The Monstrous City of Australian Urban Fantasy: The City Edifice of Brisbane, Queensland in the novels of Angela Slatter and Trent Jamieson.

The cities of urban fantasies are monstrous. They are confining edifices, places full of liminal and hidden spaces, and they shape the narratives contained within. Urban fantasy as a genre is shaped by the unseen creatures that populate its cities, the archaeological striation of pasts pushing into the present, and the thematic tensions of anxiety, fear, and dread. The cities of Australian urban fantasy are presented as monstrous places. Angela Slatter’s Vigil presents the city of Brisbane, Queensland as full of the contradictory spaces of churches, dirty street scapes, and elite hidden places that hint at a rot beneath the city. Trent Jamieson’s Death Most Definite presents a night-touched Brisbane landscape of liminal spaces and terminal landscapes. The perspective both urban fantasies present is of a city as a place of darkness, of dangerous and forgotten edges, of anxious tensions, and boundaries that constrict. The sense of place created in these narratives present a near-dystopic view of the modern city: creating a place more terrifying than the monsters it contains. This article explores the creation of a sense of place through the gothic concept of the edifice, inclusions of liminal spaces, and terminal landscapes of the dead and undead, to present a monstrous city in Australian urban fantasy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]