Urban Fantasy Settings Beyond New York: Why I Chose Vancouver

How I Turned Vancouver into an Urban Fantasy City

When most people think urban fantasy, they picture New York alleys, Chicago skyscrapers, or New Orleans cemeteries. I love those cities, but I had nothing to add to that conversation. Those aren’t my towns.

I live on the west coast of Canada, where the city is wedged between mountains, ocean, and rainforest, and the forecast is “emotional support rain” nine months of the year. When I walk through downtown Vancouver at night with neon lights reflecting in puddles and fog curling around the buildings, I see Mother nature’s set dressing for urban fantasy. There’s a reason the TV series Supernatural shot here all those years.

So, when it came time to build my own urban fantasy worlds, I didn’t want a generic city with a new label slapped on. I wanted a place where the story couldn’t happen anywhere else. Vancouver, with all its contradictions—outdoor-obsessed but tech-heavy, wellness-obsessed but deeply stressed, beautiful but expensive enough to make you consider a blood pact—was perfect.

Plus, it’s my hometown and I love it deeply, which means I get to write these books as a slightly unhinged love letter.

Reason #1: Some Places Practically Come Pre-Haunted

One of my favorite parts of turning Vancouver into an urban fantasy city was hunting for locations that are already doing half the worldbuilding for me. Some places are such obvious no-brainers that all I have to do is point and say, “Okay, that’s vampire territory now.”

Case in point: Blood Alley in Gastown.

Yes, that’s its actual name. Blood Alley. It’s a narrow, cobblestoned lane in one of Vancouver’s oldest neighborhoods, with brick buildings crowding in on either side. Even before I started writing urban fantasy books, my brain didn’t whisper “interesting historical detail” about that area. It yelled, “This is where the vampires hang out!”

So in my Magic After Midlife series, that’s exactly what where I put them.

I didn’t rename it, because why would I? Using the real name gives local readers a secret thrill and gives everyone else a sense that Vancouver has history and teeth. That’s the sweet spot for an urban fantasy setting: a real-world place with enough atmosphere that when you drop in vampires, it feels less like invention and more like confession.

Reason #2: The Weather is a Vibe

If you’re writing urban fantasy, you can absolutely set your story somewhere sunny and cheerful. You can have monsters in perpetual golden hour. You can have demons in flip-flops. That’s allowed.

I, however, live in Vancouver, where the default setting is “damp existential crisis.”

The bonus is that this kind of weather feels incredibly normal to people who live here. Vancouverites will absolutely walk through sideways rain in a fleece and call it “a bit of drizzle.” That gives me characters who treat the city’s most goth days as background noise… which is the perfect cover for magic and monsters.

Reason #3: Real Neighbourhoods Make the Best Pocket Realities

I don’t usually run my supernatural world like a strict map of “this neighbourhood belongs to X faction, that one belongs to Y.” I do love figuring out which neighborhood my heroine lives in and sharing that, but what’s been super fun in the new series I’m writing is building alternate-reality pockets on top of them—places that are recognizably the city, just… turned up to eleven.

The bones stay the same: the general layout, the kind of people who’d be there, the mood of the area. The supernatural factions that would naturally gravitate to that spot in the real world get to own it fully in the pocket version.

For example, part of the Mount Pleasant neighborhood is known as the Tea Swamp. Well, I absolutely had to use that name as its magic alternate reality counterpart. Three guesses as to what kinds of people hang out there?

Writing it this way lets me explore the “what if” of the city.

What if this place could finally be as magical as it secretly feels?

That’s the fun of using a real city as my base: Vancouver gets to keep its real-world personality, and then I build the magical version.

Reason #4: The City’s Scale Makes Magic Feel Intimate (and Dangerous)

A lot of famous urban fantasy cities are massive, sprawling metropolises where you can lose yourself in endless districts. Vancouver isn’t small, but it’s not that. It has this particular “big enough to have secrets, small enough that they might actually find you” feeling.

That’s useful for me.

I write heroines preventing supernatural disasters, while still running errands or worrying about making a living. Vancouver’s scale lets me connect those dots fast:

•           You can go from a character’s neighbourhood coffee shop to a creepy alley or liminal waterfront spot in a single walk.

•           People run into each other again in different parts of the city, which makes coincidences believable and grudges easy to maintain.

•           When something supernatural goes wrong, it doesn’t feel like it’s happening in some anonymous corner of a giant urban sprawl. It feels close. Personal. A couple of bus stops away.

In practice, that means my magical crimes, monsters, and pocket realities never feel separate from “real life.” They’re threaded through the same streets my characters shop, commute, and date on. Vancouver is just contained enough that when the magic starts misbehaving, you can’t pretend it’s someone else’s problem in some other part of town. It’s here. It’s yours.

At the end of the day, that’s why I keep coming back to Vancouver as my urban fantasy setting. It’s not just pretty scenery I slap magic onto. It’s a city with sharp edges, weird corners, and a very specific mood that shapes the stories I tell and the heroines who have to survive them.

The more I write about my hometown, the more it feels like I’m just peeling back layers that were always there.

If you want to read my versions of Vancouver—because each series is its own unique take on the city—you can find all my urban fantasy books here: www.deborahwildebooks.com

And now I’m curious: what city do you think would make an amazing urban fantasy setting, and why?