Then there’s The Exorcist, which you don’t need me to summarize because it’s permeated pop culture so much that you probably know the gist of it even if you’ve never read the book or seen the movie.Īnd no article about the history of urban fantasy would be complete without mentioning Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice. You’ve got ‘Salem’s Lot by Steven King, which is about a man returning to his hometown and finding it’s been infested by vampires. The horror boom of the 1970s saw the release of novels and movies full of supernatural threats that influenced later urban fantasy.
In her article “ The Long and Diverse History of Urban Fantasy,” author Carrie Vaughn mentions the werewolf novel Darker Than You Think by Jack Williamson, stating “how at home this novel, originally published in 1940, would be in the current marketplace.” And the novel was based on a short story published in the pulp magazine Unknown years earlier, which goes to show how those early pulp stories are the predecessors of today’s urban fantasy. Since occult/paranormal detectives are such an essential part of urban fantasy today (and one of my favorite tropes), it’s easy to see the influence these stories had on the genre. They also featured some of the first occult detectives, such as Jules de Grandin, whose fictional adventures were published in the magazine Weird Tales from the 1920s through the early 1950s. These stories are full of demons, ghosts, witches, and other urban fantasy staples. Pulp magazines came in a wide variety of genres from detective to western, but for its influence on urban fantasy, we need to look at horror and occult fiction. The age of pulp magazines lasted from 1896 to 1955 according to “ The Golden Age of Pulp Fiction.” These magazines were cheaply made from wood-pulp paper, and like genre fiction of today, they had a reputation for poor quality when they actually produced stories ranging from bad to excellent. Characterized by an environment of fear and supernatural threats, Gothic fiction like Dracula has had an enormous influence on not only contemporary horror but also urban fantasy.
That means nothing before the Industrial Revolution, and you know what was popular during that same time in the West? Gothic fiction.
You could argue that urban fantasy traces its roots to early mythology, but if the “urban” component is necessary, then it really can’t exist until the rise of big cities. Bram Stoker was doing it back in the 1800s. Seriously, you could find a sinister vampire stalking the streets of London in any urban fantasy novel you pick up today.
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