I love bringing mystery to the everyday, combining street with forest, integrating folklore with modern life, but also interpreting the classic stories of old with a streetwise perspective. The vampires and the wolves we once fled are now in our beds.Īnd as a writer who gets to explore and create new worlds, I love it. The love interest is the tortured villain. The heroes are now the feared creatures themselves. The paranormal has moved nearer still, transformed from its roots in horror into something far more romanticized and approachable. Gave the stark world we found ourselves in the same mystery and intrigue the untamed forest had once held. The man attempting to live his life in secret, battling his inner demon and the moon that brought it forth. We brought the fairies from their circles in the glades and gave them a place in the thoroughfare of London, creating half-breed protagonists that took this integration deeper. The hags who had once lived in creepy cottages in the woods, now lived in dark and eerie side streets.
We peopled the neighborhood with witches. We invented creatures that made the brick landscape their own, slinking through the dark streets between shadows, and plaguing unsuspecting damsels with their deadly bite. We brought the fantastical with us, combined our ancient folklore with the new age. When knowledge of the nighttime prowlers was a matter of survival.Īs the industrial age transformed our pastoral landscape with its brick monoliths and dirty streets into something ugly, burning with furnaces and ironworks, we turned to story to help us translate this encroaching change and reconcile the new starker world with an older, richer time.
The creatures the hero must overcome were from the deep forest, from an older age when we shared the land with the preternatural. Folklore offered us heroes that fought the evil villains in woodlands and mountains. His protagonist is tormented by doppelgangers, apparitions, and strange objects of desire. Sound familiar?īefore this, fantasy had always had a rural setting.
In Baudelaire’s poetry, Paris became a fantastical caricature of the real city. Even the great Charles Dickens wrote about an imaginary dinosaur ‘waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill’ at the start of Bleak House. Believe it or not, urban fantasy can be traced as far back as the 19 th century.
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