"Those who are monsters already should see to it that they fight other monsters. If you and the abyss are going to be eye-fucking all day, you might as well exchange phone numbers."
— Arkay, Forest of the Damned"
A horror/Urban Fantasy serial by JW Troemner set in the American Rust Belt, written to copy the episode/season format of TV shows like Supernatural and released as a serial of ebooks and later collected in print.
The first book follows Rosario Hernandez and her shapeshifting dragon Arkay (no, not that kind of dragon... okay maybe). If living on the streets of the American Rust Belt isn't enough, they manage to piss off a Necromancer.
Urban Dragon contains examples of:
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Entire Series
- A Friend in Need
- Action Girl: Arkay’s favorite way of making money is mugging sexual predators
- Action Mom: Rosario is fiercely protective of Arkay (and… pretty much everyone else)
- All-Loving Hero:Rosario
- All Myths Are True: Expect to see wendigos, rakshasa, and menehune in the same room at any given moment.
- Badass Normal
- Rosario is “built like a fertility goddess in training,” but that doesn’t stop her from rushing in to save people
- As one of the only humans in the latter half of the series, Meph also counts
- Berserk Button: Whatever you do, don’t hurt Rosario
- Blessed with Suck: Arkay’s lightning powers mean she can’t use normal computers without shorting them out
- Butt-Monkey:Meph
- Contagious Heroism: Most of the people who meet Rosario wind up catching her perspective on life.
- Cool Gate
- Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Arkay
- Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon: Arkay tends to make these kinds of threats when she’s irate
- Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?
- Domino Revelation
- Dork Knight: Meph (at least, Arkay seems to think so)
- Fantasy Kitchen Sink
- Femme Fatalons
- First-Person Smartass
- Friend to All Living Things: Rosario specifically, and Potnia Theron in general
- Genre Savvy: There are a LOT of references to the way people act in horror movies
- Good Is Not Soft: Just because Rosario’s a good person won’t stop her from picking up a gun
- He Who Fights Monsters: See the page quote
- Heel–Face Revolving Door: Whose side Meph is on changes with every book.
- Hot-Blooded: Arkay in spades
- Hulking Out: any time a dragon gets sufficiently hurt or upset, it goes into a full-blown rampage of destruction, and also lose their ability to comprehend speech.
- Humans Are the Real Monsters
- Killer Rabbit: Arkay is short, shrimpy, and acts like a ditz. Don’t get her mad.
- Masquerade
- Monster Mash
- Morality Chain: Rosa for Arkay, and Arkay for Meph
- Morality Pet
- Mundane Fantastic: Arkay uses her super strength to change a tire and a succubus works in IT
- Mundane Utility: Arkay's devastating lightning powers are also great in a pinch for charging her phone
- Our Dragons Are Different
- Our Monsters Are Different
- Our Vampires Are Different: Averted: they’re long extinct
- Our Werewolves Are Different: Also extinct
- Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Arkay
- Police Are Useless: it doesn’t help that they’re being manipulated to enforce the Masquerade
- Post-Modern Magik
- Safety in Muggles
- Stock Monster Symbolism: subverted, in that most of these monsters are just trying to live their daily lives without getting murdered by monster hunters
- Super Mode: Arkay when she goes “Big and Scaly”
- Terms of Endangerment: Arkay usually takes whatever condescending pet name you just used on her and throws it back at you, usually while carving her name into your chest. The Contessa uses Germanic words that sound like endearments but decidedly aren’t: Little snake for Arkay, and for Meph a word that either means prisoner or songbird.
- The Dragon: Arkay is this to Rosario at the beginning of the series
- The Heart: Rosario
- The Lad-ette: Arkay
- The Power of Love: a good reason not to take Rosario lightly
- Unfazed Everyman: Rosario's other power is adjusting very quickly to the weirdness of the world she lives in
- Unskilled, but Strong: multiple characters point out that Arkay actually really sucks at fighting, but she makes up for it with raw power
- Unstoppable Rage: Unless you’re dealing with Rosario
- Urban Fantasy
- Van Helsing Hate Crimes: monsters live in fear of the Order
- Waif-Fu: Arkay doesn’t look anywhere near as strong as she actually is
- What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: Rosario has an almost superhuman affinity with monsters. The fact that her best friend is a violently overprotective dragon helps.
- What Measure Is A Nonhuman
- Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Despite the fact that they have access to guns, can breathe dangerous substances, and are strong enough to pick up cars, dragons are weirdly prone to strangling their enemies.
- Wrong Side of the Tracks: The early books especially spend a lot of time in homeless camps, meth neighborhoods, and abandoned buildings. Despite all of that, it's surprisingly not a total Crapsack World
Mark of the Dragon
- Broken Hero: Rosario is an obese homeless woman… who fights zombies.
- Blue-Collar Warlock: Matheson is a mortician by day and a necromancer by night
- Cover-Blowing Superpower: Averted. Arkay doesn’t actually make much of an effort to hide her draconic strength
- Deliberately Distressed Damsel
- Heroic Second Wind: Arkay gets up after getting hit by a truck and having a building dropped on her, and then immediately hits her Post-Victory Collapse]
- I'm a Humanitarian: Ghouls have to eat human meat or suffer horrible consequences. Some of them try to offset the squick by taking from already-deceased organ donors.
- Mugging the Monster
- Our Ghouls Are Creepier: Subverted. They’re just people with really weird dietary restrictions
- Person of Mass Destruction: Seriously, don’t mess with dragons.
- Platonic Life-Partners: Arkay and Rosa tried dating for a while, but it didn’t work out.
- Shut Up, Hannibal!: “He was right. Shooting zombies was one thing, but I’d never killed anyone. I didn’t think I could. Not even a man like him. But he was right about other things, too: the world doesn’t work like it does in movies. Because in real life, people don’t have to sit still during the villain’s monologue.”
Shadow and Steel
- Demonic Possession
- Fighting from the Inside
- Heroic Willpower
- Industrial Ghetto: “Land in this area was cheap, relatively speaking, thanks to an old coking plant that stood on the other side of the tracks. It had operated for most of a century before it got shut down, and word on the street was that it would take at least another decade to clean up the poisoned soil. Three guesses why the city never tried too hard to bulldoze the Valley.”
- Living Shadow
- Our Demons Are Different
- Possession Burnout
- Sealed Evil in a Can: Father Gabriel should know better than to open strange boxes that have been deliberately hidden inside a church
- Who You Gonna Call?: Sure, Rosario was crazy when she said she had a dragon, but now that there’s another monster on the loose, you come running…
Dance with the Devil
- Bad Samaritan: “He was a member of the Order of Saint Michael of the Sun, which as near as I could figure made him one part exorcist, one part social worker, and one part Winchester from Supernatural.”
- Cliffhanger
- Kick the Morality Pet
- The Love Slap Epiphany: Arkay’s no holds barred beatdown results in Adam switching sides
- Monster Roommate
Potnia Theron
- Care-Bear Stare: A Potnia Theron’s secret superpower. It’s a lot more scary when backed up by a dragon.
- Creature-Hunter Organization
- Fallen Hero: At least, Adam thinks he’s one
- Fantastic Racism: “It’s a dragon, not a person.”
- Heart Is an Awesome Power: Potnia Theron are prized by the Order for their ability to tame and subdue monsters
- Helpful Hallucination
- Knight Templar: Adam and the Order
- Meaningful Rename: In Goethe's Faust, Mephistopheles offers Dr. Faust knowledge, money and power with the intention of eventually stealing his soul; Adam offered Rosa information about monsters, health insurance, and support with the intention of using her against Arkay.
- The Men in Black
- Wham Episode
Forest of the Damned
- A Hero to His Hometown: Three Claw is seen by the monster community as a messianic protector; to the Order, she's a walking nightmare
- All Therapists Are Muggles: When hiring therapists, Arkay demands that they be let in on the Masquerade... mostly because the majority of their patients are going to be monsters.
- Amnesiac Dissonance: this is the big downside to using Styx; Because not the entire brain is reset, victims will still retain certain quirks from their old personality, like Arkay keeping Three Claw’s awful habit of naming things.
- Anti-Villain: Three Claw
- Beneath the Earth
- Came Back Wrong: Anybody who uses too much Styx
- Cruel Mercy: A lot of the way Arkay treats Meph
- Humiliation Conga: Arkay’s Cruel Mercy involves giving Meph a demonic name, flaunting her awareness of his crush on her, and constantly reminding him of all the horrible things he’s done.
- Living Shadow: A whole forest full of them. Not to be confused with shadow demons.
- There Are No Therapists: Subverted. When Arkay inherits the Hoarde, she insists on hiring an army of therapists to deal with the organization’s collective PTSD
- The Marvelous Deer: And her name is Comet. As in from the Christmas song.
- Wainscot Society: The Hoarde is accessed through, of all things, a highway rest stop
- Walking the Earth
Aglaeca
- A Glass of Chianti: to the point where even thinking of wine starts triggering Meph’s PTSD
- Aristocrats Are Evil: There’s a reason why the Archduchess and the Contessa are often only known by their titles.
- Broken Pedestal: A good portion of the reason Nadia hates Arkay is because Arkay can't live up to the idealized memories of Three Claw
- (Literal) Dragon Lady: Three Claw built a cult of personality that exaggerated her ruthlessness and sense of mystery
- Good Colors, Evil Colors: Determined by a dragon’s color scheme. Arkay is blue, while the Contessa is red
- Man of Wealth and Taste: The Contessa
- Noble Top Enforcer: Nadia
- Our Fairies Are Different: in-universe. Nobody can agree on which species count as fae.
- Percussive Therapy: After a particularly bad conversation, Arkay smashes her bed against the wall
- Red and Black and Evil All Over: You can tell the Contessa’s agents from a mile away because they’re the ones wearing red tuxedos
- Revenge Through Corruption: It seems strange that the Contessa would want revenge on Arkay before they even met. After all, there’s a limit to even dragon rivalries. Until you realize that she’s taking revenge against the Order.
- Sensible Heroes, Skimpy Villains: While Arkay doesn’t have room to talk about skimpy outfits, in this book she wears practical clothing while the Contessa wears cocktail dresses
- Seven Deadly Sins: Arkay is Wrath, the Contessa is Pride
- Wicked Cultured: The Contessa
Crusader Non Grata
- All Trolls Are Different: Dagny is twelve feet tall and has fingernails the size of playing cards, and her eyes are so adapted to seeing in the dark that she has to squint against even faint illumination in the pitch-black Forest of the Damned
- *Click* Hello
- Despair Event Horizon
- Enemy Mine
- Friendly Enemy: Arkay’s relationship with Meph, much to his irritation
- Hey, You!: Arkay calls Ivan ‘Ives’. He doesn’t appreciate it.
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Nightmare Fuel
Remnants and Revenants
- Abnormal Limb Rotation Range: the bone dragon
- Cue the Sun
- Dead All Along
- Nightmarish Factory
- Our Liches Are Different: The Lich at the center of the labyrinth keeps himself alive by feeding on the life force of anyone who wanders into the Bone Yard
- The Maze
Beloved of the Dragon
- The Baroness: The Contessa
- Dungeon Bypass: navigating a labyrinth of extra-dimensional doors is a whole lot easier if you’re hanging out with a minotaur
- Dresscoded For Your Convenience: The three armies in the final battle. The Order are all in black, the Hoarde are in blue, the American Armed Forces are in green.
- Final Battle: Between Arkay and the Contessa, and between the Hoarde and the Order
- Good Samaritan: this is how Rosario got her dragon
- Season Finale
- Shapeshifter Showdown
- The Unmasqued World
- "What Now?" Ending
