Urban Fantasy Anansi Boys

The topic of our seventh week of reading was the urban fantasy. The urban fantasy is the category where a lot of post-Tolkien era works fall into. These are not the easily repetitive epics set in Middle-Earth-like worlds, with wizards, archers, and sorcerers. With influences that seem to come from myths and legends handed down orally through generations in cultures such as Latin America, these are stories that merge every day situations with fantastic characters and plot lines.

A good cinematographic example of the urban fantasy is the film Pan’s Labyrinth. Set in the time of Spain’s civil war, the story explores the life of a little girl who’s the stepdaughter of a malevolent anti-rebel general. Through out the story she comes into contact with a magical, yet mysterious, beast called Pan who has her go about certain tasks in order to prove her worthiness of being a princess back in his mystical realm. At the same time she carries her tasks out, she also has to deal with the ongoing wartime situations at the base camp she lives in. In this week’s reading Anansi Boys, we see a good model of an urban fantasy. The novel tells the story of a modern day English accountant called Charlie who discovers that his recently deceased father Mr. Nancy was actually not human at all, but the incarnation of a West African spider-god spirit called Anansi. After he finds out about this, Charlie also learns that he has a brother he never knew about. He eventually meets this brother of his called Spider, a very mischievous character, who had inherited the mystical powers of their father. Charlie soon regrets bringing Spider into his world and they go about dealing with different conflicts through out the novel. It was very interesting to see how the author Neil Gaiman brought together the two worlds of both our everyday cities and the deep mythical plane from where Anansi and other god spirits like the Tiger and Bird came from.

Out of all genres of fantasy, the urban fantasy is the one that I believe makes a deeper connection with the audience. Yes, middle-earth is cool, and space or extra-terrestrial worlds are amazing, but what we live and experience everyday is our Earth. So whenever an author successfully creates a story that incorporates both realms, it makes a much stronger connection with the reader.