The best books that offer a fresh new take on urban fantasy

A Discovery of Witches swept me off my feet as a reader! Harkness’s prose is gorgeous, and as an avid highlighter of my favorite lines, my physical copies of her books are dripping with ink! It’s a love story between a reluctant witch and a vampire, but so much more than that with a strong influence of science, along with a mysterious lost book. The characters are complex and rich—even the side characters! This isn’t your YA, teeny-bobber urban fantasy; it’s grown up, smart, sophisticated, and completely addicting. 

Once you devour the rest of the All Souls series, check out the TV series based on the books! The casting is perfection and it is one of the few examples where the film/TV version did the books justice.

This book inspired me to write my own novel because of one thing: the main character is a woman and there is no romance in this story. Before reading The Rook, I thought writing a book with a female lead always had to center around a romance (even though there is romance in my novel as a subplot). The Rook proved all of that wrong. It’s about a woman who works at a supernatural secretive government agency who has her memory stolen. She has to find the culprit while masquerading as herself, or face deadly consequences. The Rook is an edge-of-your-seat thriller and oddly enough is also really funny. It’s a strange mix of juxtapositions, but somehow they all work in making a great read. 

This book made me want to throw it across the room many times, and I couldn’t recommend it more. It’s about a dangerous virus that escapes and quickly infects most of the world, turning the majority of the population into vampires. But not the cuddly, repenting type—the mindless, zombie-esque type. What gives this book edge is that it’s an epic urban fantasy, spanning thousands of years, and offers interesting insight into how language and religion develop within human culture that blew my freaking mind. 

My teen years were spent in the early 2000s, so Anne Rice was the OG to me for urban fantasy. Tale of the Body Thief is my favorite story of hers. Like my novel and current city, it also takes place in DC (Georgetown!) and I love retracing Lestat’s footsteps through the novel as he visited notable places like Martin’s Tavern. The plot focuses on Lestat body-switching with a human who ends up stealing the vampire’s body. If you’ve seen Interview With the Vampire, you don’t really need to have read the other books in the series to read this one. For me, I love that it’s a fun literary ride with familiar characters and setting. 

Just when everyone thought urban fantasy was dead, here comes The Atlas Six! What really makes this story interesting is the world building. There is not a lot of backstory on the world it is set in, but bits and pieces throughout the book give you context clues. There are people with magic and abilities, shifters, and petty-thief criminal mermaids. Similar to A Discovery of Witches, science is a strong theme, but in this story, the science is less genetics and more physics-based. As a reader, it made me wonder if there really is an intersection between space, time, and magic. The twist at the end turns the whole story on its head, making me want to grab the sequel immediately!