Urban fantasy as a genre

This is a Book Week guest post from Susan K Mann for Saturday’s Fiction, fiction and more fiction theme

Urban fantasy as a genre and the effect films like Twilight has had on it…

Authors like Stephanie Meyer and JK Rowling have had huge success with their Twilight and Harry Potter series. Along with the film adaptations of the books, these have brought the urban fantasy genre into the forefront of publishing.

No matter how many of the die-hard fans disapprove, this has been good for the genre. Twilight especially has made reading popular for many teenagers who probably hadn’t picked up a pick that they didn’t have to read in years. Harry Potter has done the same for a whole generation of children who have grown up reading them. This has to be a good thing.

I hope that these readers will continue down their reading path and look for similar books like PC and Kirsten Cast’s House of Night series or Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy series. As their tastes become a bit more mature, they will hopefully move on to Kelley Armstrong’s amazing Urban Fantasy series Women of the Otherworld and similar authors like Kim Harrison.

TV Shows also helped with the build up to what Urban Fantasy is now, with the likes of Charmed about three young witches and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, about well a vampire slayer. This had a spin off called Angel, in which both shows had a huge cult following. There were numerous shows of this calibre about at this time. I think this kick started the genre when Twilight was just a twinkle in Stephanie Meyer’s eye.

Charmed helped make witches an acceptable main character and not something old, wicked, and green, with a wart on the end of their nose. Harry Potter fuelled this. Now we have witches, vampires, werewolves, reapers, demons, and various other supernatural beings taking the main stage in books and the media.

Strong female characters are all the rage; Bella who can hold her own and isn’t scared from a lusting vampire, Zoey who is a goddess in training and has taken on her fair share of enemies, Buffy well lets just say you wouldn’t want to meet her in a dark alley if you were wearing a long black cape. These characters are all good role models for us girls, even if they do fall for a guy you wouldn’t want to take home to meet the parents.

Twilight, Vampire Diaries and some other vampire TV shows and films are like an updated version of the Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Forbidden love with death mixed in. They have a lot in common with teenagers with their surging hormones and vampires surging bloodlust. I think this is what appeals to teenage girls.

One negative point on the recent vampire phenomenon is that all subsequent books published containing vampires, get compared to Twilight even if the author hasn’t read them. I think each book should be based on his own merit. All books can be said they were copies of something previous, eg. JK Rowling could have based Harry Potter on Jill Murphy Worst Witch series, or Twilight may have been based on LJ Smith’s Nightworld. When both authors may have never even heard of the past works.

I think we should encourage the Twilight minded people, they are helping expand the Urban Fantasy genre, making it not only popular in the world of books but in the media as well. Giving us, long term fans a wider choice and it’s not as geeky as it once was to be into science fiction.

This post was originally published on Susan’s blog.

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