Urban fantasy is famous for taking real metropolis and recreating them as paranormal landscapes . At the New York Comic Con panel “ Demonic Hotspots , Infernal Pit Stops and the Badlands , ” six writers explicate why and how .
This gore gathered urban illusion author Kim Harrison , Rachel Caine , Patricia Briggs , Anton Strout , Edward Lazellari and Christina Henry to talk over the geography of their fancied worlds . From the limits it create to the weird trivium they ’ve been able to include , they shared the ups and downs of working from reality , rather than make a globe wholecloth .
First off , the most obvious question : why did they pick the city they did ? The panelists write in a various accumulation of places , most of which you could easily find on a map : Cincinnati ; Tri - Cities , Washington ; New York City ; and Chicago . The only fancied townsfolk — Rachel Caine ’s Morganville , Texas — is found on several real towns around El Paso . The rationale behind each generator ’s choice of setting was as varied as the location .
Patricia Briggs , author of the Mercy Thompson series , confessed many of the options she might otherwise have used were already demand . Laurel K. Hamilton had St. Louis ; Jim Butcher had Chicago . So she get going thinking about the Tri - Cities , which should be the “ anti - haunted town , ” a stereotypical suburban enclave . Inhabitants even think of the town as being a stock - issue WASP biotic community . Only :
You look around and you go , “ Then how come I ’m take heed people speaking Laotian and Russian and Taiwanese and Native American ( as in India ) and Native American Indian at the mall ? I figured any town that could brush off that it ’s a hotbed of multiculturalism is the unadulterated place to ignore that they have werewolf and lamia , too .
Kim Harrison originally design on setting her series in a made - up metropolis , but her editor suggested they relocate the Hallows into the real world . Consulting with a mathematical function , she realized only Cincinnati worked , which turn quite well :
It ’s one of the oldest cities in the U.S. It was the fourth largest at one point . It was an former city that kept its computer architecture . It ’s get the Old garden graveyard . They used to be known for their body snatching . Seriously ! You could be in the primer for an hour and then you ’d be on a train heading north to Detroit for the infirmary for study . Then you ’ve got the tunnels .
Edward Lazellari basically followed that old saw to “ pen what you know ” advice . He ’s been walk the streets of New York since he started taking drafting classes at 15 and knows the metropolis like the back of his hand :
I would take the railroad train in from the Bronx by myself . I would get off several blocks ahead of my stop and take the air the rest of the way , and after class i would walk some more . I ’ve lived in the city all my living . I just lie with this city backwards and forwards and I love it with all my sum . It ’s one of the greatest cities in the world and that ’s why I set it here .
Anton Strout , who also typeset his Simon Canderous serial in the Big Apple , explain that the downright outlandishness of the city easy loan itself to the paranormal :
It does not take much of a reach of the imagination to realize something eldritch is go on just out of the box of your eye . I always like exploring that , and most of it ’s very actual , based on existent things — with a spin . Like , there was a mass grave at Bryant Park . Would n’t it be horrible if you had a necromancer who bechance to be close there ?
It ’s surprisingly promiscuous to feel weird things to swivel off of , as well . Strout can go for a walk of life and find something to use in his next picture :
I ’d go to Central Park and be like , “ I ask something to happen for the picture and suddenly , as I ’m walk behind the museum , I come across a matter called Cleopatra ’s Needle , and it is a heavy Egyptian monolith , just in the center of key common . I ca n’t help but take those thing from around here and just be like , “ You know what would be really coolheaded ? ”
Rachel Caine draw many of her undecomposed , unearthly item reading histories of the area . For example , she recently learn the first Texas coroner live in the area and his name was — wait for it — Dr. Slaughter .
Lazellari , on the other hand , uses real details about the city to ground Awakenings , which is lay half in our world and one-half in a medieval alternate reality . The fantastic elements in New York City are but bleeding over from the other existence , so he process to represent the city as accurately as possible :
It should make sense that a bull would live there or an artist would dwell there . I ’m very true to New York in terms of those elements , and then I ’m ripping things aside with the outside element . If my New York was too fantasy - the likes of from the get - go , I do n’t think it would work as well .
Of course , then there ’s the problem of how , exactly , their extrasensory mankind can stay on to go unnoticed . Strout admitted that it ’s tough to keep matter quiet in a major metropolitan arena , so he bank on the ability of New Yorkers to ignore what they do n’t want to see , whether that ’s a panhandler or a Greenpeace campaigner or something occult . Christina Henry , whose series about fallen angel is set in Chicago , takes a similar approach path : “ The easiest explanation is that people see what they want to see . ”
Then there ’s the fact that , as Lazarelli point out , in the tangible world , demon get away with terrible things all the sentence :
Jaycee Dugard was kidnapped at 11 . She was living in a tent in a backyard and no one discover for a decade . Look at the guy in Austria who had his daughter in the basement . His own wife did n’t recognize . If real - lifespan monsters can hide these things for decades — if you ’re a lamia and it ’s your life to ensure no one knows , you ’ll find a agency .
Briggs really likes the limitation of her material - public context : “ One of the things I like about taking a veridical space and working with it is that it dictate some things . Because it does , it makes the tenseness and the chronicle find more tangible . ” For deterrent example , she had to figure out some reason her vampires know in the sunny Tri - Cities . She determine they were being punished , which helped shaped their acculturation in a unique way of life .
But perhaps the most underrated aspect of setting urban fantasy novels in real - life locations is the opportunity for fancied revenge . As Anton Strout hold : “ I ’ve waited in line at Time Warner Cable places throughout Manhattan over the years … . There ’s a reason the Time Warner Center is filled with lamia in my books . ”
al-Qur’an
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