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There is a saying that if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it must be a duck. Which is very embarassing if you're the parent of a small child with a plastic duck bill squeaker. If the child in question were a book, he'd be relegated to the "duck" shelves in short order and nothing his mother could say would get him moved back to homo sapiens.
Which is why half the bookstores I've walked into shelve Urban Fantasies in Horror. This really surprised--and I admit--offended me at first. I don't write horror! 'Deed I don't. (See Kat; see Kat get huffy and parochial.) It's not that I think horror is beneath me, but that I think of it as "that other stuff." Then I stopped to wonder "what is horror all about?" and could I be totally wrong about it?
So I started asking and thinking. Why was I considered a horror writer by some people? Was it the vampires, the ghosts, the death and dismemeberment? Well, in some cases, yes. To some folks, the presence of a vampire is all it takes to slot a book neatly into horror. That's kind of sad for some of the vampires, the St. Germaines and Henry Fitzroys who are basically nice guys. But it's not just vampires that will put a book into the horror department.
It's monsters of any kind that will get you shelved next to Lovecraft, King, and Koontz. From kit-built reanimation specialties to Elder Gods who wake from the oceanic depths, if you've got a monster you've got horror. But stop and consider: the best horror is not about monsters. The Cthuluan tentacle beast is not just the numinous thing of ancient evil; it's the Id. It's us. It is the deepest atavistic drives of humans rising from our own slumbering ocean of mind. That's what horror is: holding up the mirror to ourselves, to society, to Humanity, to our own hubris and cruelty. It comes dressed as Freddy Krueger and It. It comes as a chill touch on the back of the neck and breeze in a closed room. It comes as that uncanny Thing in the mirror.
The best of horror fiction turns the eye inward, to examine the worst in ourselves, to chide us with the thought that we're our own worst nightmare. And often we cannot save ourselves. So perhaps all good writing is horror since it strives to hold up that mirror--perhaps not with such bleak hopelessness, but with the same intent that we should recognize the Thing in the mirror. It is us.
But Urban Fantasy is not quite so bleak. So long as it keeps Pandora's box beside the mirror of the Human soul--the box that was empty of all... save Hope. To me that is the thing that keeps Urban Fantasy from being outright horror: it has a kernel hope, even when things are bleak and the demons are winning, even when the evil within rises like black tides. When Dante Valentine can love her demon half, when Harry Dresden can overcome the blackness in his past, there is hope for the rest of us that our own blackness will not eat us alive.
And perhaps small children with duck bills aren't really ducks at all.
Kat Richardson, 
Poltergeist, 
Harper Blaine, 
Greywalker, 
detective, 
supernatural, 
murder, 
Penguin Books, 
books 
Getting the bookstore treatment...
I had no idea our local BaM carried romantica until a friend online mentioned that she saw it shelved in the general fiction section at her own store. Sure enough, the next time I went in, I easily found a four shelf section of romantica books set up in the general fiction section.
It's pretty much the same thing when searching for urban fantasy. You have to know where to look for it.
I don't know why they shelve it in with horror. I fear that if urban fantasy had more of an element of romance in it, they'd shelve it in with the general fiction section and it would be lost there with the rest. Instead, when it lands on the horror shelves, I think that's probably the bookstore's way of doing their part to keep it out of no man's land.
Where they do choose to shelve it leads me to believe most bookstores don't quite know what to do with urban fantasy at this point. I could almost understand the confusion, in some circles the elements of what makes up an urban fantasy are still up for debate. However, the indicia on the spine of most urban fantasies I've seen clearly states "Fantasy".
I can only guess that bookstores are looking at this genre as still in its infancy and are dropping it wherever they can fit it, nevermind that what they're doing is a great disservice to their customers.
Hunting down our favorites...
I'm not surprised that you find your books in horror. When I stop by any bookstore with my list, I know that I'll need more than an hour to gather them. Every store seems to have their own little method of shelving and I sometimes wonder if they're trying to lead us on the 'grand tour' of their fiction section. The stranger thing is that the more books you have in your series the more likely it is to find that they've been split up.
Urban Fantasy is usually softer than horror.....there's a romance or something 'good' to come out of whatever conflict fuels the story. :)
It's entirely up to the
It's entirely up to the store, too. Even though the publisher puts a genre on the spine most of the time, the store shelves it where they think their customers are most likely to expect it to be. Which could be... anywhere!
I do agree that even when they are pretty bleak--like Charlie Huston's Joe Pike books--there is some positive thing offered in exchange for the trials and nastiness the hero goes through in UF. I hope.
Too true...
I forgot all about the fact that the publisher actually puts it right on the spine. Readers are a pretty determined lot when it comes to filling their wish list, so unless the store is sold out we'll track it down....eventually. :)
As much as I enjoy horror, I love urban fantasy for exactly the reason you've stated....we get some positive thing offered in exchange for what the hero has gone through. (a lot more characters are alive at the end of the book too)