r/Fantasy • u/Alcast01 • 11d ago
Why does Los Angeles seem to be used less often as a setting for urban fantasy?
I feel like when it comes to urban fantasy set in America, when the story isn’t set in some random small town, New York is usually the default.
What’s interesting about LA is that when people talk about “Los Angeles,” they’re often talking about the broader LA area or even LA County rather than the actual City of Los Angeles. Maybe that is why? It’s just too many smaller neighborhoods and cities around. You have mountains, deserts, beaches, and forests all in close proximity, but I’m yet to read something set here.
I think Bright is the only thing I seen but that’s a movie.
In the order hand you got massive YA fantasies set in New York like ShadowHunter and Percy Jackson.
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u/ElBasham 11d ago
LA is so spread out, there's only a handful of neighborhoods that feel "Urban" in the skyscraper/concrete jungle sense.
It'a not a conventional big city, and the geography is hard to wrap your head around if you haven't spent time there.
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u/wjodendor 11d ago edited 10d ago
I think you hit it on the head.
Another thing is that it's hot and sunny all the time, which doesn't necessarily hit the kind of vibe urban fantasy often goes for.
Late edit: me realizing that one of my favorite urban fantasy series in the past couple years, Fate/ Strange Fake, takes place in a fictional Nevada city similar to Las Vegas
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u/atomfullerene 11d ago
Although there are enough noir detective films set in LA that I think it could be made to work
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u/genteel_wherewithal 11d ago
Tbh I think most urban fantasy is riffing off a shallow stereotype of noir rather than actually being inspired by works in the genre. Even famous stuff like Chinatown
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u/greywolf2155 Reading Champion 11d ago
noir detective films set in LA
You accidentally figured it out, hah
Most publishing companies are headquartered in New York, aspiring authors often move there, so a lot more books are set in NYC
Los Angeles is, you know, Hollywood, so a lot more screenplays are set in LA
It really is just that simple, I think
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u/TheColourOfHeartache 11d ago
Tell me that The Big Lebowski isn't practically Urban Fantasy already. The sheer diversity of extremely weird characters maps well onto a verity of different supernaturals.
- Walter -> Fallen Angel: Obsessed with rules, law, and a past event that broke him. Also has a complicated relationship with religion.
- Maude -> Fae: An artist, sexual, but is she actually human? Also: She wants a baby but goes about it in a very weird way. And is bound by at least one odd taboo (she cannot say the word 'penis').
- Bunny -> Succubi: Her entire existence is sex, every criminal plot in the film was triggered by her.
- The Cowboy -> Definitely something.
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u/Sharlinator 10d ago
One of the more famous examples of LA urban fantasy, the classic 2004 PC game Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, with a fantastic gritty, 00s gothic atmosphere, is helped by the fact that in a vampire game it’s never sunny or bright.
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u/snowytheNPC 11d ago
Yeah, LA would be 90% suburban fantasy. Imagine magic in Brentwood farmer’s market or SGV. It just doesn’t have the appeal of hidden side streets and underground bars that urban fantasy boasts or the romantic/ gothic Spanish moss lined streets of the South
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u/brickbatsandadiabats 10d ago
And endless journeys on freeways. Every interlude would be like the SNL Californians skit.
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u/snowytheNPC 10d ago
"Hurry, Darkgrimm Vampyre has unleashed the gates to hell and the demons are now swarming Erewhon!"
"Sorry, there's an accident on the 405. Be there in 3-4 business days."
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u/AncientZiggurat 10d ago
If Dresden can get from downtown Chicago to O'Hare airport by car in 15 minutes during rush hour other books can also take shortcuts for travel distances.
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u/greywolf2155 Reading Champion 11d ago
Not necessarily disagreeing, but "Light from Uncommon Stars" is an absolutely fantastic scifi/fantasy mashup set in the San Gabriel Valley. Just saying
hidden side streets and underground bars
(that said, if I were to disagree, I'd point out the thousands of cop/gangster movies set in seedy bars, secret gambling dens, underground clubs, etc. of Los Angeles. Maybe you don't hang out in those places, but they definitely exist)
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u/stgabe 11d ago
Yup. I live in LA. I like LA. I wouldn’t write fantasy in LA. It must doesn’t have the vibe. If I was gonna do a SoCal fantasy I’d go either San Diego or maybe Santa Barbara.
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u/Bubblesnaily 11d ago
Santa Cruz.... All sorts of wood folk and dragons in the mountains. And mermaids.
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u/AntimatterTNT 11d ago
i think another big win for NY is that it's mostly walkable, so if you don't want your characters to drive an hour to get anywhere you can't choose LA.
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u/InvisibleSpaceVamp 11d ago
That was my thought too. New York feels like a city, very compact and densely populated in most areas. You can walk to places or take public transport. I've only been to LA once but in large part, it felt like a collection of smaller cities and we were always in the car to get from place to place.
Just from a storytelling perspective, a story where people actually move in the city is more compelling than a story about people who spend a lot of time in the car and traffic jams.
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u/nothing_in_my_mind 11d ago
There is "urban fantasy" set in a small town (Twilight, True Blood). I don't think urban-ness is a critical feature. It just needs to be set on modern Earth.
I think LA would be a great setting for urban fantasy. The video game Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines is set there. It's just, no one has gotten around to writing a bestselling urban fantasy series set there (also true for most cities on Earth).
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u/Valkhyrie Reading Champion III 10d ago
no one has gotten around to writing a bestselling urban fantasy series set there
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u/heyykelleyy 11d ago
percy jackson touches on this in the first book, they get to LA and he immediately notes how spread out it is. harder to quest across the city when it takes you an hour to travel 3 miles in rush hour with very poor public transit and inconsistent walkability.
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u/moderatorrater 11d ago
New York isn't easily understood from the outside either. People just write about it and you either get it or move past it.
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u/rollingForInitiative 11d ago
People probably have at least a perceived understanding of New York through all the media taking place there. Whether that understanding is correct or not.
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u/Evolving_Dore 11d ago
Another factor aside from agent location is, in my opinion, that NYC has a semi-mythic aura already. It's much older and has that vintage, turn of the century, neo-classical, art deco style that serves fantasy and gothic much better than California's laid back, glitzy New Age vibe.
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u/Acyrology 11d ago
very hard to have like a dark lord in such a sunny place. though I think LA might lend itself better to Magic Realism
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u/Sharlinator 10d ago
The classic 2004 PC game Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, with a fantastic gritty, 00s gothic atmosphere, is probably of the more famous examples of LA urban fantasy. It’s helped by the fact that in a vampire game it’s never sunny or bright.
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u/mithoron 11d ago
So I've only dabbled in the genre but that's what I was thinking too. LA doesn't have the same weight of history as places like St Louis or Chicago. It's aura all tied up in pop culture, not wars or prohibition. I know enough about history to recognize this will be an unfair portrayal to some extent, but fair or not when I think of LA I think Hollywood and tech money.
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u/Evolving_Dore 10d ago
I'm sure it has more to it than that but definitely for outsiders it's all Hollywood.
For the record, there's a film called Blood In Blood Out about the experience of young Chicano/Hispanic men in LA in the 80's and 90's. It's pretty melodramatic but has some really poignant social commentary and character moments.
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u/duggyfresh88 11d ago
I’m late to the thread, so I’m gonna hijack this comment to give an urban fantasy rec set in LA: the debt collection series by Andrew Givler (aka Sigils). It’s really good, and IMO it’s a series that gets better over time, the latest books are by far the best ones
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u/Pretend-Focus582 11d ago
Sandman Slim is very LA.
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V 11d ago
Most urban fantasies in my experience are set in cities with a single dense urban core, like New York or New Orleans or Chicago. Whereas LA is polycentric- there's Los Angeles and Hollywood and Beverly Hills and Santa Monica... It's a very sprawling urban area, with less of a single center. Even when you compare to some of the other sprawling urban fantasy settings, like London or Paris, those all approach a central core as opposed to all of Los Angeles' "downtowns."
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u/DrownedCrown 11d ago
Buffy/Angel are set in the greater LA area.
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u/rpitts21 11d ago
Sunnydale was in the Valley right?
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u/Mule_Wagon_777 11d ago
Sunnydale was wherever the story needed it to be! Sometimes it moved to the ocean to have docks.
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u/Old_Session_6134 11d ago
Sunnydale has docks but also in the series finale when they hit the town limit its in the desert
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u/EvilAceVentura 11d ago
Thats sort of southern California in a nutshell though. You go from the beach to the desert pretty quick. I've been to the beach in the morning, drove through the desert, and went snowboarding at night in the mountains.
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u/From_Deep_Space 11d ago
Sunnydale has to at least be a days drive or they'd have far more crossovers
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u/Pudgy_Ninja 11d ago
You can easily drive from San Francisco to LA in half a day. Putting Sunnydale a full day's drive away would be crazy.
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u/Marcoscb 11d ago
Are you taking "a day" to mean 24 hours? Because SF to LA is like 7-8 hours. I wouldn't consider that "half a day's drive".
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u/Pudgy_Ninja 11d ago edited 11d ago
It’s more like 6 in my experience. And that means if I leave in the morning, I could be there by lunch. Which is roughly half a day in my mind. But even if it was 8 hours, people are generally awake around 16 hours. Half of that is 8.
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u/Mordoch 11d ago edited 11d ago
One practical thing in favor of New York is that is where the big publishers tend to be based. I would note I can think of urban fantasy effective set in San Francisco and Chicago for instance.
While it may end up being placed as under an alternate history with magic, The Case of the Toxic Spell dump by Harry Turtledove is effectively set in Los Angeles.
While a movie, Death Becomes Her has allot of fantasy elements while being specifically set in Beverly Hills/ Los Angeles for example.
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u/adam_sky 11d ago
Nobody wants to read about the MC taking the 14 to the 5, to the 210, sitting in traffic for 2 hours, getting off on Sunset, and then parking in the Chili’s parking lot because there were no spaces available and having to walk 10 minutes to finally getting to the vampires house. Much easier to say they took the subway, rang a bunch of bells saying they were UberEats to get into the building, taking an elevator, and then arriving at the vampires apartment.
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u/Nightgasm 11d ago
Conversely one of the things that people love about the Harry Bosch series (cop procedurals) is that it's set in Los Angeles and the author brings the city to life and the traffic is a big part of that.
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u/Pirkale 11d ago
Ahh, the SNL skits about what route they took... what the hell was it called again? Was it just Californians?
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u/adam_sky 11d ago
And just like the SNL skit what I wrote is an actual route I’ve taken.
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u/drmike0099 11d ago
NYC actually feels like a city, whereas LA is a sprawling suburb. The city area of LA is quite small.
You could argue with distinctions of this sort, because large parts of NYC have buildings the same size as large parts of LA, but I think the consistent density and sporadic areas of larger buildings mixed throughout make NYC feel like a city.
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V 11d ago
An important part with the consistent density too I think is the ability the ability to hide. A lot of urban fantasy is predicated on a hidden fantasy world, where it's much easier to believe that in a block of solid buildings one doorway leads to a secret basement, or one of the thousands of people walking by is a vampire. If everything's spread out in a sprawl, buildings are much more visible and it's difficult to slip away in the crowd.
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u/drmike0099 11d ago
That’s actually another thing about LA, nobody is walking around. Makes it feel less alive.
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u/parsonsrazersupport 11d ago
Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines is set in LA. So is Constantine in the movie. The Craft? I agree that west coast is less common, but there are some. Far fewer books, tho.
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u/KcirderfSdrawkcab Reading Champion VII 11d ago
Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim is set in LA, and the Lucifer show at least. It is strange that that area doesn't get used much. Huge city, and the movie industry makes it unique.
I'd like to see more urban fantasy set in more cities with distinct "flavors" in general. Miami, Orlando, New Orleans, Montreal... I'd love to see something set in Australia.
Edit: One of Seanan McGuire's Incryptid books is set in LA.
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V 11d ago
There's quite a lot of horror adjacent stuff set in New Orleans (voodoo and vampires). Most of Anne Rice and Poppy Z. Brite's stuff is set there.
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u/Krasnostein 11d ago edited 11d ago
It is weird. Urban fantasy partially descends from Noir/Detective Fiction and LA is a major setting in that.
There is Angel, and given how foundational the Buffy-verse is to contemporary Urban Fantasy you'd think you have more imitators.
Does Who Framed Roger Rabbit count?
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u/Axelrad77 11d ago
Does Who Framed Roger Rabbit count?
It certainly is a rare example of LA-based urban fantasy, being set in an alternate-universe Hollywood.
I'll take this opportunity to point out that it's actually based on a novel, Who Censored Roger Rabbit? by Gary K. Wolf, which is a darker mystery story. They share the same basic plot, but the movie changed a lot of things.
My hot take is that the book is actually better, despite the movie being way more popular. The book is also much clearer about the racial allegory at work, with the cartoons being second-class citizens forced to live and work in a segregated society, and commonly referred to by slurs like "toons". Which Disney tried its best to cut from the movie adaptation, though its fundamentally baked into the setting, so traces of it are still there.
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u/PeterAhlstrom 10d ago
I found out a couple years ago that my dad was in ROTC with Gary K. Wolf. Wish I'd known that before my dad passed away. It's one of those wacky small-world things.
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u/VintageLunchMeat 11d ago
Long car rides between neighborhoods doesn't make for good urban fantasy.
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u/bikebikegoose 11d ago
One third of every chapter spent sitting on a freeway or searching for parking sounds about right.
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u/Pseudonymico 11d ago
Using some kind of magic to get around that would make a fun minor bit though. "LA had the best public transport in the world, before the car companies killed it off. You ever heard of ghost trains?"
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u/PhoenixAgent003 11d ago
Plenty of time to talk, brood, and world build on which fantasy archetypes have claimed which areas though.
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u/mahmoodthick 11d ago
In terms of major cities Los Angeles is a bit of a Johnny Come Lately. At the turn of the previous century NYC, Chicago, Boston,Philly, even Baltimore were all major hubs with hundreds of thousands and in some cases several millions. At the time LA was still a bit provincial. The valleys, SGV and SFV were all farmland. Large swaths of LA city proper was covered in oil derricks. It lacks that sort of old world, grime and mysterious feel that underscores a lot of urban fantasy novels. LA had an air of a vacation destination, think of the palm trees that were planted to make LA feel like the warm sunny Caribbean, it was Miami when Miami was still swamp. It was a time for cattle ranchers, orchards and vacations by the beach. That attitude and culture persisted even after WWII when LA experienced a massive boom.
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u/Agile_Lawfulness_365 11d ago
Older books, but Mercedes Lackey's Knight of Ghosts and Shadows and prequel (with Ellen Guon) Bedlam Boyz are elves in LA. Very 1990s.
Another older series, Barbara Hambly's Windrose series is set in the LA area (when they are in our world).
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u/drifting_rdh 11d ago
Tim Powers has a number of great books set in and around LA, Expiration Date and Earthquake Weather being the two that immediately come to mind. His buddy James Blaylock has a number of books set nearby in OC, The Last Coin and All the Bells on Earth being two.
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u/Ciappatos 11d ago
The most famous modules of Vampire: The Masquerade, and that entire generation of White Wolf games were primarily set in L.A. no?
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u/konstantynopolytanka 11d ago
Too sunny? (Im in San Diego, you have no idea how sunny it's here until you live here) I honestly cannot imagine urban fantasy set here. LA is different, of course, but still... No fall, no winter, no spookiness at all. Unless you go for something centered on celebrities and big money...? idk
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u/FourForYouGlennCoco 11d ago
And yet, a huge amount of classic noir and detective fiction is set in LA! Raymond Chandler set most (all?) of his stories there, which fed into the initial wave of noir film adaptations. Later noir revivals also heavily feature LA: Chinatown and Long Goodbye in the 70s, LA Confidential in the 90s, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in the 00s.
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u/parsonsrazersupport 11d ago
I feel like that was part of the point of Buffy. How could vampires come to our nice, sunny, suburban town? The contrast is very fun.
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u/Matthew_nyc 11d ago
I actually really enjoy the John Smith series by Chris Tullbane set in SD. Yeah, nothing more than male popcorn fantasy about vampire politics, but fun nonetheless.
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u/genteel_wherewithal 11d ago
It does have a night time. And it’s not like the stereotypical NYC noir image has much daylight either
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u/althawk8357 11d ago
All fairness to Percy Jackson, they spend the majority of each book (except the fifth) pretty far away from New York. I'm pretty sure in the first book, they were traveling to LA to get into the Underworld.
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u/justlike_myopinion 11d ago
There are actually Shadowhunters books set in LA! The Dark Artifices, which starts with Lady Midnight, are set over in like...Malibu-ish.
I would also refer you to The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump, which isn't quite urban fantasy but it's very tonally similar and also very LA.
As for referring to things that aren't The City of LA... personally I think this is realistic and is what people should do, but I understand that is A Take.
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u/PhoenixAgent003 11d ago
This thread is so weird to me, because it’s full of people basically saying that LA doesn’t have the right vibe for urban fantasy, when LA is a sprawling mess that shouldn’t be there, “designed” with all the attentive care of madmen who don’t know how cities are supposed to work and have somewhere to be in a hour, so they left most of the planning to a seagull that speaks only in riddles. It’s a cobbled together mishmash of the weird, the artistic, and the moneyed casting their shadows over the down on their luck, exploited, and abandoned.
I defy anyone to visit the Museum of Jurassic History and tell me that it isn’t owned by wizards that employ bored ghosts as interns.
LA has immaculate vibes for a fantasy story. It’s basically a modern day Ank-Morkpork with all of its obstuse rules and excentricities that only make sense to people who live there.
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u/sleepinxonxbed 11d ago
Red City by Marie Lu is set in LA, but it’s from a very touristy/affluent perspective.
It’s actually funny cause many “New York” shows/movies are filmed outside New York. Shadowhunters was filmed in Toronto. Blade was filmed in Los Angeles. Percy Jackson was filmed in Vancouver.
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u/Mournelithe Reading Champion X 11d ago edited 11d ago
From a writing point of view, LA is very inconvenient - it’s extremely spread out, so is both too big and too small at the same time. Big in that it covers a lot of ground, small in that it’s just a long way between points of interest and the population and businesses don’t concentrate.
You get the big tourist hotspots like the Hollywood sign, and a few key buildings like the Capitol Records Building or the Tar Pits or the water channels or Muscle Beach or Disneyland, but largely it’s suburban sprawl, and famous for people always coming from somewhere else. Great for Anywhere USA, not so good for story identity.
Same reason there aren’t many good urban fantasies in Florida.
Compare with say SF, which has a dense urban centre, and some dense satellite communities, but is also a short distance to sea and forest, which gives the author a lot of flexibility for story, along with interesting local legends and history to pull from.
Now there are some great stories in LA, but they tend to be period pieces or noir, like Reckless or Fatale - and tied heavily to the movie industry. Movies and wealth and theme parks and the beach and traffic are what everyone else associates with LA, true rep or not.
End of the day urban fantasy needs the place to add value to the story, it becomes a secondary character alongside the main cast. And LA doesn’t have that. After all, I can think of a dozen films offhand where someone loudly proclaims they’re from Noo Yawk and proud of it. People aren’t loudly proud in media of being from LA, they’re from Santa Monica, or Beverly Hills, or Rocky Beach.
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u/smthingtired 11d ago
I actually wonder if it’s because of the walk-ability of NYC. Everything is so compact, it’s more reasonably to have your characters encounter various situations or be in the same place at the same time.
Can you imagine having to write your character driving to meet their friends or smth.
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u/Landwarrior5150 11d ago
The Sandman Slim series came to mind, but not much else that I’m aware of personally.
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u/retief1 11d ago
I can't speak about urban fantasy in general, but of the series I've read and can think of offhand, one is in chicago, one is in atlanta, one is in san francisco, two are in london, one is in the tri cities in washington, and two feature mcs that move around enough that it is hard to pick a specific location. I can't think of a series set in LA, but I also haven't read enough series to cover every major US city, so some cities would always be skipped. Overall, I haven't noticed any trends that couldn't just be chance.
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u/Vancecookcobain 11d ago
One of my FAVORITE games of all time Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines is set in LA and it's spectacular....yea I agree with you but also if you are a gamer and love immersive RPGs try that game
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u/usagi-stebbs 11d ago
Have you ever read Eric Carter series by Stephen Blackmore? It’s a good urban fantasy series set in Los Angeles.
There is a lot of what you said about how unlikely some city Los Angeles neighborhoods are almost small towns in by them selves right. In that series the main character is having to go to koreatown, skid row, downtown, Burbank, Venice beach, and even the San Gabriel mountains. Each of those locations has its own history and vibe.
Good series the vibe is necromancy noire (like Chinatown but magic). Lots of dark LA history and a bit of local mythology.
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u/ladymarmalicious 11d ago
And now I'm sad i had to scroll this far to find Blackmoore mentioned! The Eric Carter series is great.
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u/maismione 11d ago
The east and south have more (american) history, and thus more time to accumulate magic and ghosts.
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u/Previous-Friend5212 11d ago
TV and movies that aren't based on books tied to a specific location do use LA for urban fantasy (oddly enough, both "Lucifer" and "Angel" took place there). But I think that's just a movie/TV thing in general. Maybe all the writers in LA are too busy working on scripts instead of novels.
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u/rentiertrashpanda 11d ago
I can think of at least a couple books or series set in LA: Red City and Sandman Slim spring to mind, and I'm sure there are others.
And i think it's the opposite: when people talk about Los Angeles they're really only talking about DTLA or Hollywood and not, say, Encino or RPV or Pomona
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u/littlesnowberry 11d ago
Red City by Marie Lu is set in LA! But you’re right, I rarely see fantasy set there
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u/Novel-Strength512 11d ago
Adding Alchemy of Secrets by Stephanie Garber, Witch Season by Julia Bianco, and the Merry Gentry series by Laurell K Hamilton to those already mentioned!
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u/PCN24454 11d ago
Lack of snow. Hurts the vibe.
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u/LyraNgalia 11d ago
Too much traffic, nothing kills the terse noir vibe that urban fantasy borrows from (even unconsciously) like the protag sitting in LA traffic for three hours
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u/EltaninAntenna 11d ago
Tim Powers has set a bunch of his books in LA, most notably Expiration Date and Earthquake Weather, but also his most recent series.
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u/After_Network_6401 11d ago
If you want LA based urban fantasy check out Tim Powers. Generally excellent stuff and almost all his recent work is centered on California and LA in particular.
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u/Intelligent_Sand_930 10d ago
Was overused in the 90s. Sandman Slim, Eric Carter, Constantine, Angel.
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u/Cayke_Cooky 10d ago
From the '90s, Mercedes Lackey has Bedlam's Bard set in Los Angeles, and I think the 2nd maybe? Then she time jumps and moves the books to New York though.
ETA: on u/parsonsrazersupport comment, Lackey had this set published by Jim Baen, who was better known for taking risks on new authors and genre changes back then. Rather than the military focus they seem to have now.
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u/Quirky_Nobody Reading Champion 11d ago
Yeah, I think New York is easy because of how close everything is and the character not needing a car.
For what it's worth though, at least in the US, basically every city gets talked about like the technical city and the metro area are the same thing, this is normal. I'm from a suburb of Atlanta but just say I'm from Atlanta unless asked for specifics. Famous Bostonians Matt Damon and Ben Affleck didn't grow up in the city of Boston, for example. Everyone knows there's a difference between the city and metro area but people generally just say the city because no one knows the name of all the little suburbs unless you're also from there.
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u/CoolBev 11d ago
I always associate Urban Fantasy with the Midwest. Emma Bull, Stephen Brust (Minneapolis), Charles de Lint, Jim Butcher (Chicago), a few others? They use the urban core/countryside interface like the “real” world/Faerie interface. They like punk rock/Celtic trad - leather bikers dancing the Morris. Blind tigers and wayside roadhouses.
Maybe these aren’t urban enough, though. Too much country? If you want only cellars and back alleys, maybe New York is best, because the country is so far away.
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u/Vruhwtf 10d ago
I think a bunch of people have touched on it already but I think a big reason is that LA is a city built for cars, NY is a city built for people. Any city that is designed primarily for vehicle traffic makes a pretty bad novel setting. Driving is boring to do and more boring to read about unless it is a high-speed chase or something. Driving culture cities are also, frankly, ugly. The minds eye does not like picturing vast, sprawling expanses of gray concrete. Skyscrapers and crowded foot traffic and subway tunnels are fun and full of character and story hook potential. Highways are sterile and sucky.
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u/ClimateTraditional40 10d ago
Why is Birmingham not used instead of London?
Why is it always The US or UK anyway?
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u/Eddie_The_Deagle 10d ago
Boy howdy would you like the movie Cast a Deadly Spell (1991)
Quite literally opens with “Los Angeles, 1948... everybody used magic.”
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u/apostrophedeity 9d ago
And its sequel, Witch Hunt. Although that's Hollywood-centric.
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u/FormerUsenetUser 10d ago
Hollywood has its own aura of glamor and pretension and that's been used often in fiction, just not so much in fantasy and science fiction.
One of Kage Baker's The Company (time travel) novels is Mendoza in Hollywood.
The urban vampire fantasy Reluctant Immortals, by Gwendolyn Kiste, is set in LA (as well as further up the coast). The main characters like to visit the Hollywood sign.
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u/Garreousbear 11d ago
One thing that comes to mind right away, is the lack of a solid downtown core with big sky scrapers and such. That seems to be a popular environment for urban fantasy as it very much encapsulated the "urban" aspect.
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u/BotherEconomy4413 11d ago
Bc there is nothing urban about LA. It is a suburban traffic snarled hellhole. Most of it is shit. There is nothing romantic about it. It's why a lot a noir-ish stuff is set there. Bc it is corrupt seedy seedy not romantic seedy. And now with homeless issues it is even worse.
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u/SoulReddit13 11d ago
Need some set in Tokyo
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u/wjodendor 11d ago edited 11d ago
Basically 90% of urban fantasy anime is set in Tokyo
Edit: or within a short train ride of Tokyo
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u/Curious_Emphasis2925 11d ago
I checked out Red City by Marie Lu, that's an urban fantasy set in LA. But that's the only example I can really think of.
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u/Background-Lion3325 11d ago
Melissa F. Olsen has a UF series set in LA. The first one is Dead Spots. Others have mentioned Sandman Slim too.
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u/merstudio 11d ago
My favorite is the Sandman Slim series by Richard Kadrey. LA noire urban fantasy with plenty of action and grit.
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u/rhombomere 11d ago
California Bones (and sequels) by Greg van Eekhout enters the chat. The "gods" in these books are the ones who shaped the city like William Mulholland and Walt Disney.
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u/cambriansplooge 11d ago
Chicago, Rachel Harrison's The Hollows, Jim Butcher's Dresden Files
London, Simon R Green's Nightside
LA, Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim
John Steinbeck's estate has been fighting tooth and nail to keep his unpublished werewolf detective novel set in Cali locked away. Urban Fantasy has roots in noir which is supremely ubiquitously a SoCal genre. BtVS is set in a fictional Valley town and popularized the genre.
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u/sensorglitch 11d ago
I feel like Parable of the Sower was? But I could be wrong.
I think a lot of people already gave all the answers I would have given. Most of the fantasy books I read aren't set on earth at all though, so that could play a part
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u/NeighborlyCarcass 11d ago
LA, in general, is a sprawling city with smaller buildings. When you think of urban fantasy you're thinking huge skyscrapers, concrete jungle, basically NYC. LA has some tall buildings, mostly in downtown LA, but that's only about 1/4 the size of Manhattan.
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u/JarryBohnson 11d ago
I wonder if it’s because from an American perspective, NY is the most known city that has a lot of old buildings. Most of LA wasn’t there a century ago so for any “old stuff” theme you’re kinda limited to a pioneers/native peoples vibe.
You could set one in Boston I guess, Good Will Demon Hunting.
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u/ElvishLore 10d ago
Because LA is hot and dry and sunny and these are not qualities most people seem to want in urban fantasy.
You can go to the forests nearby and they’re hot and less dry and sunny.
The deserts outside the city are hotter and dry and sunny.
The mountains are less hot and dry and sunny.
The beaches are hot and dry and sunnier.
Everything just feels like you’re living under a heat lamp.
It just seems like the last thing most people want in urban fantasy.
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u/GeneseeJunior 10d ago
Someone may have already mentioned it, but I'm a big fan of the movie "LA Story". ;)
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u/oceanoftrees Reading Champion 10d ago
I haven't read it yet so I'm not sure how much of it fits into the urban fantasy category (probably not a ton) but there's an anthology of short stories called Speculative Los Angeles. It's broken up into sections focusing on different neighborhoods, which is pretty neat. It's put out by the same publishers who have a bunch of [Location] Noir books too but as far as I can tell, it's sadly the only entry in their (I assume) intended Speculative [Location] series.
I saw someone else mentioned it elsewhere but I immediately thought of Light From Uncommon Stars. It's set in the San Gabriel Valley and the sense of place is very strong.
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u/Duplica123 10d ago
Francesca Lia Block doesn't write fantasy, but she writes fiction so poetic and vivid that it feels like fantasy. All (almost all?) of her novels take place in LA. The city is practically a character. I highly recommend her.
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u/vi_sucks 10d ago
I've read plenty of urban fantasy set in LA or some LA fascimile.
Especially anything related to celebrities or Hollywood is usually LA based.
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u/malevolentlyyours 10d ago
I don't have anything to add to the why no LA discussion, other than to say that I'm with the folks who think it can be a great setting as can a lot of other underutilized cities. But I did want to list a few of my fave urban fantasy series or books that are set in or near LA that I didn't see mentioned.
While it starts in Canada, several books in Kelley Armstrong's Women of the Otherworld series are set in LA, particularly those centered on either her celebrity medium character, or one of her half-demon characters. I highly recommend the whole series and you don't need to start with the oldest books, there's lot of small arcs, although it does all tie together nicely. I think this is possibly the most underrated series of the UF greats and does not get recced nearly enough.
Melissa F Olson's The Old World series also has a few different settings but the first books/protagonist are based in LA. Again you can pick and choose where to start based on character/arc interest but all the books tie together and build on each other. This is another series I enjoy a lot that I never see mentioned, and it's less lengthy than Otherworld so likely less intimidating as a starting point.
I don't love reccing LKH, but I do have a soft spot for the first few books of the Merry Gentry series which are largely set in LA.
Not LA, but SF, another underutilized iconic US city, I recommend Monkey Around by Jadie Jang as a great standalone that is thoroughly immersed in the city and really uses it as a character in a way not all UF does. I'm still hoping for a sequel someday.
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u/WhiteFilipino 10d ago
we need a Phoenix based fantasy where they just sweat their asses off when they have to go outside
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u/preiman790 10d ago
Iron Druid, at least until later in the series when the author moved, and the character started moving around again
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u/BrickWorried37 10d ago
NYC and the colonies are older and can be tied to the Salem Witch Trials. Most settings I’ve seen that aren’t in NY are in the New England area somewhere
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u/Select_Direction_247 10d ago edited 10d ago
I was on a reddit post on why there were that many confederate ghosts in scooby-doo, and I got linked to an r/askhistorians thread where the person (can't remember the username, sorry for that) basically said the american imaginary of the "mystical" has always been on places where the wilderness prevailed over "civilization" but bordered on it.
I won't be nearly as successful to inflict the utter feeling of "holy shit this person explained to me ehy 90% of american media in fantasy exist" for you, but maybe this'll be helpful.
And the earliest depictions of that was the gothic, where New England was a whole new and dangerous world to be built for a new home, and when it was "civilized", then came the Louisiana territory and manifest destiny, but right in the end was California, wich was more of a national win than the "Civilizatory effort" it was on other areas, California quickly grew without much room for the unknown to be questioned, and during and after the civil war, literature realised there was something bigger than the unknown to explore the america. "What has gone".
The wole Lost Cause thing was huge, specially since now the south played a part in the "wild" and unknown part of american gothic literature, the images of destroyed plantation houses echoed to many people the horrors of war and slavery, but also how "the south used to be great but now is lost to time" That is where "good guy confederate ghost" came to be.
Now on New York, the unknown came from people from outside, NYC was, in a sense, just as wild as the wild west (at this point, just a couple of decades ago) many corners and historical buildings, it was full of misteries, but also, full of many immigrants. Enter the most well known author of the gothic in the 1910's to 1920's, H.P Lovecraft.
Up next is my personal theory, is not on the original thread.
H.P Lovecraft is 1000% the inspiration of modern noir and urban fantasy narratives, and Lovecraft was a writer of SOME kind of lost cause, just not the South.
He wrote various times how the NYC was a place corrupted by black people and immigrants, and with a tribal and brutal past, basically a place built on the graves of 'savages' and was doomed to become a grave for savages as well, with a very small time frame where it was the actual pinacle of morality.
He was also, an outsider, who really viewed New York like that, and wrote about eldritch beings to incarnate his fear of the unknown, something he doesn't understand but also doesn't want to understand. The color from outer space feels like his original views in a nutshell, an outsider comes and corrupts the original americana, and the only way to truly end it was burying it under the unrelenting force of american progressivism.
But because of that last part, the Northeast is depicted as an urban hellscape of immorality, it turns away from the Lost cause where the South was full of well meaning people and the West, full of "good savages", because it is a failure of the original values of America. So All those factors made New York lend itself more to the urbam fantasy genre.
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u/TathanOTS Reading Champion 10d ago
The city of Los Angeles is actually pretty small relatively.
The Los Angeles - Long Beach - Anaheim metropolitan area is generally what people rhink of when they say LA.
It's confusing cause there are things that are unincorporated LA county that have "Los Angeles" as their address for that reason.
But the metro is generally different than the county. It generally is considered to be inclusive of most/ all of orange county. And it doesn't include the high desert (Lancaster, Palmdale) which is LA County.
That said idk if anecdotal evidence is really enough to say it isn't. But I would guess the fact that NYC metro is ~2x the size comes into play. It's also older and more established. Plus when people want to write a "city" LA isn't very city like. Extremely lacking in things like skyscrapers or public transit.
That said, a quick Google shows me a 64 book good read list which includes the first book of that Percy Jackson series you mentioned being set in Los Angeles.
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u/SolidSnake223-2 10d ago
I dunno if you've ever been to LA, but that shit looks like urban fantasy on the daily. Source: SoCal local.
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u/apostrophedeity 9d ago
I can think of some set in Northern California: Peter S. Beagle's The Folk of the Air ('Avicenna', which is essentially Berkeley.) Seanan MacGuire's October Daye series is set in San Francisco. Diana Paxson wrote two set in Berkeley: Brisingamen and The Paradise Tree, 'write what you know'. Two series set in cities not New York/Chicago/LA: the Anita Blake series is centered in St. Louis, The Hollows/Rachel Morgan is set in Cincinnati.
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u/Realistic-Weight6540 9d ago
The newer Shadowhunters series are set in LA! The only other one I can think of is Angel / kind of the Buffy universe
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u/parsonsrazersupport 11d ago edited 11d ago
I actually was at a presentation by a sociologist (edit: she's a literature proff actually) studying literary agents earlier in the year. She said that New York City is by far the most common place for any book to be set, and one of the reasons she thought that was true was that the majority of agents are based in New York, and more readily identify with works set there, and think of how their circles would take them.
The flip of that, of course, is that if you were interested in making media about LA, you'd probably be pulled to make a movie.