When Urban Fantasy Isn’t So Urban

Urban fantasy vs. contemporary fantasy: what happens when your “urban” story takes place in a small town? Join me as I unpack the maze of fantasy subgenres and share lessons learned from past books.

I’ve been working on a new book — which is awesome, because it’s been a while since inspiration really hit. I started out calling it a dark urban fantasy. But as the story has evolved, I’ve realized the “urban” part only shows up in the opening. Most of the action takes place in a small town about an hour north of the city. Moving everything back into the city would strip away settings that matter to me, so it doesn’t feel very urban anymore.

This isn’t the first time I’ve wrestled with how to categorize what I’m writing. When I wrote Stone Heart, there was a romantic relationship in the story that make people jump to the “romance classification.” But it also included infidelity, poor decisions, and plenty of things that didn’t fit the traditional happily-ever-after formula.

I ended up calling it women’s fiction — and learned the hard way that even with that classification, when some readers expected a conventional romance and were disappointed, they let me know through some poor reviews. Not my intent, but it taught me how important genre expectations can be.

That’s why I want to get the classification right this time. When I started researching, I realized just how many subgenres exist within fantasy. Depending on how you count, there are anywhere from 20 broad categories (like high fantasy or urban fantasy) to 80+ niche subgenres (think silkpunk or anthropomorphic fantasy).

And new ones keep popping up as writers fuse styles. Grimdark or hopepunk, anyone? (For those wondering: grimdark is a darker take on epic fantasy, while hopepunk leans into optimism and resistance.) And I’m not even touching romantasy here — that’s a whole different conversation and one of the hottest subgenres right now.

With all these choices, writers can find themselves in quite a pickle when it comes to marketing their books. So let me use my current work-in-progress as an example. The working title is The Cardinal Witch — though that may change. At first, I thought it would be an urban fantasy set in an alternate Boston. But as I wrote, the city shifted into something else, and at least half the story now unfolds in a smaller town, with occasional forays back to the city.

If I market this as straight-up urban fantasy, fans of that genre might be disappointed. Urban fantasy usually has:

• A city or urban environment (often recognizable, like Boston) where magic is hidden or layered

• Grit and modern infrastructure shaping the story

• Tension from the collision of ordinary and supernatural

My book doesn’t quite fit that mold. Instead, it leans toward contemporary fantasy, where readers expect modern settings — towns, suburbs, rural areas — where magic is openly part of life. And in my case, the story isn’t about magic intruding into our reality; it’s a modern world that is inherently magical. That nudges it into what some agents and editors might call “secondary-world contemporary fantasy.” (Quite a mouthful, isn’t it?)

So maybe The Cardinal Witch isn’t urban fantasy after all. Maybe it’s contemporary fantasy with a twist. Whatever label it ends up wearing, I’m curious: do you care about subgenre labels as a reader, or do you just want a good story?