THE BASTARD STEPCHILD There’s a new kid on the shelves in…

““THE BASTARD STEPCHILD There’s a new kid on the shelves in bookstores these days. Most often he can be found back in the science fiction and fantasy section, walking with a certain swagger among the epic fantasies, the space operas, the sword-and-sorcery yarns and cyberpunk dystopias. Sometimes he wanders up front, to hang out with the bestsellers. They call him “urban fantasy,” and these past few years he’s been the hottest subgenre in publishing. The term “urban fantasy” isn’t new, truth be told. There was another subgenre that went by that name back in the 1980s; it mostly seemed to involve elves playing in folk-rock bands and riding motorcycles through contemporary urban landscapes—usually in Minneapolis or Toronto, both of which are very nice towns. The new urban fantasy may be some kin to that 1980s variety, but if so, the kinship is a distant one, for the new kid is a bastard through and through. He makes his home on streets altogether meaner and dirtier than those his cousin walked, in New York and Chicago and L.A. and nameless cities where blood runs in the gutters and the screams in the night drown out the music. Maybe a few elves are still around, but if so, they’re likely to be hooked on horse or coke or stronger, stranger drugs, or maybe they’re elf hookers being pimped out by a werewolf. Those bloody lycanthropes are everywhere, though it’s the vampires who really run the town . . . And don’t forget the zombies, the ghouls, the demons, the witches and warlocks, the incubi and succubi, and all the other nasty, narsty things that go bump in the night. (And worse, the ones that make no sound at all.)””

— George R.R. Martin