The Importance of Place

"If it's the same story wherever it happens to be set, it isn't Urban Fantasy." -John Clute in an interesting rant about how real cities are key to Urban Fantasy.

A locally set story I have to check out.  I have liked the Disch I've read a lot, but have been slow to delve deeply, not really sure why.  This sounds cool: "Thomas M. Disch's "The White Man" (2004) desolately supplements his Minnesota Quartet sequence, conceiving in true fantastika fashion (that is, with the deadpan literalness central to the twentieth century's finest fiction about the twentieth century) of whites as the true vampires who have desiccated Minneapolis."

And he mentions a Richard Bowes story I have not read, yay.  I am always on the lookout.  He writes the NY and east coast I remember, grungy, wrung out by poverty and drugs but dotted with little miracles here and there, and oh so queer.

Speaking of which, I need to remember to check MN poet James Wright's massive posthumous anthology out next time I go to the library.  He had crazy range.  Bone-chilling, brilliant, devastating.  And mainly in iambic pentameter, IIRC.