Urban Fantasy

[alanajoli]

Between a blog entry of amsaph yesterday and a contest and interview of mdhenry, I've come to a realization. If urban fantasy authors weren't so prolific online and so incredibly friendly to fellow bloggers, I don't think I'd even be reading the genre.

No, seriously.

YA paranormal is sort of a different beast--I've been reading contemporary fantasy in the jfic and the YA sections since I was itty, either with children getting sucked into a fantasy world or having strange things happen to them because they picked up a magic coin. It's not a far stretch from those to books about kids with paranormal abilities, and from there, books with teens whose lives are intersecting with a supernatural world all around them. YA paranormal as a whole has always had a shape--real world kids interacting with crazy paranormal stuff.

Urban fantasy, however, seems to be the heir of a couple of different venues, but a lot of the tropes are born out of the horror genre. As a kid, I never liked horror. I don't like to be scared, and I've never liked scary movies. The word "thriller" tells me I need to avoid the product. But the majority of my reading these days includes zombies and vampires and werewolves--all traditional folk creatures that have run wild in the *horror* genre, and none of which, as creatures, would have encouraged me to pull a book off the shelf as little as three years ago. But when I started following fangs_fur_fey back at the beginning of 2007 (maybe the end of 2006), not only were all of these great writers posting exciting things about using folklore, their writing processes, and just general fun stuff about their lives, they all seemed to be really cool people. And that personal connection is apparently what I needed to really start actively seeking out UF. (And of course now there are the Deadline Dames and the League of Reluctant Adults, which I'm following a little more regularly than FFF these days.)

lyster and I were talking not too long ago about internet presence driving book sales, and I'm coming to acknowledge that I'm the market share--I'm a person who definitively buys books based on my web familiarity with the writers, and I'll even wholeheartedly embrace a genre that wasn't really my thing if as a community, they're really awesome. It's an interesting way to think about what I read.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

This is a good question, and has caused me to think about the nature of buzz and hype and the rest. That is, aside from the obvious part, which is a gigantic publicity budget so that one sees refs to a thing everywhere, for a time, but those are shills. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't.

I don't want to misstate--I have an awful cold so my head is reverbing like a mallet-struck cymbal--but I see two things happening, one the success of text, and two, the success of cult of personality. This is akin to the cult of celebrity, in which case someone so good looking, and in good parts, and whose life has been romanticized enough, creates interest just by being. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Junior did this--so much so that Mary could play engenues when she was way past the age most women were summarily kicked out of the industry, whose producers and directors wanted 'em young and nubile.

John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow made themselves personalities, Scalzi before he commenced fiction . . . CD was writing for a while, but I don't think anything was the kickass success that Little Brother was right outside the gate, after he made himself a personality. Neil Gaiman has made himself a personality. (He also writes well, which helps! :-)

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

Oh, goodness, feel better! It's no good having percussion in your head.

I quite agree that there's a celebrity writer aspect to many authors --particularly in comics and television, where the writer is also the brand. Many people are fans of Joss Whedon rather than being fans of a particular one of his shows. And I know several Whedonites who follow around other writers from the Whedon shows. I suspect the same is true with the Lost crowd. And in comics, the writer is often the brand starting from the story, but the developing into the personality. I highly suspect Alan Moore and Warren Ellis were just guys who wrote comics before they were eccentric brilliant personalities who people knew from their antics or online presence, possibly better than their work.