Paranormal vs Urban Fantasy

Author’s Note: Again, a reminder that there WILL be a post here on the blog tomorrow (Monday, going up 11am EST). This post is part of the YAmazing Race (with MGnificent Prizes) put on by some fantastic fellow members of the Apocalypsies. You can check out more info about the race here. The race itself will start Monday at 12pm EST (so my post will be up a little early) and will be a great way to learn about some VERY exciting debut releases for 2012, as well as an opportunity to win some fabulous prizes.

Also! also! I will be revealing my official back-of-book (or really, since it’ll be hardcover, “inside-front-flap-of-dust-jacket") synopsis for the US version of WHAT’S LEFT OF ME! Yay! The UK one is already up, and found its way to Goodreads a little while back, but the US one is still a secret, and will remain such until tomorrow, where you can then find it here. 

 I know, it’s not as exciting as a cover reveal or ARCs, but still! I’m excited ;)

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So, during my recent trip to California, some of the other Pub Crawl ladies and I got into a (admittedly brief) conversation about Paranormal versus Urban Fantasy, which then got stuck in my head for a (admittedly overly) long time. To be more specific, we wondered how on earth one differentiated a book that should be labeled “Paranormal” from one that should be labeled “Urban Fantasy.”

So, being me, I decided to do some research on the whole thing. 

First off, though, here’s more or less what I said during that conversation, before I’d really put that much thought into it or read up on it at all: in my mind, Paranormal is like Twilight, while Urban Fantasy is like True Blood. To be fair, I’ve never actually watched or read True Blood, but to the best of my knowledge, in said series, vampires are pretty much known to exist by everyone. They’ve integrated into society, and society has bent around them, accommodating them. Contrast this with the case in Twilight, where if we were to interview, say, one of Bella’s classmates, we’d get the idea that they lived in a world exactly like ours. 

Vampires exist in both series, but in Twilight, they’re secret and the majority of people don’t know about them—society is basically just like the real world…In other words, technically, you and I could be living in the Twilight world and just not be in on the whole vampire-y action. Whereas we could not be living in a True Blood-esque world because in that one, vampires have become part of mainstream society.

You may or may not be shaking your head in confusion/WTH-ness by this point. But yeah, that was pretty much my definition of Paranormal versus Urban Fantasy before any and all research into the matter.

Now, let’s see what other sources on the interwebs had to say!

To begin, I did what any modern-day university student does when flummoxed by a question: I googled it. Apparently, the whole “Paranormal versus Urban Fantasy” question is pretty common, because Google auto-completed it for me. After looking through several sites, here’s what I gathered (these points are basically just pulled from the sites and represent many different people’s opinions, most of them made concise by yours truly):

Paranormal:

-Often heavily associated with “Paranomal Romance” nowadays, even if the “romance” part isn’t actually tacked on the end

-can deal with any time period

-more focused on relationships

Urban Fantasy:

-City environment 

-Location is important—almost a second character

-modern and grounded and current culture

-more likely to be gritty or dark

-more focused on the plot/character arc of just the main character

It was actually pretty hard to make these lists, because people tended to contradict one another a lot, and most people weren’t actually comparing Urban Fantasy with Paranormal, but with Paranormal Romance, so there was a lot of discussion about whether or not a HEA (or “Happily Ever After”) influenced a book’s categorization, etcetera.

What do you guys think?