Towards a New Urban Fantasy

“You are mad, boy, absolutely mad! Vidocq--Rocambole! You mix up legend and history, bracket murderers with detectives, and make no distinction between right and wrong! You would not hesitate to set the heroes of crime and the heroes of law and order on one and the same pedestal!”
--President Bonnet chastising Charles Rambert in the opening pages of Fantȏmas

New York City

It is my contention that the urban fantasy novel ought not simply drop orcs, goblins, wizards, and the like into, say, New York City or Los Angeles and call it a day, but rather that it should work toward making the urban fantastic. The pulp literature of the 1910s, 20s, 30s, and 40s is far closer to my vision of what urban fantasy could be than something like Shadowrun or even Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files. Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre’s Fantȏmas, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels, and Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op stories all elevate cops and criminals to the level of epic heroes--this is what urban fantasy can do and be. The genre has no need for Tolkien transplants: the city is always already enchanted.

Los Angeles

The ever shrinking literate public has long been pacified by novels of staid political rebellion and love without sex. No more! I say. The dime-writers of the 2020s shall sing of robbery and of graft, of crime and of punishment--the song… of Fantȏmas! I myself have been engaged in the production of my own brand of urban fantasy. My goal is to do for pulp detective fiction what The Cramps did for rock and roll; that is, to make the genre as daring, lurid, and strange today as it was when it first appeared in the pre-yellowed pages of Black Mask and Dime Detective. Thus were The Phantoms born.

Paris

While reading Fantȏmas, I was struck by how often Inspector Juve (and others) insinuated that the titular criminal may actually be an alias employed by any number of enterprising crooks, murderers, and thieves, rather than a singular individual. He appears as something of a cyborg criminal--a felonious gestalt of cut-throats and pick-pockets. My Phantoms, then, are what Fantȏmas only seems to be: a gang of egoist thugs unknown even to one another. I imagine them wearing domino masks to their clandestine meetings, during which they perform strange rites to prove their membership. (That these rites change every meeting is immaterial: the willingness to perform is all that truly matters).

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Represent and Stake: Vampirism and the American Race Novel

Image
Both Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels (and the adaptations thereof) use vampires as a stand-in for marginalized and/or oppressed groups. In I Am Legend , the vampires are the proletariat; in the Stackhouse books they are variously homosexuals, the X-Men, people of color, et cetera. But where in Matheson’s novella the vampires employ violent means to achieve their Revolutionary ends, Harris’ bloodsuckers take a somewhat subtler approach; opting instead to ingratiate themselves to mortals by appearing opposite Bill Maher on Real Time and opening integrated bars where the undead can mix and mingle with the living. Bill Maher, circa 2008   This evolution in vampiric praxis reflects a sea-change in American politics. When Matheson published I Am Legend in 1954, it likely seemed as if the only way any subversive ideology could gain a foothold in the United States was through violence. Thus, They came at sunset, muttering, snarling, screaming… H
Read more

The Big Bang Theory Theory

Image
  The Anxiety of Influence In the preface to the second edition of The Anxiety of Influence , Bloom uses Shakespeare’s artistic struggle against Marlowe to explain the Bard’s development as a playwright and poet. Of particular interest is his comparison of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta . Marlowe’s Barabas is an outright caricature; an unrepentantly evil figure cobbled together from centuries of anti-Semitic propaganda. Shakespeare’s Shylock, meanwhile, is presented as a complicated man who nonetheless falls into the same behaviors as his antecedent. Shylock is not so easily dismissed as Barabas, Bloom argues, and it is for this reason he is a more pernicious character. Shylock at once confirms the audience’s anti-Semitic prejudices while also allowing them to feel as though they’ve given him a fair shake and still found him wanting.   "One by one, they all just fade away..." A similar dynamic has played out between Chuck Lorre and Dan Ha
Read more

Conan the Barbarian and Schwarzenegger's Pecs as Visual Metaphor

Image
In an effort to make my corpus more legible to future biographers, I’ve decided to distill/recycle some of my Twitter threads into long(er) form blog posts. What follows is an attempt to do just that. Here’s hoping I was successful. Robert E. Howard’s Conan cycle is fantasy as only an American--and more specifically, a Texan --could conceive of it. Here are tales of degenerate wizards and brave warriors; of monsters and other, less nameable, things lurking in dank dungeons. The crenellated walls of Castle Camelot are as far from the decadent cities of Hyboria as the verdant forests of Wales are from the desolate oil fields of Texas, as are Arthur’s high minded notions of noble chivalry and Christian honor from the titular barbarian’s ethos of rugged individuality and brute strength. Indeed, Howard inaugurated an entirely new sub-genre with the Conan stories; Sword and Sorcery. Robert E. Howard Described by Fritz Leiber in the late 1960s as “an earthier sort of fantasy,” Sword and Sorce
Read more