Urban Faeries
I have just finished Melissa Marr's eagerly anticipated new novel Wicked Lovely and am entranced. The prose style is almost impossibly elegant for a young adult novel. I wish we had YA books like this when I was a teenager. Actually, I don't think of it as a YA novel - though it's being marketed that way. For me, it's just wonderful fantasy literature, pure and simple. I don't want to give away any spoilers - so I'll just be vague and say that the depiction of the faeries and their victims are depicted with mixture of beauty and tragedy with a side helping of terror. It reminds me of those classic faerie tales that are especially haunting, where every action has unexpected consequences and good intentions are no guarantee that things will turn out well. Charles de Lint has good taste (read the July issue of F&SF magazine)!
Actually, there are a lot of interesting literary takes on faerie lore out there, notably, Holly Black's work. Her books Tithe, Valiant and Ironside, like Wicked Lovely, take a somewhat sinister view of the faerie world, which fits in nicely with their depictions of angst-ridden adolescense. I know my adolescence was pretty angsty - so I can relate to these characters very well. The best fantasy, I think, uses the supernatural as a metaphor for the real life issues. I think both Marr's and Black's writing does this well.
Then there is the adult urban fantasy take on faeries: Marc Del Franco's Unshapely Things (also has a Druid detective and a dwarf mafia - hee, hee), Rob Thurman's Nightlife (up there with Valiant re: scariest scenes invloving trolls in NYC) and Moonshine, Elaine Cunningham's Shadows in the Darkness and Shadows in the Starlight and, to name an old classic, Emma Bull's War for the Oaks. All these novels have new and intriguing takes on faerie lore (okay, Cunningham writes about elves - but still) that have influenced me greatly in my own writing.
The heroine of my novel, which will probably turn out to be YA because of her age is half faeire. Her mother is a faerie and her father is a Sorcerer and she lives in present day Los Angeles. Of course, that presents all sort of possibilities. (Dark chuckle). I hope that by the time I'm finished with it, everyone isn't tired of faeires and urban fantasy!!!! Slight hyperventilation. Okay ... calming down.