Is Our Writers Learning? The Shambling Guide to New York City

Once again I take a look at a new genre book to see what I can learn. This month, Mur Lafferty’s urban, The Shambling Guide to New York City (cover art by James McKelvie, all rights with current holder).
The story: After a workplace affair with a married man goes very, very wrong, Zoe Norris, a travel-book author, pulls up roots in Raleigh and relocates to NYC (Lafferty is a Raleigh resident). She badgers a publisher into letting him work on his new travel book series, then learns it’s a Big Apple guide to “the coterie,” the supernatural world. Her coworkers include a vampire, a water spirit, a zombie, a death goddess and an incubus.
That’s a lot to handle even before things start falling apart. Someone hides the zombie brains, driving them crazy. A mystery villain has it in for Zoe. Her handsome neighbor works for the people who hunt down monsters when they go bad. And when her enemy finally shows up, things get big and messy.
What I learned:
•Urban fantasy is more flexible than I thought (as I don’t write urban fantasy that’s not much help specifically, but I hope it applies to whatever subgenres my stuff does fall into). Pretty much every book I’ve read or glimpsed (it’s a much bigger genre than my reading, so I apologize if I’m slighting it), the hero is either a monster or a monster slayer. Zoe’s neither. She’s an honest-to-God normal person who just stumbles into all this. That’s more interesting to me.
Likewise, most urban fantasy is first-person. One of the things that turns me off to the genre (YMMV) is that the narrative voice always sounds the same: tough, cynical, snarky, with soft moments mixed in. As Lafferty’s writing in third-person, it doesn’t have the voice, which helps.
•Coincidence is not your friend. It turns out the bad guy is someone with a mad on for Zoe who by sheer coincidence also has a Big and Evil Plan targeting New York. I can buy Zoe stumbling into the plan and making herself a target, but having someone from her past just happen to be the villain? As presented here, there wasn’t enough set-up for me to buy that.
•All weird creatures are not alike. I kept wondering why gods were hanging out with elves and vampires, who I think of as a much lower level of supernatural.Is it because they have no worshippers left? Or they’re the “supernatural beings some people worshipped as deities” kind of god?
•If someone’s job is important, write about it. Zoe stumbles into the coterie world because she’s a capable editor, but despite all the staff meetings and discussion of deadlines, she never seems to do much editing (some staff interviews, that’s it). There’s a point where everyone agrees her plan for the travel guide is brilliant, but we don’t learn what the travel guide is.
That may leap out at me because as a writer, I’m naturally alert to how people write about writing. But as a general rule, if the job plays a role in the story, fobbing us off with “wow she was good!” doesn’t always work.
•A premise can only stretch so far before it breaks. At the climax we have giant monsters smashing their way through the airport, then roaming across the city. The next morning’s response? Wow, wasn’t that a big earthquake we had last night?
I will accept a certain amount of “People won’t believe what’s in front of their eyes,” but not this much. People might not jump to the existence of the coterie, but they’d be aware something strange had happened. I can understand Lafferty not wanting to shake things up too much, but this wasn’t even remotely plausible. While the other things I disliked were minor, this one ain’t.
That said, I did enjoy the book and I look forward to reading the sequel. But I’m glad I got the book from the library instead of buying a copy.