Intro by Dame Devon: It is my great pleasure to welcome Dame for a Day, Nancy Holzner!
Nancy is the author of DEADTOWN a new urban fantasy that hits the shelves on December 29th. I had the pleasure of reading an early copy of DEADTOWN and it is a blast! How can you get your hands on a copy? Well, Nancy is giving away a signed copy of DEADTOWN right here. Just leave a comment and she’ll choose a winner via random number generator on Sunday the 20th by 11:59 EST.
The Top Ten Reasons I Write Urban Fantasy
I began my career as a medievalist; I earned a PhD in medieval English literature and then taught works like Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Le Morte d’Arthur at the university level. A lot of people (including some perplexed family members) have asked me how I made the journey from academic medievalist to urban fantasy author. It was a long trip with several detours—along the way, I worked as a high school teacher, copyeditor, corporate trainer, instructional designer, and author of prescriptive nonfiction (that’s a fancy name for how-to books). I also wrote two other novels—neither of them a fantasy—before Deadtown. So I didn’t exactly go to sleep one night as a medievalist and wake up the next morning to find that the Urban Fantasy Fairy had left the Deadtown manuscript under my pillow.
Even so, there’s a lot about urban fantasy for a former medievalist to love. Here are the top ten reasons I write in this genre:
10. I get to reinterpret some of my favorite stories. Deadtown’s underlying mythology comes from the Mabinogi, a collection of Welsh stories and legends written down in the 12th and 13th centuries. It’s one thing to study medieval stories and another thing to teach them. But using them as the basis for an updated story brings them to life in a whole new way.
9. Zombies! In the Middle Ages, the faithful believed that on Judgment Day the dead would be resurrected—body and soul reunited—to stand before God and learn their ultimate fate. There are some great doomsday illustrations of corpses climbing out of their graves, animals bringing back half-chewed limbs to reunite them with their owners, sea monsters regurgitating drowned sailors . . . talk about a zombie apocalypse! My zombies are different from that idea of the risen dead; they’re also different from the shambling brain-munchers you find in horror fiction. They’re victims of a virus no one understands, and they’re characters who think and talk and act. They’re almost like you or me, aside from one teensy problem: their frenzied hunger at the scent of human blood.
8. I can use second-person familiar pronouns. After years of reading Old and Middle English literature, I’ve got thee, thou, thy, and thine down cold. And I’m not afraid to use them, either; in Deadtown Difethwr, the Hellion that menaces Boston, speaks in an archaic style. (Try getting away with that in a how-to book!)
7. Magic is real. Lots of people today don’t believe in magic, and I think that’s a shame. To medieval people, magic was real. People used spells and charms to injure and heal, to find lost objects, to make barren land fertile. Often, these spells were pagan in origin but incorporated Christian elements that, in the minds of the practitioners, boosted their firepower. Magic is also a fact of life in urban fantasy. Deadtown has witches, who work with natural forces to direct magic, and sorcerers, who summon demons to do their bidding.
6. Demons! Medieval Europe was a demon-haunted place. Stories abound of travelers encountering shapeshifting demons on the road, of demons tormenting pious monks, of corpses crawling out of their coffins, possessed and piloted by demons. Medieval demons weren’t just figures in scary stories; they represented evil—its power, its temptations, its consequences—and they were real to people. Urban fantasy lets me set real demons loose in the world and then figure out how to fight them.
St. Catherine of Siena under attack by demons. Looks like she could use a flaming sword!
5. I get to take revenge on Shakespeare. The great English playwright took old stories, many of them from the Middle Ages, and rewrote them for his own audience. About time someone did the same thing to him. (I know, I’m not the first—not by a long shot. It was still fun, though.)
4. I can get allegorical on my story. Allegory is an extended metaphor in which characters and settings are themselves (on the literal level) and also represent something more than themselves (on the allegorical level). Medieval morality plays, for example, have characters with names like Everyman, Death, Good Deeds, and Knowledge. Nothing in Deadtown is that obviously allegorical, but do the zombies or Deadtown itself represent something more than the literal? Hmm . . . The cool thing about allegory is that the reader gets to decide.
3. I can ignore the laws of physics. That apple didn’t bonk Sir Isaac Newton on the head until the 17th century. During the Middle Ages, the closest thing to physics was called “natural philosophy,” and it attempted to figure out the workings of the natural world (with the understanding that natural law was subject to divine law). People didn’t worry about things like the law of conservation of mass. My shapeshifters don’t worry much about that, either. Whether turning into a mouse or a wolf or a rhinoceros, they just do it.
2. Flaming swords! Seriously, who wouldn’t want one of these? The archangel Saint Michael had one. He used it to destroy demons and guard the entrance to Paradise. Vicky gets one, too. In fact, hers is named the Sword of Saint Michael, and it’s the only weapon that’s effective against Hellions.
1. It’s even more fun than grading a stack of final exams! There was a lot that I loved about teaching, but sometimes sitting through endless faculty meetings and trying to make constructive comments on last-minute papers could try the patience of a saint. (And I should know; I wrote my dissertation on saints’ lives.) As much as I’ve always loved reading, analyzing, and discussing stories, writing my own is a lot more fun.
And there you have it, my ten best reasons for writing urban fantasy. Now it’s your turn. What are your top reasons for reading urban fantasy? One lucky commenter, chosen at random, will win a signed copy of Deadtown. The contest is open from now until 11:59 p.m. EST on Sunday, 12/20.
