The title comes from a Kipling quote which Fritz Leiber trimmed into the title of one of his short stories, A Bit of the Dark World. It sums up the concept of intrusion fantasies.
I’ve been thinking about intrusion fantasy because it’s probably the subgenre Southern Discomfort fits into, rather than urban fantasy. Urban fantasy is (typically) set in the “real world” but it’s not the world as we know it: magic is everywhere, whether it’s happening off the radar (as in the early Harry Dresden books) or it’s common knowledge (the Sookie Stackhouse books were the existence of vampires is common knowledge). In an intrusion fantasy (it’s sometimes equated to low fantasy but I don’t think they’re an exact match) the world of the story is our world but something uncanny has intruded on it. The accursed whistle and the thing it summons in Oh Whistle and I’ll Come To You My Lad.
The haunted mansion in The Legend of Hell House. The backstage ghost in my Backstage With the Hypothetical Dead (available in 19-Infinity).
Intrusion fantasy typically treats the supernatural as a one-off. By implication, if one ghost appears, there might be others. In Death is Like a Box of Chocolates, it’s clear the Greek myths are real; we’ve dealt with Pandora’s box, the Furies and Epimetheus and they confirm the Olympian gods were real too. Even so, the issue is how to deal with Pandora’s box unleashing chaos in a small Florida town, not with the implications that raises. Are there other myths floating around? Are other gods real? I don’t tell.
That’s pretty much the approach I took with Southern Discomfort. Olwen McAlister and her nemesis Gwalchmai are the last of elvenkind in the world. My protagonist Maria asks why, if she has second sight, she’s never seen magic anywhere else; Olwen replies that maybe there is no magic anywhere else. Olwen doesn’t know, nor does she care (elves are not curious). Perhaps there is, or was once, perhaps other remnants are out there in the world somewhere. My cast are focused on events in Pharisee and don’t really worry about the bigger picture. As I’m not planning a sequel, I assume Maria never does run into any magic anywhere else.
This shifts the story in a direction that may not be as marketable. Nobody I submitted to saw it as low/intrusion fantasy rather than urban fantasy that didn’t quite fit the genre. But it’s the story it needs to be, so I can live with that.
Illustration by James McBryde, cover by Kemp Ward. All rights remain with current holders.
