(no subject)

[skygiants]

You know that thing where no matter what hobby you have, you can write a cozy themed mystery novel series about it? Like, there's knitting-themed cozy mysteries and gardening-themed cozy mysteries and accounting-themed cozy mysteries and so on?

I don't think 'cozy themed series' is a thing for fantasy novels, because it's kind of been subsumed by urban fantasy which is a whole separate thing, but maybe it should be a thing? Actually I would kind of love if that was a thing. (ACCOUNTING-THEMED COZY FANTASY NOVELS BY THE DOZENS.) And if it was a thing, then Barbara Ashford's Spellcast and its sequel Spellcrossed would fall squarely into that subgenre.

So the basic premise is that Our Heroine Maggie goes on a road trip and accidentally gets sucked into a tiny community theater in a charming small town in Vermont, which is full of charmingly eccentric theatrical types and wacky theatrical hijinks, and also it turns out powered by the charming and angsty fairy director who uses his MAGICAL FAIRY POWERS to help all these charmingly eccentric characters put on successful musicals while coming to terms with their personal hangups and growing as people. The first book is about Maggie getting over her low self-esteem by performing as the clambake lady in "Carousel," and the second book is about Maggie getting over her parent issues by directing "Into the Woods." While falling in love with/sorting out relationship status with the charming and angsty fairy director, of course. They are basically the coziest damn things I've ever read.

And, like, OK:
- it's wish fulfillment up the wazoo
- there are all kinds of ethical problems with fairy magic cheerfully being used to futz with people's emotional states and ability to perform high-quality theater that are really very BARELY glancingly addressed
- don't go in looking for numinous because there's really very little numinous to be found
- also many of the charmingly eccentric theatrical types verge on stereotype (I cringed, for example, at the subplot about the gay actor playing Neville Craven who kept accidentally giving off incest vibes during his scenes with Archibald in "The Secret Garden") (although actually the loud and intimidating but good-hearted Chinese choreographer who SPEAKS IN ALLCAPS was my favorite and I would very happily read all about her romance with her mild-mannered Swiss-German stage manager husband)

So if you're likely to be irritated by those things, stay away, but I had massive amounts of fun. The books just kind of exude comfort -- at least if you are a person who loves musicals and loves cheesy fantasy novels, which, I mean, there's no denying I am the target audience. There is an X painted on my chest. HERE I AM.

But also I think I'm a bit cozy comfort fantasy-starved? Seriously, cozy theme fantasy can become a thing any time now.

Comments

[ceitfianna]

Ooh, this looks like it might be catnip for me as cozy mysteries are my favorite and I love fantasy about the Fae.

[skygiants]

Oh, yeah, I think you'd love it. All the cozy, none of the corpses.

[graycardinal]

Heh. I thought you'd like these....

And the two original books have just now been re-released in an incredibly fat combined edition (print only, evidently) entitled Spells at the Crossroads.

[skygiants]

Wow, that was fast! Although also slightly disconcerting to me because of another much-beloved fantasy series of my youth that I've had difficulty locating as an adult called the Crossroads series. Which is also kind of cozy themed fantasy-ish (fantasy about vets!) albeit a bit too disturbing to really be cozy....

[sovay]

another much-beloved fantasy series of my youth that I've had difficulty locating as an adult called the Crossroads series.

Nick O'Donohoe! The Magic and the Healing (1994), Under the Healing Sign (1995), The Healing of Crossroads (1996). I cannot tell for the life of me whether those would hold up if I re-read them, although the central conceit of a veterinary practice for mythological creatures is still gold. I remember liking the first two very much and the third not at all. I always wanted more about Morgan. She was such a weird quasi-Arthurian touch. (Doesn't she hail from a country that would have been the Waste Land if she hadn't murdered the Fisher King, or something?) To the best of my knowledge, the trilogy is dead out of print. If it turns out that my parents still own the copies I read in high school, I'll lend them to you. I can't promise anything, though—there have been several devastating book-losses since then.

[graycardinal]

Ah, yes, the Crossroads series by Nick O'Donohoe, well-described by sovay above. I remember those books fondly, too, though I think I agree that they don't *quite* meet the "cozy" standard. I unwisely winnowed those from my collection some years back, having badly underestimated the likelihood of finding them again at need.

OTOH, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the even more obscure O'Donohoe book I kept: Too Too Solid Flesh, which is a pure sci-fi whodunit featuring a production of Hamlet largely performed by robot actors. Very Asimovian, totally fascinating, and published by -- of all things -- TSR, the company behing the Dungeons & Dragons empire. Very, very odd, but also very, very good...and, of course, utterly out of print.

[sophia_sol]

I just realized I don't own a single book that could be called a cozy fantasy and that is a SAD LACK.

These books sound like fun and I shall be adding them to my to-read-someday list!

Out of curiosity, can you think of any other books that would fit into the cozy fantasy or cozy theme fantasy subgenre?

[skygiants]

RIGHT? I'm having real trouble! There's the vet-themed fantasy series I mentioned in a comment above (The Magic and the Healing is the first one -- it's about a bunch of vet students who go on rotational rounds to a magical fantasy land) but given that the heroine has a terminal disease and there's a lot of murder and emphasis on the fact that veterinary medicine can be tough and depressing I remember it as kind of too dark to be called cozy. I think there's also an fantasy series about a werewolf who hosts a radio talk show, but I haven't read it -- that's the one I was thinking of when I said urban fantasy got there first, though, because the cover definitely seem super urban fantasy even though the conceit could conceivably be cozy-theme-style. Maybe Mercedes Lackey's racecar elves series? But given the focus on ABUSED CHILDREN!!! in those books, I wouldn't exactly call that cozy either...

I don't know, if anyone else has thoughts, please chime in!

[rachelmanija]

There's Pamela Dean's The Dubious Hills. It's pastoral and has a cozy feeling and is largely about small domestic matters, though it's maybe too intellectual to quite fit. The premise is that all knowledge/understanding is split among individuals, so that only the person in charge of pain can feel pain or know when anyone else feels pain. And so forth.

Possibly inspired by that, Jo Walton's Lifelode. Also very domestic, with odd magic and polyamory.

Katherine Blake's The Interior Life. A housewife imagines adventures in fantasy land, which may or may not have an independent existence; they influence her life in positive ways. Absolutely lovely book.

[next_to_normal]

YOU HAD ME AT "INTO THE WOODS."

[skygiants]

Right? First book is "Brigadoon", a made-up musical and "Carousel", which is fine but none of which I know very well, and then for the second book they busted out "Secret Garden" and "Into the Woods" and I'm like YEAH OK LET'S DO THIS.

[hebethen]

How interesting! Most (adult) mysteries are murder mysteries, as far as I can tell, which one would not instinctively associate with an adjective like "cozy". Are Cozy Mysteries non-murderous, or do they simply alchemize?

Also, I bet cozy bibliophile mysteries are well-established, but if there's a cozy fandork/gaming/linguistics mystery novel series out there you gotta lmk, right?

[skygiants]

Alchemize! I think the trick is mostly to have the murder victims be generally unlikable and the unpleasantness drowned out by the comforting charm of everything else, a la Miss Marple or Murder She Wrote.

I've not yet come across a cozy gaming or linguistics mystery novel series, but I bet they both exist! Internet, this is your cue to provide, HINT.

[thistleingrey]

In the ones I've read, there are murders but they're passed off as "Oh, yeah, another murder without gory detail, but let me tell you all about the new stock I've laid in at my New Age crystals shop!" Passing over most of the mystery stuff makes me bounce, actually--no knitting or embroidery/cross-stitch cozy mysteries for me so far, though the idea seems appealing!

[jinian]

Cozy mysteries frequently are murder mysteries, it's just that the person murdered was never all that popular to start with and everyone else has generally happy/comedic times instead of angst and sordid affairs.

Donna Andrews' We'll Always Have Parrots takes place at a media con and I quite like it, if you'd like a rec from me. :)

[lacewood]

The closest thing I can think of to cozy fantasies are actually... cute fluffy Regency fantasies, and maybe some of the early children's fantasy books (eg. Mary Norton's The Borrowers is pretty cozy) But those are clearly set in an earlier era so it's not quite the same.

Maybe... DWJ...? (I mean, Archer's Goon is SORT OF cozy until the spaceship and time travel show up....? Black Maria was like, CREEPY COZY? IT'S A STRETCH BUT)

Sadly I can't think of any modern day versions. I think urban fantasies get a little too ~ALPHA MALE~ and THE FATE OF THE WORLD/UNIVERSE/ETC IN YOUR HANDS to have the cozy effect. Clearly this is a niche people should get into, RIGHT NOW.

[skygiants]

Yeah, cute fluffy Regency fantasies get at some of the same feel, but 'cozy mystery' generally denotes 20th-century to me. And I love the notion of contemporary fantasy, I think there's lots of cool stuff you can do with it! Except now it's all got eaten by the urban fantasy cliches that I don't like, so YA seems to be the only place you can do the interesting things. And they are doing super interesting things (Frances Hardinge!) but I think of that as a bit different from the fluffy comfort food that cozy mysteries are.

[skygiants]

I realized below: Enchanted Glass! That is totally cozy fantasy.

[graycardinal]

[reading everyone else's posts between bouts of list-making]

I'd distinguish between urban fantasy -- which first shows up in the early '80s, with Bull's War for the Oaks and de Lint's Moonheart -- and today's paranormal fantasy/romance, which was broadly templated by Laurell K. Hamilton when the Anita Blake series left-turned several books in (and see also Mercedes Lackey's Diana Tregarde novels, which were paranormals ahead of their time).

There's just beginning to be a shift from paranormal mode back toward purer urban-faerie strains, probably due in part to the success of Seansn McGuire's books (which straddle both sides of that fence, but are arguably grounded more deeply in "urban" than in "paranormal").

[sovay]

Seriously, cozy theme fantasy can become a thing any time now.

I would totally classify Patricia C. Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles as cozy fantasy. Like, any scene with Morwen and Telemain just seals the deal.

(I read those books as a child, starting with Talking to Dragons (1985)—and then spent years convincing everyone else I knew that, no, it really was written first and everything else was just filling in backstory—and while I had other reasons for learning Latin, Cimorene really is why I learned to make cherries jubilee.)

[skygiants]

See, while the Enchanted Forest books are absolutely a comfort read and cozy in the more broad sense of the adjective -- and I can definitely think of second-world fantasies that have a similarly comforting feel -- I wouldn't call them cozy fantasy as parallel to cozy mysteries per se. Cozy mysteries per definition are not just amiable and charming (though they are!) but also usually contemporary and set in a small town or community of some sort, and you just don't get a lot of that feel in contemporary fantasy, which has tilted heavily towards the URBAN and DARK and GRITTY. The noir end of the spectrum, if you will.

Actually, I've just remembered DWJ's Enchanted Glass, which I think would count. OK, one!

[holli]

Okay, I am now definitely writing the story about the haunted vintage shop where the former owners of the dresses appear as shades, wearing the dresses, to dispense useful advice.

[skygiants]

YES, PLEASE DO THAT *___* I still have to write up the Barbara Michaels Gothic-that's-super-not-Gothic about the vintage shop!

[hebethen]

So I just came across the announcement of a cozy mystery fantasy project. Welp.

[enleve]

I'm not sure I know of any that exactly fit, but the novels that come to mind are:

Sharon Lee's series set in rural Maine is a contemporary fantasy. It is a trilogy, starting with Carousel Tides. I'm not sure how cozy it is, but it avoids most of the paranormal sub-genre tropes.

Another that come to mind is Mathemagics by Margaret Ball, where the magic works much like computer programming, and a woman from our world is valued for her skills with math that work like magic in another world.

If you don't mind a science fiction time travel cozy mystery, then I heartily recommend The Far Time Incident by Neve Maslakovic. That book makes me happy. It has fun characters, a more realistic depiction of academia than I've come across in most fiction, and it manages to successfully satisfy the requirements of many genres at once.