Editorial: Defining Rural Fantasy

Rural Fantasy might at first sound redundant. Aren’t many major fantasy stories set in rural places? The Hero’s Journey, for example, often begins with a farm boy or a hobbit in a pastoral setting. However, in its typical progression, the hero leaves their rural homeland to venture into the larger world in order to save it. When they return at journey’s end, they tend not to fit into their village. They have transformed into a figure of worldly stature.

Urban Fantasy, in contrast, often takes fantasy into contemporary cities. Wizards might go to great lengths in these stories to hide their powers from those without to blend into the modern world. This genre also extends its arms to include any fantasy story that takes place in a world that has undergone urbanization or technological development. The majority of the story need not take place in an urban setting, only in a world in which urban life is predominant, even if the protagonists are primarily rural or suburban.

Defining a genre is inherently an impossible task. If there’s one thing that literature and art always do, they defy boundaries, upend expectations, and resist any neat categorization. Still, genres can help us to make meaningful arrangements of texts that speak to one another and to us. Without wanting to lay down an iron-clad definition of Rural Fantasy, I will offer the following: Rural Fantasy is fantasy that takes place in a rural setting.

I will take it one step further by offering a few negative definitions to distinguish Rural Fantasy from other stories. Rural Fantasy does not see the rural as a mere starting point, as an unrefined or unlucky birthplace that needs to be transcended. In these stories, rural spaces are not uncivilized backwaters or fly-over country. At the same time, they do not offer mystical antidotes to the ills of the modern city. The former notion relies on classist assumptions about the superiority of urban living, while the latter reinforces many racist and xenophobic arguments. Both attempts at dividing the rural and the urban into a hierarchy assume an essential superiority of one group over the other. This type of thinking is neither creative nor can it lead to anything other than violence.

The Rural Fantasies I was interested in for this special issue challenge this divisive way of thinking. In particular, I looked for stories that pushed back against the harmful tropes that paint rural places as little more than regressive strongholds or essential wellsprings for a unified national identity. So much gets lost when this is all we can see in rural places.

The stories that follow meet my definitions of Rural Fantasy, yet each story offers something that exceeds this category as well. As good literature does. These stories are rural fantasies and more than rural fantasies. They fit together within the loose bounds of this special issue, and each will easily feel at home alongside other stories that center other generic conventions, tropes or themes. For now, I invite you to read them for what they have to say about rural places and the people who inhabit them.

“To Curse with Needle and Thread” by Vijayalaxmi Samal takes us into the violent throes of colonization with all of the messy ambiguities that arise over time as survivors and their descendants have no choice but to live in this transformed world.

“Hazards of Being Related to the Chosen One” by Emmie Christie offers a fun twist on the Chosen One trope. Here we do not follow the person assumed to be the hero but rather his sister who stayed in their hometown and all of the crap she has to deal with.

“The Inside of the Outside” by Angus McIntyre is this month’s reprint. This story in search of demons seems to flip on its head three times before everything sorts out in the end.

“An Acre a Year” by Gregory Marlow follows a secret deal a farmer’s wife made with the Fae. The future quickly catches up with her, as she rushes headlong into the consequences of that deal.

“Little Bird” by Aggie Novak rounds out the issue with an unlikely friendship, and perhaps a little more, among an outcast girl and a mostly forgotten spirit.

My thanks go to everyone who submitted to our open call. You truly made the work of selecting stories a challenge. Special thanks as well to Rebecca Halsey for her assistance at every step of the way, and to the entire team of readers and editors at Flash Fiction Online for the tremendous amount of work that goes into this and every issue. Of course, thanks to the talented authors whose work appears in the following pages. It was a true pleasure to work with all of you to put together this special issue on Rural Fantasy.

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Ⓒ Jason A. Bartles