If I’m being honest, Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series gets credit for introducing me to urban fantasy, a contemporary offshoot of paranormal fiction. But my addiction to the genre began in earnest with Sookie Stackhouse.
I’ve always been a fantasy, horror and sci-fi junkie, and while I wasn’t a True Blood fan, I was a voracious reader preoccupied by the supernatural. Charlaine Harris’s pulpy series following the misadventures of a small-town waitress with telepathy, set in a world where vampires and werewolves are just “coming out,” hit me at just the right moment of having nothing to read, and few prospects ahead.
The majority of urban fantasies are published in a series, and starting a series comes with the comforting knowledge that if you dig the protagonist, you have a number of books to look forward to reading (and likely more in the works behind them). I read Dead Until Dark — the first book in Harris’s Southern Vampire Mystery series — in 24 hours, then the next four over the next week. By book seven, the plots were becoming trite and predictable and by the series’ conclusion at 13, it felt like Harris was phoning it in. But at that point, I was only reading obligatorily; I’d discovered a whole new pool of authors to choose from, ones who possessed writing capabilities superior to Harris’s and delivered more compelling narratives by characters that proved far more captivating and well-rounded than the seemingly two-dimensional Sookie.
Of the series that spoke to me most, all shared certain traits, some executed with greater finesse than others: situated in a present-day world filled with supernatural beings that the general public may or may not know about; anchored by a strong and compelling female protagonist with distinguishing physical characteristics and an abundance of wit, cunning and supernatural talent that she uses to make money but that conversely gets her into trouble, sets her apart from everyone else, sometimes even her own kind, and usually ends up helping her save the world, or perhaps just the day; and featuring one chief romantic interest along with a string of lesser prospects who usually fall short in light of said chief or are knocked completely out of the picture by him. (Or her.)
If you’re going to dive into some urban fantasy, my suggestion is to start with Kelly Armstrong’s Otherworld series, its rotating cast of narrators centered on the world’s only living female werewolf (the first book, Bitten, was adapted into a terrible SyFy series). Deborah Harkness is another high-quality worldsmith, the heroine of her All Souls Trilogy a witch historian who unearths the secret of supernatural existence. There’s also Kim Harrison’s Rachel Morgan, a fiery-haired witch with demon’s blood and a PI firm/home situated in a church; Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson, a tatted-up shape-changing part Native American coyote who fixes cars and isn’t quite accepted by the local wolf pack, even after she starts dating its leader; and Karen Marie Moning’s MacKayla Lane, a seemingly fluffy-headed Buffy the Vampire Slayer-like Cali girl who wields mysterious powers over the (not-so-nice-in-real-life) fairies.
This article appears in Dec 10-16, 2015.