Guest Blog: DSB on What is Dark Urban Fantasy?

I recently discovered (and now regularly stalk) Rebecca’s fantastic site Dirty Sexy Books.  She sums her site up this way: Catering to dirty book lovers everywhere, and including, but not limited to, paranormal romance, urban fantasy, thrillers, romantic suspense, science fiction romance, historical romance, pulp noir, horror, vampires, werewolves, faeries, witches, and any other freaking creature you can dream up! So of course she’s perfect for an All Things Urban Fantasy Guest Blog!

Everybody’s heard of it, but just what is Dark Urban Fantasy?

If you read enough urban fantasy, sooner or later you’ll come across the term ‘dark urban fantasy.’  I’ve always likened it to dark versus milk chocolate in my mind, but I’ve never heard a good description of this sub-category, or a definitive way of knowing whether a UF is ‘dark’ or not.  Instead, I’ve been using the same logic employed by the Supreme Court on their famous pornography ruling, the old ‘I know it when I see it’  rule.  The only problem there is that I can only spot a dark urban fantasy (I’m itching to use the acronym DUF, but that makes me think of Homer Simpson’s beer) after I’ve read it.  That’s a backward approach at best, and it doesn’t help me much when I’m looking for new books.  Thus, I decided to use this guest post opportunity to try and nail down this concept, and highlight some books that I think deserve the ‘dark urban fantasy’ label. 

First, I suppose I should define dark urban fantasy in my own terms.  If an urban fantasy is full of magic and danger, then a dark UF will amplify those elements by a power of ten.   Everything is more intense, and the writer will often shine a spotlight on something deeply disturbing, like child abuse or torture.  You can bet that any relationships between the hero and the other characters are tenuous, fragile things, and if there’s a romance you can count on something tragic happening.  That’s been my experience with dark UFs anyway, but let’s see if we can find an official definition.

A good place to start is Wikipedia.  Don’t laugh, I use it all the time and it rarely leads me astray.  I entered ‘dark urban fantasy’ and wow, I got 638 hits, but it’s interesting to note that there is no single page dedicated to the subject.  There is a page for ‘dark fantasy’ though, and it says,

“Dark fantasy is a subgenre that combines elements of fantasy, including marvelous abilities, with those of horror.[1]”

Further down on this same page it talks about the combination of dark fantasy and urban fantasy, and they refer to it as ‘urban dark fantasy.’ Aw man, I hate it when people say it that way.  It sounds so awkward and backward.  Is it a sign of ignorance, or are they just being pretentious?  I can’t tell.  Anyway, I ran a search using ‘urban dark fantasy’ just in case, but I get the same results.

So, Wikipedia has reinforced one of my beliefs about dark urban fantasy, and that is the inclusion of horror elements.  In my experience a dark UF does not shy away from truly horrific stuff, whereas a regular UF maintains a sense of hope even during its darkest hour. Think back to the last horror movie you’ve seen.  Sure, the good guy may have won, but his woman, his car, and his dog probably bit the dust along the way.  The same often happens in a dark UF novel.

I know some readers are asking, why would I want to read a dark UF?  It sounds too forbidding for book lovers who like more light-hearted stuff.  Well, I certainly agree that one should be in the proper kind of mood to tackle a dark UF, and I myself never read too many of these books back-to-back.  However, once in a while this darker style is exactly what I want.  Dark UFs are wildly creative, and they usually feature an astounding amount of world-building.  When I get tired of sugary-sweet happily-ever-afters, the cynic in me welcomes these gritty visions. Life is never fair in a dark UF.

This lack of a good way to define dark urban fantasies creates a problem for readers who want to find these types of stories.  I’ve yet to encounter a bookseller, either online or in person, who can identify dark UFs correctly.  If you go to Amazon and search on ‘dark urban fantasy’ it spits back all kinds of series that may qualify as UF, but they definitely aren’t ‘dark.’ I suppose it’s up to the authors of dark UF to identify themselves (which some do) and for readers like ourselves to pool our knowledge.

In that spirit, I have a list of urban fantasies below that all qualify as ‘dark’ in my opinion.  Since this is highly subjective, feel free to disagree with me, or better still, let me know if you’ve encountered a particularly good dark urban fantasy that we can add to the list.  For simplicities sake, I’m only listing the first book from series that meet my expectations as dark UF.

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 “Finch” by Jeff Vandermeer

Plot Summary:  Set in a surreal, spore-ridden world, John Finch is a reluctant detective working for the gray caps, mankind’s new masters.  After devastating civil wars weakened the city of Ambergris, the gray caps emerged from their caves to take control, using mushrooms to turn humans into useless addicts, and spying on the populace through millions of floating spores.  When the gray caps assign Finch to investigate a double homicide, it becomes apparent that multiple factions across Ambergris have a stake in what Finch turns up, and he’ll be forced from his role of quiet subservience in order to survive.

“Bone Song” by John Meaney (The Tristopolis Series)

Plot Summary:  In this gloomy vision of a gothic city living under a purple sky, police lieutenant Donal Riordan is given an impossible job; he must protect an opera diva from a group of bone hunters called the Black Circle.  In this world, the bones of the dead hold power, and a true artist’s bones can bestow beautiful dreams.  Eventually Donal joins an elite group of officers who suspect that some of their most prominent citizens belong to the Black Circle, and they’re in a race to expose the members before even more superstars are harvested for their bones.  This series is filled with zombies, wraiths, and sentient cars.

“A Rush of Wings” by Adrian Phoenix (The Maker’s Song Series)

Plot Summary: FBI Special Agent Heather Wallace has been tracking a serial killer for three years.  Within a matter of days, two of the killer’s victims are found near a goth club called Inferno in New Orleans, and Heather believes that Dante, the club’s owner and rock star god, is somehow involved.  Dante is a vampire, or nightkind, and he has no memory of his childhood aside from splintered fragments that surface sporadically.  As the plot thickens, we keep meeting sinister characters who all want a piece of Dante, because he is far more than just a vampire.  This is the only dark UF series I’ve encountered that features a hot romance.

“Daughter of Hounds” by Caitlin R. Kiernan

Plot Summary:  Three lost girls are at the center of this dark urban fantasy.  There are alien hound creatures who steal human babies to use as their servants, and these lost children are called changelings or the children of Cuckoo.  First we have Soldier, who is a grown woman who serves the hounds and tries to drink her memories away.  Next we have Emmie, an 8-year-old genius who has yellow eyes and startling dreams.  Finally there is a mysterious girl named Pearl who doesn’t age, and who becomes the catalyst that brings Soldier and Emmie together.  I found this book to be frustrating at times, but it definitely deserves to be included here.

“Already Dead” by Charlie Huston (The Joe Pitt Casebooks)

Plot Summary:  Joe Pitts lives on the island of Manhattan with 4,000 other vampyres who have carved it up like a pizza pie.  There are coalitions and then there are rogues, like Joe.  Pitts eeks out his existence by doing odd jobs for both sides, but he’s living on the edge, and it’s hard to cultivate his own blood supply without someone dropping the hammer on him.  When some zombies make a mess in his backyard, the most powerful heavies give Joe the task of hunting the zombie carrier down.  This is a job offer that he cannot refuse, and he cannot afford to fail.  This series just gets darker as it goes along, and there are five books in total. 

“Child of Fire” by Harry Connolly (Twenty Palaces Series)

Plot Summary:  Ray Lilly is an ex-con with a chauffeur job for a secret group called Twenty Palaces.  He’s driving a sorcerer named Annalise to a small town in the Pacific Northwest to investigate a magical disturbance.  Unfortunately for Ray, Annalise hates his guts for a past betrayal, and she plans to kill him or watch him die on this job.  The town is small, insular, and dotted with black scorch marks.  When Ray watches one of the child burn alive, he realizes that a strange amnesia settles over the entire town, so not even the parents realize their child is missing.  This was a powerful debut, and book two, “Game of Cages,” is coming in August.

“Staked” by J. F. Lewis (The Void City Series)

Plot Summary:  Eric is a powerful, lazy-ass vampire who owns a strip club on the seedy side of Void City.  He turns his stripper girlfriend Tabitha into a vamp after she nagged him for years, just because it was easier than arguing.  When Eric kills a werewolf, their entire pack swears revenge, and Eric is more annoyed than anything when his beloved vintage Mustang is totaled as collateral damage.  Meanwhile, Tabitha’s sister, Rachel, is tempting Eric with her cinnamon-scented flesh, and Eric can’t bring himself to dump Tabitha, or cool things down with Rachel.  Yeah, he’s a jerk, but what’s new?  This is the only dark series that makes me laugh with its gallows humor, and it’s a terrific combination I wish more authors would try.  Just because it’s filled with horror doesn’t mean it can’t be funny too.

“That Which Bites” by Celis T. Rono (The Julia Poe Chronicles)

Plot Summary:  A toxic poison wipes out most of humanity, and with the vampires now in the majority, they hunt their food source to the brink of extinction.  Since the age of eight, Julia Poe has been alone in her bunker, only coming out to scavenge for expired canned food and collect rainwater.  Eventually she makes friends with a vigilante nun and former vampire slave, and together they hunt the vampires and free the human ‘cattle’  who are milked for their blood.  When her friends don’t show up for their rendezvous, Poe tries to save them and ends up being captured by Sainvire, one of the powerful master vampires who controls what’s left of Los Angeles.  I’ve saved the best for last, and sadly this book has never received the buzz that I think it deserves.

You can read my full reviews for these novels over at Dirty Sexy Books.  Abigail, many thanks for having me over to visit. 

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