Posts about urban fantasy

Oct202012

October Reading: Murder Among the Fae

Urban fantasy has some common mainstays: a magical world lying next to ours (whether or not the mortals know it), a mystery to solve, usually by a character who is marked by both worlds.

I’ve read a lot of urban fantasy series in recent years, but nothing has quite grabbed me as tightly as the October Daye novels. Maybe it’s the fact that there’s nary a vampire nor werewolf in sight, or that October, Toby to her friends, routinely survives things that should kill her. Just when she gains some ground on a case, things get worse.

Craft-wise, McGuire has an excellent handling of exposition. She cloaks explanations of politics and world mechanics in cranky exchanges where the imparting character disdains Toby’s ignorance. This method helps her get the essential information across without taking the story out of the first person. McGuire draws heavily on Irish fairy lore, never leaving out the downright bizarre. She veers a bit into Kim Harrison’s turf with her take on pixies in the first book, but she quickly recovers and distinguishes herself by focusing on more intriguing elements.

As a half-breed changeling, Toby is too fay for the mortal world but will never be pureblood enough to live happily ever after with the fairies. While she’s a knight with a powerful liege lord, her own magic is so faint that’s she’s regularly overpowered. Her allies are often compromised, with conflicting obligations and motivations that make them less than trustworthy. McGuire hooked me right away with an early, outlandish twist in book one. She soon followed it up with a shooting scene that captured the sense fading life better than anything I’ve read. The stakes stay high and nothing comes for free. Toby bleeds a lot, and she often loses it all, giving you the sense that she’s not going to make it. This keeps the tension high, and when she gains traction, whether in her case and her personal life, you just know it could all fall apart without a moment’s notice.

Like a lot of series, the tension peaks though the books keep going. The first five books weave and resolve multiple threads, leaving Toby with an important dilemma in the sixth that just can’t feel quite as crucial. That’s no fault of McGuire’s, and you simply can’t sustain crisis levels of tension (Harrison hit a similar plateau in her ninth Hollows book, which made the tenth a bit of a letdown). Plots aside, McGuire gets better and better at her craft. While I found the plot of the second novel, a Local Habitation, the weakest, she’s redeemed it by incorporating the mystery’s outcome into her ever-expanded world. Book three, an Artificial Night, is outright spooky.

I picked up the first book, Rosemary and Rue on a whim, like I often do with books and once I started I couldn’t put it down or stop recommending it.

Sep182010

Everyone Needs a Breather: A Little More on Pace


We all have periods when it seems everything goes wrong: life enters cascade failure, and one crisis after another piles on. You’ve probably met someone who just seems cursed. A personal loss is followed by a car wreck, then a flooded house, then an illness. You start to wonder which god they pissed on to create such calamity. You pity them, but you fear them a bit too. Stand too close and lightning might strike. Conflict is a rule of life and fiction, but fortunately there are good times as well as bad. Even the bleakest existence is mercifully punctuated with a bit of hope.

In fiction, and in life, everyone needs a breather, a time out, or just a break. Sometimes we can’t control the pace of reality, but as writers we get to show our characters some mercy from time to time.

I return to the issue of pacing as I consume urban fantasy at a voracious rate. In Florida I tore through the rest of the Sookie Stackhouse catalog and started on Simon Green’s Nightside books. The first book in the Age of Misrule series is next. One book that came highly recommended, but that I can’t seem to complete, is Vickie Pettersson’s Scent of Shadows.

Green, Harris, and Pettersson all work in the first person, the standard point of view for urban fantasy. This prevents the problem Kristin Nelson recently discussed, of having the action in the second chapter not flow directly from the action in the first. Doors get opened, characters are presented with a conflict, and work towards a resolution. All three share the nuts and bolt of a good read: the protagonists are compelling, the antagonist is stronger, and you want to know where the plot will go. In Harris’s series, Sookie takes regular breaks from the supernatural. I was surprised to note how much of the books deal with her domestic issues and money woes. Green uses his fantastic setting, the magical heart of London, to punctuate the action with colorful anecdotes and asides. But Pettersson never seems to come up for air. Tension in a book should build, driving the reader to keep turning the pages, but even the most action-oriented horror films have to insert quieter moments to bring things down before you reveal the next monster.

Pettersson hits her protagonist, Joanna Archer, with one shock after another. She’s brutally attacked, then reunited with her lost first love. She’s disowned by her father. She suffers a brutal personal loss. She’s dropped into a confusing supernatural battle. All of this is perhaps in the first hundred pages. With these revelations out of the way, I thought things would slow for a moment; but the revelations continue. Joanna is given the need to struggle with a legacy inherited from the mother who abandoned her, her new allies don’t trust her, she destroys a life. She’s not what they expected. Her love thinks she’s dead. He’s been targeted. She’s . . . and I put the book down.

Reading Scent of Shadows is rather like lunch with that perpetually unlucky friend. You’re obligated to go (and it is the rare book I don’t finish), but you scheduled the meeting as a lunch because you’re not sure how much more tragedy you can absorb. Hearing about his endless travails, time after time, start to wear you out.

Is Scent of Shadows a bad book? I don’t think so. There are a lot of good ideas here, including one great twist I never saw coming and thought was genius. Pettersson just hits Joanna with too much at once, without enough time for any of the revelations to really connect to the reader’s consciousness. There are enough major life events, changes, and thresholds crossed for three books in the first half of Scent of Shadows, and the compression is a problem of pacing. A little downtime here and there would help the book a lot. At least it would help keep me caught up in the story. The characters might be super human and able to absorb endless punishment, but as a reader, I’m not. I need the protagonist to catch her breath. Lesley, who recommended it, has good taste and assures me the series improves dramatically. The story has been compelling enough for Pettersson to put five of them out there, so I’m hoping to return to the story when I’m ready for more.

Feb272010

A Discussion of Urban Fantasy and Talk of True Blood

What’s in the backpack today: Hester by Paula Reed.

I’ve finally gotten around to watching through the first season of True Blood, which led me to read Charlaine Harris’s Dead until Dark (the first book in the Sookie Stackhouse mysteries). I’d been avoiding the show due to its adult nature, and I finally decided to see what all the fuss is about. What I’ve found is a tightly scripted, small-town murder mystery. Oh yeah, and there are vampires, but so far I’m finding them to be somewhat incidental and less interesting than the other goings on.

I’ve come to think that a lot of urban fantasy’s appeal is derived from its ease of access. In epic fantasy we have to weave a world for the reader, and in that weaving we have to work hard to not bore you with exposition while also telling you the rules of how the world works. Urban fantasy gives the reader an immediate access point: you know the world. It’s yours. The writer can then layer in the supernatural aspects. The hook is more immediate and relatable. The urban fantasy writer has other challenges though. They have to take the mundane and more it extraordinary, whereas as the epic writer can work backwards from making the extraordinary relatable. Neither is easier. Writing is never easy, but I think there’s less chance for an urban fantasy writer to get lot in world-building, a problem inherent in epic fantasy.

Comparing genres is much easier than comparing mediums. True Blood, as a show, works largely on the strength of its secondary characters: Tara, Lafayette, and Sam; all of whom have much smaller parts in the first book. The show has to take one book’s murder plot and cut it into multiple scenes and episodes, changing point of view. The book, which as seems to be the standard in urban fantasy, only gives us Sookie’s first person point of view. Both the show and novel benefit from tight scripting. One thing I noticed immediately was that there are no “use its or lose its” in either one. Every element that’s introduced has a purpose. Description in the novel is cut to a minimum and the show is shot without lingering shots on landscape. The show definitely ups the adult nature of things to an almost extreme level. It seems some days to be HBO’s trademark, but even then the sex scenes have a point. They reflect on the plot and tie into the mystery. The vampires, when they come, when they’re described, in many ways aren’t all that interesting. They just add a layer to an already interesting world. The book of course explains things a bit better, and since it is first person, you gain a much stronger understanding of what Sookie goes through being telepathic. (I would normally have just invoked a spoiler alert, but all my sources tell me I’m the last person on the planet to watch the show or read the book).

A quick word about Charlaine Harris. She writes without any slack. Dead until Dark is tightly scripted, tightly wound. Every character has a point, as does every scene. I raced through the book in a satisfying way without any unnecessary stops to a satisfying destination.