McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Epic Fantasy - Contemporary Earth Setting?

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SlimMason:
How might an Epic Fantasy play out, if the great quest was set in the streets of New York, or any other city?

Do you know of any books that really capture the grand scale of Epic Fantasy, but in the real world?

If not, what would you expect from a novel claiming to be this kind of book?

LizW65:
Depends...how epic do you consider the Dresden Files, for instance? :)
Harry Potter is set nominally in the present day real world and could qualify as a fairly epic fantasy; the first 5 seasons of Supernatural are a TV example.  Buffy might be one as well. (I never saw it, though, so I can't comment.)

SlimMason:
Something BIG. Something that uses dozens of specific, real world places. Like having an adventure akin to Lord of the Rings, but instead of going to Mordor you have a bank, a library, an art museum. Earth is the strange world you must navigate to complete your quest.

Imagine a Banker, a Concierge, a Curator, and the Mayor are all fighting over a magic ring. Your job is to take the ring to the city dump to throw it away... FOREVER!

I have a few UF story seeds that arn't ready to sprout yet. I'm looking for different things to experiment with.

the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
George R.R. Martin's The Armageddon Rag, which I seem to be quoting a lot today, seems close to the sort of thing you are asking for; it is about a journalist in the early 80s catching up with the members of a fictional supergroup (who are about two-thirds Zeppelin and one-third The Doors) that broke up spectacularly in the early 1970s, and also the friends he hasn't seen in the decade since; the fantasy component appears slowly and grows gradually, but it is world-threatening and genuinely terrifying by the end and I admire it immensely.

Paynesgrey:
Raiders of the Lost Ark comes to mind.  Granted, a movie, not a book.  But if you look at what it was derived from (King Solomon's Mines, Alan Quartermain, She, and the like, add a mystical component, and you'd have Epic Fantasy Potential.

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