generation of urban fantasy, noir fantasy, hearkens to a call for more realism, as exemplified by the novels of Charlie Huston, whose private-eye vampire detective is more profoundly worn down and plain weary than anyone Raymond Chandler ever envisioned. Think of one of Jim Thompson’s or David Goodis’s characters on a bad day, but with fangs. (Regrettably, Charlie Huston doesn’t write that sort of material at shorter length, but I can strongly recommend his novels.) Noir fiction has been making inroads into fantasy and horror for many years. One need only look at Joe Lansdale’s anthology Crucified Dreams (also published by Tachyon Publications) to see a map of the stories that lead from the works by masters of the craft like Harlan Ellison to the newer writers included here.
Urban fantasy counts on familiarity with mythology, fairy tales, and the earliest horror tropes like vampires, werewolves, and warlocks—in the same way that science fiction relies on faster-than-light drives and sentient robots—as shorthand to pull the reader through familiar territory quickly without wasting precious time. In old horror stories the tension built up slowly as the characters were drawn toward what the reader already knew would happen. A proper urban fantasy hero is always ready to grab a stake or a silver-bullet clip, and stalk down that dark alley, or into that dank sub-basement where red eyes glower from far corners, at a moment’s notice. Or, when necessary, to be the thing behind those red eyes…to be, in the words of the bitter inversion of the 23rd Psalm that came out of the Vietnam War, “the meanest mother” in the Valley of Death.
This is not The Secret History of Fantasy. In that book, the previous anthology I edited for Tachyon, I gathered together a group of writers, all close to my heart, who were at once carving out new directions in fantasy while at the same time following in a tradition that owed little to the specter of J. R. R. Tolkien, or at least to those following slavishly in his footsteps. This was daring, auspicious work that took its joy in the telling, fiction that played with the very underpinnings of our genre, fiction that reveled in its own audacity and took itself seriously, without being ponderous or exclusionary about it.
The stories in this anthology represent the other side of that encampment—raw, consciously commercial fiction, feeding an unquenchable hunger for walks on the wild side, blending and shaking up familiar themes until they are transformed into something new and meaningful.
In this collection you will find a number of wonderful stories, some deeply provocative, others played for camp. You will be purely delighted by some of them and profoundly disturbed by others—I should be rather disappointed if it were otherwise. But you will not be bored.
A Personal Journey into Mythic Fiction
Charles de Lint
My journey into mythic fiction began early, with the books that I read as a child. Because my dad was a navigator for a surveying company, we moved around a lot. I didn’t grow up or go to school with the same kids in the same neighbourhood, so I never felt the home roots that most children acquire.
While I often resented being the new kid on the block, in later years I came to appreciate what a mind-opening upbringing it was. It was also a time when I learned to amuse myself since books and my own imagination were the only entertainments I could take with me. Fairy tales and Enid Blyton’s books and, later, The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame gave me my love of both story and illustrated books. As I got older, I devoured all the Tarzan and John Carter of Mars books in my father’s library. When I reached my teens, I began to w
rite.
I already appreciated mythology and folklore from my early years, but in my late teens I became totally enthralled by writers such as William Morris, Lord Dunsany, James Branch Cabell, Katharine Briggs and Colin Wilson. I spent my teen years reading everything esoteric that I could get my hands on. I was also intrigued by world religions, as well as by divination systems such as the I Ching, runes, etc.
There wasn’t a great deal of fantasy fiction available but fortunately my appetite for fiction went beyond fantastic literature. Mainstream, westerns, mysteries, detective novels…anything with strong characters and a good story appealed to me.
I also developed a passion for music. This was the time of Beat poets and musicians like Bob Dylan, Donovan, The Incredible String Band. As a listener and as a musician, I developed an abiding love for Celtic music, which also happened to contain a great deal of myth and folklore.
During my teens and twenties I wrote reams of poetry and hundreds of songs, some of which contained fantasy elements. In the madness that comes with youth, one night I burned almost all of this in a magnificent bonfire. Ah, the drama and folly of it all.
By the late seventies I had evolved into writing stories and novels. When I first started out, I wrote high fantasy because that’s what I thought fantasy had to be. My first few novels (not all of which were published, thankfully) were definitely influenced by Tolkien. My wife MaryAnn, while editing one of these early works, said, “You read all kinds of fiction. You should try this in a contemporary setting.”
I replied, “Absolutely not. It wouldn’t work.” But the idea lodged in my head and it wouldn’t go away. I wanted to write about the real world, but I also wanted to write fantasy. So I tried combining the two in one book and it didn’t work. But the process showed me how it could work.
My next book was Moonheart (published in 1984), and I suppose the fusion of fantasy and realism in it was pretty successful since it remains in print to this day. I was blessed to have had that wealth of background reading from my youth. It allowed me to dip my proverbial ladle into that pool of myth, folklore and realism and play with various elements that intrigued me. And basically, I was doing the same thing that I do to this day: writing a story that I’d like to read but doesn’t yet exist. Combining fantasy with the modern world let me push through self-imposed boundaries, and beyond what was being published in the fantasy genre at that time.
MaryAnn’s suggestion got me going, but I had other help along the way. A few other fantasy writers had used contemporary settings in their work (Roger Zelazny, Peter S. Beagle and Roberta MacAvoy were among my favourites). But mostly, it was Terri Windling, my editor at Ace Books, who gave me sage advice that deeply influenced the trajectory of my work.
Terri had bought my high fantasy The Riddle of the Wren as well as Moonheart. After Moonheart, I turned in another high fantasy called Eyes Like Leaves. Although she’d accepted the book, Terri asked me if I was sure I wanted this to follow Moonheart. She cautioned me that with a couple of high fantasies already under my belt (The Riddle of the Wren, and The Harp of the Grey Rose from Starblaze/Donning), a third high fantasy might brand me forever as a high fantasy writer, no matter what else I subsequently produced.
At the time I still liked high fantasy books. I liked them a lot. But I already knew I didn’t want to keep writing them exclusively. So I swapped the manuscript of Eyes Like Leaves for Yarrow, a contemporary novel I’d just finished.
By the time I had a few more books under my belt (Mulengro, Greenmantle), I was calling what I wrote “contemporary fantasy.” Then, when I turned in my modern retelling of the old fairy tale “Jack, The Giant-Killer,” I made the mistake of calling it The Jack of Kinrowan: A Novel of Urban Faerie (the full title only showed up on the copyright page; everywhere else it was called Jack, The Giant-Killer).
Somehow the subtitle translated to “urban fantasy” in all subsequent references to my work.
I didn’t fight it, but it never sat well. For one thing, while I enjoy setting magical stories on city streets, many of my tales have been set in more rural environs.
But I let it go.
Or at least I did until I was getting ready to go on tour for my novel Someplace to Be Flying. I’m not a naturally entertaining speaker the way some of my peers are. When it comes to writers like Joe Lansdale or Neil Gaiman, the way they do a reading is often as compelling as the story itself.
I felt I needed to do some prep work so I got together with Terri to talk about it. The first thing we realized was that I needed a way to describe what I did, because that’s almost invariably the first thing that an interviewer asks. Somewhere in that conversation Terri said, “If we have to be in a genre, why don’t we make up our own?”
I’m not sure which of us came up with the term “mythic fiction,” but as soon as we had it, we knew it was perfect. Now, rather than paraphrase Terri, let me turn it over to her in some excerpts from correspondence to explain exactly why:
We came up with the term because we wanted a way to describe novels and stories (including our own) that make conscious use of myth, medieval Romance, folklore, and/or fairy tales, but that are set in the real world, rather than in invented fantasy landscapes. “Fantasy” was inadequate for our purposes because it is a term that is both too broad and too limiting. Broad, because it includes imaginary world novels, as well as works that aren’t based on myth and folklore. Limiting, because “fantasy” has come to mean (to the average reader) fiction specifically published within the sf/fantasy genre, whereas the work we were trying to define was published in many other areas as well: mainstream fiction, historical fiction, horror fiction, postmodern fiction, surrealist fiction, young adult fiction, etc. We also found the terms “urban fantasy” and “contemporary fantasy” unsatisfactory—partly because of the connotations I’ve just described attached to “fantasy,” and partly because not all the works we were looking at were urban, or set in the present day.
Some works of mythic fiction—such as John Barth’s Chimera (in mainstream fiction), Delia Sherman’s The Porcelain Dove (in historical fiction), or Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood (in fantasy)—use mythic themes and tropes in obvious ways. Other works of mythic fiction are more subtle in their engagement with this material—such as the quiet bubbling of magic and folklore one finds within Alice Hoffman’s tales, or Steven Millhauser’s, or James P. Blaylock’s. Like “magical realism,” these stories use mythic and/or magical tropes to tell us something about the real world we live in, rather than (as in some other forms of fantasy) to remove us from that world altogether. Many magical realist tales also fall under the mythic fiction category—when they work with mythic or folkloric imagery rather than with surrealist imagery that is unrelated to these things. A story needn’t have literal magic or fantastical elements to be considered mythic fiction, however; there are realist novels based on myth and folklore that also fall into this category—such as Brian Hall’s The Saskiad (inspired by the Iliad).
To which I might add that I think that the best of these stories deal with character—people’s relationships, trials and personal growth, using mythic and folkloric material either as a reflecting mirror, or to illuminate the tale by allowing inner landscapes and emotional states to appear physically “on stage” alongside real-world aspects.
The value in this kind of story is that it speaks to the obvious concerns that make up the physical world we all share with one another, but also addresses the individual worlds we carry inside ourselves—hopefully in a manner that allows us to understand ourselves, and each other, a little better and with more empathy.
By now you’ll have noticed that Terri Windling’s name has come up a lot in this piece. There’s a reason she is almost synonymous with the term “mythic fiction” that goes beyond what I’ve written about so far.
The important thing to remember is that when she was an editor at Ace Books (from 1979 through the early ’80s), and then later at Tor Books (late ’80s through the ’90s), she created a home for this sort of fiction. From time to time other publishers put out books of a similar ilk, but it was the lines Terri created and edited that set the standard in those early days when publishers and their publicity departments weren’t quite sure what to do with such material.
Even if Terri hadn’t been buying my books, I’m quite certain I would have continued to write this sort of story—once I realized it could be done, I wouldn’t have been able to stop. And I’m sure the same is true for Emma Bull, Ellen Kushner, Stephen Brust, Will Shetterly, and all the rest of us. But we would have had to work really hard at selling these stories, taking precious time away from our writing. We wouldn’t have had the safe haven that Terri provided, which allowed us to stretch and grow.
She became a spiritual center around which gathered not only fiction writers, but also visual artists, poets…in fact, anyone with a creative impulse who wanted to meld traditional folk, fairy tales and mythology with their art. Through her work as an editor, and as a talented painter and author in her own right, she was instrumental in creating a focus for this conversation on the mythic arts that exists between artists, and between their work in various mediums.
Putting aside her own wonderful paintings and stories, this community might well be her greatest legacy—a community that’s still active today and continues to grow:
