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I am going to apologize to Coco when she comes back but I am not going to apologize to any more zombies. I am going to find out some more details and if a zombie or cancer or whatever you want to call it threatens Coco Hart or any kids I know I am going to kick that motherfucker zombie’s ass.
I miss you, baby. But it’s better than forgetting.
We Are Not a Club, But We Sometimes Share a Room
Joe R. Lansdale
Nothing is new under the sun.
Urban Fantasy is not new, but the recognition of it as a commercial genre is. Actually, it hasn’t been that long ago that horror fiction of any kind, though it existed of course, was not a commercial genre.
There were bestselling authors who wrote some horror stories, Ira Levin, William Blatty, and Tom Tryon come to mind, but there wasn’t a long chain of horror novels being trumpeted, and though there were exceptions, most that were written appeared in small presses, or as original paperbacks. It was the same for short stories, though they had an even lower profile.
It wasn’t until the popularity of Stephen King that horror became an actual commercial label, both for novels and short stories; mostly the former.
In spite of its immense popularity in the ’80s, it faded dramatically in the early ’90s, came back in the late ’90s, disappeared again, rather quickly, and is now on the scene again, wearing a variety of festive party hats.
I admit up front, and quickly, that I am not a proponent of isolationist fiction. Meaning, by my definition, a kind of story that not only fits a specific genre, or a subset of that genre, but is damn proud of it to the point of inclusion and exclusion.
These distinctions are
okay, and necessary to some degree, but what I dislike are the hard and fast rules. There are no rules. There’s fiction. There are story tellers. And the rest is hair splitting.
It’s not my purpose here to round up these stories and brand them. They can be tagged to some degree, but they are not confined by the tag. The authors that wrote these stories all have tales here that loosely—and I will emphasize that word, loosely—fall into a collection box. But the authors themselves are not bound by it, and have written many stories outside this narrow definition.
These kinds of stories have ancestors. There were many writers who opened the lid on this box for the rest of us, and most of those writers were writers who, like those in this volume, were not restricted by it. They knew how to go their own way.
Fritz Leiber is a good example, and he could also be said to be someone who wrote Urban Fantasy/Horror when it wasn’t cool. He was there before most anyone. His short stories “Smoke Ghost” and “The Automatic Pistol” are good examples of the general type of fiction gathered here, though these are mutations and hybrids of his pioneering. The connection with Leiber is this: The fiction has the stink of the urban about it, same as many of his stories, either because they take place in the city, or display the weaknesses of humanity in large numbers and close quarters. The terror is often due to the actions of people: pollution, street crime, over population, dehumanization, and so on. What supernatural elements there are, are dragged out of the haunted house and into the tract house and walk-up apartment, or they take place in the wasteland of some horrid aftermath brought on by the mistakes of civilization.
This section of stories owes less to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and more to noir and writers who tripped the dark fantastic with gleeful enthusiasm. Influences come from authors outside of horror, like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain, Ernest Hemingway, and Flannery O’Connor, and many others. I’m not suggesting that all the writers here are directly influenced by these writers, only that the type of fiction they write owes a measure of its existence to it, as surely as it does to horror and fantasy writers.
Whatever the individual writer’s influences are, in this collection, each of them has put their spin on the work, given it a piece of themselves; something created by their experience, personality, geography, etc.
But there is no doubt that writers of the fantastic are the most important forerunners here. Among those writers, along with Fritz Leiber, is Robert Nathan, someone nearly forgotten these days, best known for A Portrait of Jennie, who blazed a trail for so many others, including Jack Finney. There is also Ray Bradbury.
Ray Bradbury’s impact is impossible to measure. It goes off the scale, especially fiction written in his darker days—collections like Dark Carnival and the novels Something Wicked This Way Comes and Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury had the ability to see strangeness in the most common of things. His stories are indebted more to the rural and small town tradition than the urban, but it would be remiss not to mention him. He may in fact be the most responsible for making fantasy stories legitimate.
Richard Matheson’s impact on this particular kind of tale is even stronger. His The Shrinking Man takes place in suburbia, and deals with threats of pollution via insecticide, something that causes the hero of the novel, after many adventures, to shrink, and shrink, until he is literally one with the universe. Matheson’s book is in the same school as Leiber’s short stories, or even Jack Finney’s classic novel The Body Snatchers, which is as much about depersonalization as it is a Cold War allegory, though the author always denied the latter. Matheson and Finney both explain their stories with science fictional tropes, but their creations feel and taste more like horror or fantasy than science fiction.
Matheson’s incredible novel, I Am Legend, is also a forerunner of the yarns here. Influenced to a great degree by noir, as well as science fiction, fantasy, and horror, specifically stories about vampires, he managed to write not only a crackerjack tale, but a claustrophobic novel of paranoia and loneliness that has yet to be surpassed. Every few years it is rediscovered, and its influence is immeasurable. I Am Legend is a wonderful book, a masterpiece, no matter what sticker you glue to it, and it will continue to influence. The DNA is strong in this one, my friends. Take for example Night of the Living Dead and its many sequels and the films and stories it has influenced. Not only were Romero’s zombies inspired by Matheson’s creation, there have been at least three films directly based on the novel, and a horde of others that lie within its shadow. The same goes for fiction.
And we can’t forget Harlan Ellison (not that he would let you), who has put his personal touch on so many urban fantasies and has influenced a horde of writers.
There was also Henry Kuttner, and Cyril Kornbluth, and Cordwainer Smith. They donated many of their ingredients to the literary stews brewed by future writers, and they too have helped shape this specific branch of the field. This is just the beginning of the list of writers who are owed their due for opening the way for the stories in this book. It would take a book just to list them.
It seems that now the time is right for this kind of story to be truly popular. An audience has gradually been inoculated to embrace these tales, where in the past most of these writers were read by a small group of rabidly dedicated fans. With fantastic imagery so much a part of modern-day life, with television channels devoted to science fiction and fantasy, horror and the weird, with commercials using fantastic themes and spending more money to present them than was spent on entire films of this nature in the past, the rarity that was once fantastic fandom is no more.
It’s gone mainstream.
Will it last?
Maybe not as Urban Fantasy or Horror, but tales of this nature will endure in one form or another. The stories in this collection will certainly reveal that. They are unusually good, and though they fit the Urban Fantasy/Horror mold, they can also fit numerous other molds; they are like living organisms that can shift shape and mutate. I am proud of this assembly, and in the end, it doesn’t really matter what you call them.
A brand name is just a nice way to put a book together. It appeals to those who want to at least know whose backyard they have crept into. Nothing wrong with that.
But it’s like Enter the Dragon when Bruce Lee points to the heavens, and his student looks at the tip of his finger. There’s more out there than just the tip of the finger, my friends.
I don’t want to be someone who is trying to minimize readership by denying people their labels, but neither do I want to be part of directing fiction, as if the stories are cows, through a chute and into the slaughterhouse. The more something can be identified, the more likely it will soon contain sick cows, and pretty soon the whole group is diseased and has to be put down.
