Fantasy with Friends is a weekly meme hosted by the good people over at Pages Unbound. Fantasy with Friends poses questions each Monday about fantasy, either as a genre as a whole or individual works.
This week’s prompt is:
Do you have any favorite subgenres of fantasy such as urban fantasy, historical fantasy, etc.?
Well, I think cozy fantasy is becoming a real favorite—cozy/cozy adjacent books. There’s the pure escapism, the warmth of friendship, family, the nigh-obligatory romance (not always that heavy, so even gruff guys like myself can handle it).
Shining Examples: Miss Percy’s Pocket Guide to the Care and Feeding of British Dragons (etc.), Legends and Lattes (etc.), The Guard in the Garden, Cursed Cocktails (etc.); Mrs. Covington’s.
Are portal fantasies considered a sub-genre? If so, I’d say I have a real soft-spot for them, ever since I read what happened to Lucy, Edmund, and Eustace after they got sucked into that painting of a ship. I can’t say that I’ve read a lot of them—but they’re practically an automatic-like for me.
Examples that jump to mind: The Great Way series (it’s a portal fantasy involving two non-Earth realities, which adds to the cool-factor), The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles, The Guardians of Aandor series, The Blackwood Saga, the Nav’Aria series, and the Wayward Children series.
But really, when it comes to sub-genres, it’s all about Urban Fantasy for me. Those who spend too much time looking at the Fiction categories at the top of my page will note that I have 2 for Fantasy—Urban and everything else. I read some things as a child that I think qualify (don’t ask me what—I wish I could remember, I want to re-read them), but moved on to “regular Fantasy” because there wasn’t a lot of options. Then TV’s Buffy Summers came along and reminded me just how great the idea was. A few years later, I met Harry Dresden, and that was so much better than anything Buffy could do (no UPN/WB budget constraints)—and I discovered the genre had a name. Harry was quickly followed by Rachel Morgan and her crew, then Kitty Norville, and a few others I’ve largely forgotten. Soon after that I met Simon Canderous, Mercy Thompson, Toby Daye, Peter Grant and the Folly; the Iron Druid Chronicles, Alex Verus, The Twenty Palaces, InCryptid, The Spellmason Chronicles, Jane Yellowrock/Soulwood; Fred, the vampire Accountant; An Inheritance of Magic series, The Unorthodox Chronicles, The Chronos Chronicles, The Inner Circle…and so many others. One of my sons got me hooked on Skulduggery Pleasant, I should hasten to add—UF is a thing even in the Middle Grade world.
Why does it have an appeal? I think a lot of it comes from the way they ultimately become some sort of detective novel—which is my first love when it comes to storytelling in any format. Throw in magic and the other goodies that come along with fantasy, and I’m as happy as a well-fed ogre.
There was a time—shortly after Rachel, Ivy, and Jenks joined Harry, Murph, and Bob in my “I have to read more like this” list that UF is all I looked for—new-to-me Urban Fantasies—in bookstores and in my library. This led me to read a lot of things that I’d just as soon forget (and largely have)—but it also got me to read some things I really enjoyed, and wish I could remember. But it’s the series that really stuck with me—the way they all deal with the same ideas in very different ways. For example—the Dresden files has 3 types of werewolves, Kitty Norville has multiple lycanthrope species, Mercy Thompson/Alpha and Omega have just one—and they don’t match Dresden’s (but do come close to Kitty’s werewolves); the Iron Druid’s weres seem more like Kitty’s, but aren’t quite; The Cronos Chronicles‘ are along those lines—but significant differences remain. There’s also the way that they depict the non-supernatural world around them. Are some/all of the types of magical/fantasy types known to normies? How do they react/relate to them? Can electronics survive in the presence of a mage/wizard? And so on. Don’t even get me started on the variety of Fae represented by the above, or we could be here a long time. You can get that variety in Fantasy—you can’t come close in the muggle-world detective novels.
So there you go–my favotie subgenre is Urban Fantasy, but it has some competition. Especially if that Nobledark thing takes off.
I’m really looking forward to some of the <a href=”https://pagesunbound.wordpress.com/2026/04/20/my-favorite-fantasy-subgenres-fantasy-with-friends/” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener>other posts in response to this prompt–if only because I expect a good recommendation or six.
Do you have responses to this? (either for the comment section below or from your own post)
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