Shadowhunters and Downworlders

Cities have the capability to at any moment shift out of the familiar, even if you’ve lived in one all your life. Turn a corner onto a street you’ve passed every day for the past year but have never actually explored. Walk home during a blackout. Climb a fire escape onto a roof. Walk across a bridge. Cities are brimming with the potential to reveal the strange; and it might not be that you’re suddenly transported to unfamiliar territory but that you suddenly discover that the city around you simply never was the familiar place you (mistakenly) took it for. If you’re of the right sort of mind, it’s a short leap from the strangenesses that are part of any massive group of people living in close proximity to a strangeness that seems like something more, something eerier.

In a city, for instance, you are never alone. No, really: You are never alone. Disembodied voices follow you everywhere: They come through the floorboards from the apartment above where your neighbor is singing eerily out of tune; they come, disembodied, through the speakers on the deserted subway platform at midnight. It’s very often nearly impossible to know whether you’re listening to a live person or a recording. The empty train car that you step onto might be empty, but there are at least two people manning the train. You might never see them, though, so how can you prove it? Come to think of it, you might never actually have seen that upstairs neighbor. You are never alone. You are surrounded by disembodied voices and whispers, many of them speaking in languages you can’t identify with certainty. Familiar, but unknown.

The uncanny is often tied to fear of the Other with a capital O. In a city, with all of its enclaves and boundaries, both real and imagined, its hundreds of different languages and faiths and faces, it is impossible not to feel the presence of those who are not like you and impossible not to feel like an outsider.

If the uncanny is evoked by the revelation of the occult/ hidden, if it is, again quoting Freud, “often…produced when the distinction between reality and imagination is effaced”—then the city is as good a place for the uncanny to dwell as any remote and haunted manor house. There are more hidden spaces in a city, more hidden lives and hidden emptinesses, and more darkened windows where shadow people pass fleetingly in and out of sight. There are more moments where the actual meaning of what we see or hear or imagine is obscured, more chances to glimpse a thing without understanding what one is seeing in the momentary, jarring flash of sunlight the train passes through between 59th Street and Bay Ridge Avenue on the R line.

I could go on, but the net effect of all of these things is that cities will always feel uncanny, if you are inclined to be aware of the uncanny at all. In Clary’s New York, this otherness, this sense of crossing into someone else’s terrain, redraws the map of the city. Chinatown is no longer defined by its Chinese denizens but by the pack of werewolves that dwells in the old Second Precinct building. Spanish Harlem is where the vampires make their home in an abandoned hotel. Central Park is full of fey. Industrial Brooklyn, a mishmash of artist spaces, oddball storage buildings, and manufactories that to me always looks to be in a strange state of gorgeous arrested decay, is where the High Warlock (hundreds of years old and himself an intriguing mishmash of demon and human) lives and works.

It makes such good sense in the books because these are places that feel unfamiliar in reality to anyone who hasn’t spent time getting to know them. It’s a short leap from this occasionally unsettling unfamiliarity to the enticing possibility of the presence of something truly otherworldly, something fantastic, something darkly magical dwelling behind at least one of the thousands of windows or the thousands of faces you pass on any given day.