skygiants

[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").