I read a lot of Urban Fantasy. I read broadly but UF is probably my favorite. As a reader, I was totally unaware of publishing trends. But in the last few years I’ve had to learn a lot more about publishing and then I started to hear that “urban fantasy is dead” from publishing insiders. I thought that was strange as I was still buying and reading a lot of it. Then I saw this Twitter thread from Seanan McGuire discussing her Toby Daye debut and I realized that perhaps there is a phase when UF is dead and then some hot talent breaks in and it’s not dead anymore, but then a few years go by and you hear it’s dead again.
This was all the more impressive when you consider that a) they were my debut, and b) that was during one of the many rounds of “urban fantasy is dead, bury your corpses and your leather pants.”
— Seanan McGuire (@seananmcguire) February 22, 2021
I may be mistaken but I think I heard Dongwon Song say in a podcast interview that he thought the advent of Kindle Unlimited made it very difficult to build a UF fanbase in traditional publishing anymore because readers were able to binge read through Kindle Unlimited which made them less patient for the one book a year model of trad pub.
However, I’m seeing some uptick of UF (or “contemporary fantasy”) and I’m delighted. So maybe UF is back, or “undead” (which is fitting, right?). The one that immediately comes to mind is Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning. I absolutely loved that book.
This week I blasted through Zen Cho’s Black Water Sister. What a delight to read an urban fantasy set in Penang, Malaysia.
There is the intersection of all the things I love: food, humor, hungry ghosts, and strong women. The thing I wasn’t expecting from this book was the way I could relate to the exasperating family members, the heavy weight of Asian parent expectations and the almost delayed adulthood that one can feel when living at home after college. Emotionally tender and compassionate, this book hit me in all the feels.
