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Conjuring a magical Canada with Canadian Urban Fantasy
Canadian publisher Wolsak and Wynn has launched a new online magazine called House Style, which will feature fiction, poetry and essays with a Canadian slant. As publisher Noelle Allen says in her thoughtful piece “Why We’re Not Afraid to Be Provincial,” readers want more Canada.
Canada is beautiful and complicated, pieced together over the lands of many Indigenous nations who still struggle for autonomy today. Our history is breathtaking and bloody, not boring. Our people are fascinating and dynamic. Why wouldn’t we want to delve into these stories? Why wouldn’t we want to publish them? Why wouldn’t we try to share them across provincial lines? The life you live in Fredericton is very different from the life you live in Hamilton and not at all like your life in Calgary. The stories, poems, songs and art from each city are equally different and fascinating. Why don’t we know them as well as those stories streaming to us from the States?
I had the privilege of writing one of the first essays featured on House Style, “Conjuring a Magical Canada with Canadian Urban Fantasy.” I consider a number of Canadian urban fantasy books and try to get to the heart of how Canadian urban fantasy may be different from other works in the genre — and why we need Canadian urban fantasy at the moment.
I hope you’ll give the essay a read and then check out some of the writers mentioned in it. They include:
- Jes Battis
- Kristi Charish
- Andrew Kaufman
- Chadwick Ginther
- David Neil Lee
- JR McConvey
- Silvia Moreno-Garcia
- Corey Redekop
- Eden Robinson
- Andrew Sullivan
- Drew Hayden Taylor
- Richard Van Camp
- Katie Welch
- Thomas Wharton
- Robert J. Wiersema
The world needs urban fantasy now more than ever
The rise of fantasy fiction and particularly romantasy may have its roots in escapism from the absurdity of the real world, but what about urban fantasy? Is there still a place for it in our literary landscape? Or is the real world beyond redemption?
For those unfamiliar with urban fantasy, it’s a subgenre that typically uses the real world as a setting but infuses it with supernatural or magical elements. The inhabitants of the real world are usually oblivious to all things weird in their world but not always. My Cross series of supernatural thrillers, for instance, is urban fantasy.
The urban fantasy genre has been going strong since the 1980s or so and has proven to be highly adaptable to publishing trends, mixing it up with romance, mystery, horror and more.
But is it still a viable genre for the 21st century, where the elite do what they will with no repercussions, wars are endless Groundhog Day distractions, global orders are disintegrating, and AI threatens to leave everyone jobless if not turned into paperclips? Can literature even engage in any meaningful way with a world like this?
The data suggests so. Urban fantasy accounted for around 25% of sales in 2025, and an increase in late 2025 indicates that urban fantasy is increasing in popularity even more. Readers haven’t given up on our world yet.
I firmly believe that it is time for a resurgence of urban fantasy. The world is seriously lacking in wonder — and I don’t mean WTF wonder but magic. We need something that can transcend this miserable existence but also transform it, in the imagination if nowhere else.
Because the imagination is the ultimate reality, isn’t it? It’s how each of us perceives the world and shapes it — how we understand the world.
The magic of urban fantasy is something that ruptures reality, that plays by different rules or no rules at all. It rejects the logic of the world and promises freedom and change.
Urban fantasy is the re-enchantment of the mundane, the promise of a world that is more than bland and generic offices, algorithms and billionaires that exploit us at every turn, and lives with no future. In urban fantasy deeper meaning to our existence isn’t gone, it’s simply hidden and waiting for us to discover it.
The world needs urban fantasy now more than ever to show us what it can really be.
peter darbyshire 