I woke from nothing. No dreams had stirred me. I had been a hundred years in darkness. I was a stone, waiting roundly. Blank.

I thought, Perhaps it is all over.

(When the sun was high I used to stand in the garden, toss a little golden ball to watch it shine. I played for hours that way.

It is for the best I pricked my finger.)

The keep was suspended, spider-webs gleaming in the open mouths of the half-dead. The vines had covered everything. There was no light left. I thought, Perhaps the sun has gone out, and despaired.

The covers are hard to miss in the bookstore -- dark and shadowy in tone, they show a beautiful young woman, usually tattooed and dressed in revealing clothes. She’s armed and the accompanying cover blurb informs the reader that this character is prepared to kick supernatural butt all the way back to hell if necessary. Welcome to the brave new world of urban fantasy.

Once, this corner of the speculative universe had broader boundaries. The term ‘urban fantasy’ encompassed everything from Tanya Huff’s crazed pantheon in Summon the Keeper to the twisted version of London’s Underground in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, and on to Tim Powers’ Cold War spies in Declare, or the alternate streets Charles DeLint created for his Newford tales. Some great new fantasies with urban settings have come along recently. For example, Elizabeth Bear’s Blood and Iron deals with the intersection of Faerie with the modern world. The Secret History of Moscow, by Ekaterina Sedia, blends Russian folklore and mythology with the gritty reality of post-Soviet life. But more and more these sorts of stories are called ‘contemporary fantasy’ to distinguish them from the publishing juggernaut of urban fantasy.

March 8, 2005

I killed my wife yesterday. Emptied a full load of 22's point blank into her chest. The drinking glass she was holding looked like it was suspended in air before it fell to the ground shattering into pieces.

This morning, my wife and I went to the mall to window shop.

I haven't been seeing patients lately. I'm not a hypocrite. It's unethical to promote mental health if one is unsure of one's own state of mind.

After twenty-odd years of doing collector's fairs, I considered myself happily jaded. Rare albums going for the price of your average luxury car, wild gossip about more than one long-retired artist making ready for a pie-in-the-sky comeback -- I'd seen and heard it all. Hell, I knew of one fan who'd quit his job and sold everything he owned to follow his favorite band around on their latest world tour. If there was a story out there that still had the power to shock me, I hadn't come across it yet.