Jennifer's work appeared in a number of venues last year, including Strange Horizons, Star*Line, Dreams and Nightmares, the Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Illumen, and Abyss & Apex. She's an assistant editor at Flash Me magazine.

Visit Jennifer at her blog.

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.

Where did this subgenre come from? Writers have been creating stories about sassy heroines fighting occult crime on the streets of their cities for some time, Mercedes Lackey’s Diane Tregarde novels being an early example. Anne Rice’s novels popularized the idea of vampires as tormented, romantic souls instead of the soulless, devouring monsters they’d been in folklore.

Then ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ came along, mixing action and romance with snappy dialogue. Shortly thereafter, Laurell K. Hamilton merged similar themes in her Anita Blake novels. Hamilton regularly makes the New York Times bestseller list with Anita, who bristles with weaponry and exchanges witty asides, longing glances (and later, body fluids) with a sexy vampire and a brooding werewolf. And when her sales took off, a horde of imitators followed.

Today, books that bear the urban fantasy label share many of these characteristics: a female protagonist described as ‘tough,’ ‘street-smart’ or ‘sassy.’ She has some kind of supernatural talent or ability, which often causes more problems than it solves. Her love interest may also have some link to the occult universe. If so, he will probably be a part of some organization at odds with the heroine. If not, he’s a ‘normal’ who has to be protected from his own ignorance and weakness. In either case, this will lead to heartache, or at least a few books’ worth of unresolved sexual tension. If the plot doesn’t grow directly from this tension, then it involves some other supernatural threat, for which the protagonist is unprepared. But she’s not the sort to back down from a fight, even when that would make sense, so she straps on her sword or gun or holy water and sets out to battle.

Diligent readers can find interesting variations on the usual themes. Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden stories feature a male protagonist with a cockeyed sense of humor and a chivalrous streak. Harry has the requisite vampiric and romantic troubles, but Butcher also has a smooth writing style and a few tricks that haven’t already appeared in a dozen other books.

Unfortunately, twists on the prevailing themes seem all too rare in urban fantasy today. That repetitiveness is one of the key problems with this sub-genre. Cookie-cutter heroines seem to regard vengefulness and violence as the equivalent of strength and intelligence. While many readers rejoice to see strong heroines who are in charge of their own lives, it seems silly to confuse equality with the freedom to be just as stupid as overly brawny male heroes.

Even worse, the plots often rehash earlier and more engaging works, sapping the unlife from these new stories. Relying on secondary sources -- particularly other novelists -- rather than returning to the original source material, leaves a vast array of folklore and traditional monster stories untouched. Nearly every society on earth has some sort of vampire myth, yet most often writers produce a variation on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It would be refreshing to see writers engage with other cultures and archetypes.

Yet, as ubiquitous as vampires and shape-shifters might be in folklore, they’re rarely, if ever, presented as heroic or romantic material. Given that their traditional roles have been as predators and parasites, a reflection of the worst human excesses, where’s the sex appeal? The recent spate of novels do sometimes raise issues in the protagonists’ relationships. But often the romanticized monster becomes an object of pity rather than fear when his nature leads him astray -- regardless of where it may have taken him.

All of this might be bearable if so many authors didn’t suffer from a tendency to present readers with sloppy prose and excessive information. Each author’s vampires, though more or less similar to Dracula, must be explained in excruciating detail. Apparently setting up different underlying ‘rules’ for a monster’s traditional aversions -- and then covering the same ground in every book -- proves that this generation’s monsters are something new and different (even if the end result is the same). Add to that the inclination of many authors to dwell on the heroine’s every brooding, conflicted thought, and the result is often a mess.

Though I was initially drawn to many of the themes and images of urban fantasy, I’ve long since stopped buying every book in that genre. Most don’t pass the two-page test at the bookstore—if they can’t give me something new in the first two pages, usually they next four hundred pages won’t change that.

Even so, like many readers, I keep returning to those shadowy heroines, reading the cover blurbs, hoping for a story that will catch my interest. Once in a while one comes along; Kat Richardson’s Greywalker, for example, started out with a vivid fight scene that made me want to take it home. And there will be others. Their appeal lies deep in the human psyche, where many of us want to believe in the strange and wonderful. There’s something intriguing in the idea of secret histories and worlds sideways from ours that we could see if only we had the right vision. Readers will keep looking, hoping someone can give them that vision.