Aldarion, your the first person Ive ever come across who mentioned jeffrey ford.

What a brilliant writer. The fact this guy isnt in books stores is practically a crime.

The fantasy writers assistant is a phenomenal book, containing many excellent stories.

William Browning Spencer is semi-hard to find but worth the effort. All but his first book would be urban fantasy.

James P Blaylock is great as well. His best book is The Last Coin. His good friend Tim Powers is also great. The two of them created a character that they both use...and they wrote a cookbook in his name.

Graham Joyce is good. I like Requiem, Indigo and Dreamside.

My favorite Jonathan Caroll is Kissing the Beehive, arguably his least fantastic work.

Jonathan Lethem is a favorite as well. My favorite of his works is As She Climbed Across the Table but all are good.

Hmmm...

Jonathan Carroll's "Sleeping in Flame" is very good, as is everything he's written. White Apples is another more recent book by him.

For dark fantasy in a semi-modern setting ( at least in part set in the 60's and 70's), with ancient mythological themes, Elizabeth Hand has two good books I know of, Waking the Moon and Blacklight.

I don't care for Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls, which is the only book of hers I've read. Her take on vampires wasn't particularly original and I was dissappointed.

The Art of Michael L. Peters
http://mlpeters.com

quote:

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Originally posted by Michael L. Peters:
For dark fantasy in a semi-modern setting ( at least in part set in the 60's and 70's), with ancient mythological themes, Elizabeth Hand has two good books I know of, Waking the Moon and Blacklight.

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Oooh, I like you. I've been trying to get these folks to read Elizabeth Hand for YEARS and no one seems to listen to me. *sigh*

*looks at everyone else*

SEEEEE??????? Other people like her!!!

tossing in RPGs again, i've started playing Mage: The Ascension. I guess all the White Wolf books and their attendent novels, comics, and short-lived TV shows (Kindred: The Embrace. directed by Tori Spelling) would count as urban fantasy. You've got werewolves and vampires and mages... and its all fully integrated. The genius is that the character concepts are based on the sort of people who would play these things... so a valid concept for a shamnistic mage is "DJ" or "raver".

Some of it is silly, some of it is good, and the faeries are limited to a really Gaimanish game (Changeling: The Dreaming) that isn't really as popular as the others

Updating an old thread. Ditto to China Mieville, KJ Bishop, Tim Powers, Sergey Lukyanenko, great stuff. John Crowley's Little, Big is by itself a daunting masterpiece. Add Jeff VanderMeer's City of Saints and Madmen, and no one's cited M. John Harrison's Viriconium sequence yet.

I want to say Neuromancer, the summa neologia, bildungsroman for the Brave New World, but it's not really fantasy. Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities? Doesn't use faerie. Michael de Larrabeiti's Borribles trilogy is a good YA urban fantasy.

If you're looking for vampires, I would recommend
Charlie Huston: Already Dead, No Dominion and Half the Blood of Brooklyn.
They are good, short, bloody and dark.