SHADOWHUNTERS AND DOWNWORLDERS

When I moved to New York City in 2001, it was unhomely in every sense. My apartment was a good home to come back to, and I loved it and I loved my roommate and I loved the neighborhood we’d chosen, but the city itself was frustrating, strange, and unwelcoming. I’d grown up in a rural suburb of Annapolis and I’d gone to school in bucolic, mostly rural upstate New York, but the city just being different from what I was accustomed to didn’t explain what I was feeling. I’d lived in London, I’d been lost in Venice, I’d traveled alone in France and Spain, and I was about as self-sufficient as anyone I knew. And yet. It was almost as if the city were trying to knock me down a few pegs, trying for some reason to break me. It made me cry more than I was comfortable with. It made me want to move home to Maryland.

I don’t really remember when I started to want to fight back. I don’t even remember whether that’s really how I looked at it. The way I remember it was that I started looking for evidence that this city wasn’t what it had first shown itself to be. I started looking for what it was hiding under the indifferent, hurried, even cruel face it seemed intent on putting on for me. I started grasping at moments that weren’t misery. Slowly, slowly, I found them. And at some point along the way, New York City began to feel like home.

Then, some time after that, New York began to change for me once more. Having found its homely side at last, I let myself open my eyes again to the unhomely, this time looking for the other hidden face of the city, its quirks and oddities and bits of delightful weirdness. When I’d been sure the city was out to get me, these things would have been lumped in with the things that made New York seem unknowable and sinister. Now, though, I discover those things and am fascinated by them without feeling that they make the city not like home. It takes looking around you with a certain type of eye, though. You have to be willing to walk down an alley just because of the interesting ironwork on the fire escapes. It has to occur to you to look under an awning to see the decades-old sign beneath, a treasure hidden (almost) in plain view. You have to be willing to look up occasionally, a thing that, in New York, where so much is going on at eye level, sometimes takes conscious effort to remember to do.

You have to force yourself to give things more than a passing glance. You have to look at a thing long enough for it to really show itself to you—a skill Clary has to learn in order to see past the glamours masking things all around her. “Let your mind relax,” Jace instructs when trying to help Clary see a rune on his hand. “Wait for it to come to you. Like waiting for something to rise to the surface of water.” Staring at the stronghold masquerading as an abandoned hospital on Roosevelt Island, Clary tries “to stare around the lights, or through them, the way you could sometimes look past a thin topcoat of paint to see what was underneath” (City of Bones). Seeing past the glamour—past the superficial—takes effort, but it’s a critical step Clary has to take in order to reconcile what she has been seeing with what’s really there and to walk confidently through the city she thought was home as something more than an interloper. It’s the only way she can learn to navigate the once-familiar streets without getting lost, and without being afraid.

Every city, every town, hides beneath a certain amount of glamour that—either intentionally or not—can misdirect the eye or hide something worth finding. Learning to see through those glamours is part of the process of calling any place home.




I don’t know if everyone goes through this passage, in which his or her ability to function as a complete person is somehow tied to the process of becoming functional in an unfamiliar place. Moving to a new town or starting college can be like that, although I suspect that the necessity of learning to function socially outweighs or at least overshadows the necessity of learning to function on the campus or in the new town itself. In either setting, it’s more likely to be the people than the specific place that make you feel acutely like the outsider you are. There is something inherently stranger in discovering that it isn’t the people that are keeping you from feeling like you belong—it’s the place itself. Perhaps this is why so many people simply can’t fathom living in a city (or, conversely, can’t fathom living outside of one).

I also don’t know if the concept of being lost still means what it used to. My generation and the ones that follow have been trained, if not raised, to navigate by GPS, taking the shortest route from point A to point B. We have been trained to use turnpikes and highways; if we have lost our fears of being lost, it’s because the idea has lost its meaning. Take away our ability to know where we are at any given point, and I suspect we would immediately find ourselves in strange territory, even if geographically we are very close to home.

There is a very easy way of demonstrating the truth of this in New York City. You just get on an unfamiliar train and take it to another borough. Pick a stop you’ve never been to, and get out. Voilà! A whole new world. What’s even stranger is when you get out at an unfamiliar stop, turn a corner or two, and find yourself at an intersection or a landmark you know well. Because I like to wander both on foot and in a car just to see where I wind up, this happens to me all the time, but never without a moment’s feeling of having somehow experienced something uncanny. It’s this experience I thought of when reading the chapter in City of Bones in which, on returning to her apartment building in Park Slope and falling through a five-dimensional door, Clary lands not in some other country or other world but in the front yard of her “uncle” Luke’s home in Williamsburg, just a couple miles to the north, and still in Brooklyn. Even places you know well can take on a touch of the unknown when you arrive there from a different direction.




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.




In Jentsch’s and Freud’s essays on the uncanny, the revelation of the unheimlich is usually characterized by unease and fear—normal, understandable reactions. But the beauty of fantasy is that it allows the protagonist to pass through fear to come to know this different reality and to find a place in it. It allows the protagonist to accept the true, occult (again in the hidden sense) character of the place, to reconcile the mundane and the uncanny elements into a whole, to let go of preconceptions and expectations and open himor herself to experience the full reality of the place. It is perhaps particularly appropriate that, after several hundred pages of jamais-vu experiences, Clary is allowed to experience the opposite: Magnus Bane presents her with the Gray Book and instructs her to stare at one particular rune. “Look at it,” he says, “until you feel something change in your mind.” It takes long moments, but then abruptly the unfamiliar Mark on the page has meaning. Clary does not suddenly discover that she has known this Mark all along, but she is suddenly able to understand its significance.

In stories like these, where the setting is a character, a major part of the protagonist’s evolution is the passage by which she, suddenly marooned right at home in a place that isn’t what she thought it was, must learn to love (or at least accept) the city. Only then can she truly take part in shaping the narrative. And there’s no going back either. In the scenario of the uncanny city, the protagonist isn’t questing for the portal home; she’s questing for a way to be at home. This is a powerful message to carry back to the real world; for those who have experienced the alienation that the sense of unheimlich (when related to place) describes for anything longer than a fleeting moment, there are only two options: Go elsewhere, or find a way to survive, to belong, and, hopefully, to thrive. There isn’t a portal that can whisk you home if you’re already there, so the challenge is to understand and to adapt and to find the homely even in that which is not like home.

The final scene of City of Bones is a lovely visualization of this: Clary is presented with a panoramic view of the city, alive with all the things she can now see and sense but still visible and recognizable as the same place in which she grew up:

And there it was spread out before her like a carelessly opened jewelry box, this city more populous and more amazing than she had ever imagined: There was the emerald square of Central Park, where the faerie courts met on midsummer evenings; there were the lights of the clubs and bars downtown, where the vampires danced the nights away at Pandemonium; there were the alleys of Chinatown down which the werewolves slunk at night, their coats reflecting the city’s lights. There walked warlocks in all their bat-winged, cat-eyed glory, and here, as they swung out over the river, she saw the darting flash of multicolored tails under the silvery skin of the water, the shimmer of long, pearl-strewn hair, and heard the high, rippling laughter of the mermaids.

Jace turned to look over his shoulder, the wind whipping his hair into tangles. “What are you thinking?” he called back to her.

“Just how different everything down there is now, you know, now that I can see.”

“Everything down there is exactly the same,” he said, angling the cycle toward the East River. They were heading toward the Brooklyn Bridge again. “You’re the one that’s different.”

…Her stomach dropped out from under her as the silver river spun away and the spires of the bridge slid under her feet, but this time Clary kept her eyes open, so that she could see it all.

And for possibly the first time, the sight is truly beautiful.



Kate Milford is the author of The Boneshaker, The Broken Lands, and The Kairos Mechanism. She has written for stage and screen and, thanks to a deep and abiding love for strange and uncanny places, is also an occasional travel columnist for the Nagspeake Board of Tourism and Culture. She can be found online at www.clockworkfoundry.com.