Hello. I’m Bob Pastorella, co-host of the This Is Horror podcast, website manager for This Is Horror, and writer. I’m the author of Mojo Rising, They’re Watching (with Michael David Wilson), and have numerous short-stories and non-fiction online and in print in various publications.
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Updates:
Work on Turn Up the Night is progressing nicely. The beginning was giving me fits, but I’m confident I’ve found where I need to begin the story. This is after flip-flopping POVs, starting over several times, and writing over 8,000 words. One thing that’s been helping me is doing everything I can to stay focused on Kevin’s (my main character) objective: finding his father. Without spoiling anything, Kevin’s father is missing. They’ve been estranged for nearly 35 years, but this time he’s really missing, and Kevin’s been roped into the mess by his father’s attorney. If Kevin’s father is dead and they recover his body, Kevin becomes the sole heir to his father’s estate, which is basically a smooth one million dollars after taxes and fees. Of course, things get in the way, but as long as Kevin stays focused, it gives him a reason to hunt for his father, and that’s enough to launch the story. What happens next is going to wreck Kevin in ways he’s never experienced, and in ways he may never survive.
And there are vampires.
Don’t Call it Folk Horror in the City
I’ve been threatening to write about Urban Wyrd for a while now. There will be a full-fledged article about it over at This Is Horror soonish, but for now, this will suffice as an introduction.
First, what Urban Wyrd isn’t. As the title suggests, it’s not Folk Horror in the city. It’s easy to see that connection, and there’s some definite overlap, but the differences between the two are larger and more significant. Folk Horror is a sub-genre of horror. It covers the occult and the cosmic and tends to be set in a rural area. There is an element of folklore involved in the narrative, and that lore, or belief in the lore, is where the horror element comes from. It doesn’t have to be supernatural. The mere belief that something supernatural can or has happened is often enough to scare the pants off anyone. Nature, isolation, the darkness of the night, or the woods behind your own backyard, can set the story off. Religion plays a large part in folk horror. It is a fiction of beliefs, and how we interact with those beliefs. Often the main character is a fish-out-of-water, someone unfamiliar with the old ways, someone who pushes against the strangeness of tradition and custom. Those characters are fun to write because they usually have the most to lose in those scenarios.
Urban Wyrd is not a genre. It is a mode, a larger category encompassing many schools of thought and philosophies. Modes group things together by intention rather than content. As the name suggests, it doesn’t have to be horror, and often it is not horror at all, but a weirdness, an eerie feeling of the uncanny that you can’t quite put your finger on. It’s not set in rural areas, it focuses on the urban landscape, and those in-between liminal spaces like overpasses and byways. Some of the components are hauntology, psychogeography, the occult, religion, architecture, technology, ufology, folklore, communications, and documentation, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
You won’t find much Urban Wyrd content by searching for it. A google search will get you almost nowhere, other than finding sites dedicated to exploring the subject of course, which I highly recommend checking out. I found out about Urban Wyrd reading a review about Netflix’s Archive 81 series. Before that, I knew nothing about it, but after reading the review, I had this “A-ha” moment that clicked a few things in place for me. If you’re looking for Urban Wyrd as a genre you’re not going to find a list of books to read on Goodreads. There are a few sites that list films that fall into the aesthetic, but there’s not any kind of definitive list or anything of that nature.
Urban Wyrd defies definition. Sure, there’s a long one you can find online if you dig deep enough and that sort of thing suits your needs. I’ve read it and find it covers the basics, but I also like to think that’s the point, that there is no clear-cut definition of the mode.
If it defies definition and there are no lists of what books to read, then where do you start?
Well, you check out the few websites dedicated to it and dig a little deeper. This is a vast subject that requires you to think about things differently. The Urban Wyrd mode covers so many different disciplines that you really have to look for the connections. Take hauntology for instance. The subject covers a lot of ground; music, 1970’s British television programs, nostalgia, Cold-War dread, especially misremembering these things in a way that experiencing them again years later causes feelings you can’t really explain. That’s just for starters, and that’s just one of the many things that fall into the Urban Wyrd mode. Study of one particular discipline will not result in a firmer grasp of Urban Wyrd. A better understanding comes when many of those schools of thought intersect in ways that feel strange, uncanny, even eerie.
Urban Wyrd is more a feeling, an atmosphere.
When you look at all the schools of thought that fall into the Urban Wyrd mode, patterns emerge, which make it easier to think that everything under the sun is a part of Urban Wyrd. People have a similar experience to Folk Horror, thinking if it deals with the occult and it’s in the woods, then that’s got to be it. The same thing happens with Giallo. I’m going to give you three things that definitely fall into Urban Wyrd, and why.
Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber. You want a book, start here. Why? Readers can literally take a tour of San Francisco based on Leiber’s descriptions. The story is heavily linked to the location, a spirit of place.
Ghost Watch. This British film took paranormal research and found footage into nightmare territory. It deals with investigating a modern haunted house. Totally fiction, it still pisses people off today, but it’s soooo good.
Archive 81. This Netflix series checks a lot of the boxes of Urban Wyrd without bogging you down into academia and is genuinely creepy to boot. Restoration of archival footage about a strange apartment building in New York is the connection.
A close contender is HBO’s True Detective, Season One. Close because much of the setting is actually rural, but also close because of the discovery of a videotape during the investigation with footage of occult activity.
Many people would believe any story that even reeks of found footage belongs in the Urban Wyrd camp, yet there are many found footage examples that just don’t fit into the Wyrd mode. I have to stress that stories that check a lot of the boxes may not actually fall within the Urban Wyrd wheelhouse. But then, this is also all up for interpretation, and without any clear-cut guidelines defining Urban Wyrd, you’re free to tie up as many loose connections as possible.
One thing I find interesting is there isn’t an Urban Wyrd genre. Sure, there are smatterings of horror and science-fiction, conspiracy theory, philosophy, and science, but perhaps the reason Urban Wyrd isn’t a genre is that it would borrow from too many other genres to become its own thing. As a genre, it’s too wide, too vast.
Two books that have helped me understand Urban Wyrd a little better are Folk Horror Revival: Urban Wyrd -1. Spirits of Time and Folk Horror Revival: Urban Wyrd -2. Spirits of Place. Both come from the Folk Horror Revival & Urban Wyrd Project and I highly recommend checking this out for more information. As mentioned above, I plan on diving into this subject a little more over at This Is Horror in the next few months, so stay tuned for further details.
Music: Impera GHOST, Live-Evil Miles Davis, Zero and Below Crowbar, Spontaneous Combustions Mos Generator.
Films: Nothing to report here, got a few on deck, just need the time to watch them.
TV: Still watching From. I finished Ozark (holy shit!). Started Yellowjackets … this is my jam.
Books: Providence by Caroline Kepnes (really good), Chasing the Boogeyman by Richard Chizmar, and Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber. Also listening to the audiobook of YOU by Caroline Kepnes. Still reading The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte (again). Straub’s Ghost Story (again and again forever and ever), King’s ‘Salem’s Lot and The Shining.
Next Issue: Who knows, might do a poll on twitter.
peace&love
Bob.