On Urban Fantasy

I’ve always felt that urban/modern fantasy does well when it takes advantage of its setting to create an uncanniness not possible in "ye olde times" fantasy. Dungeon crawls in abandoned malls and walking down a forest trail that could have come from Tolkien only to find an abandoned car embedded in a tree with no indication how it got there, that sort of thing.  

Or maybe you see an official-looking "No Trespassing" sign in the middle of all the natural beauty. And then another one. And then two more. And finally you see a line of trees with hundreds of the signs growing out of them like fungus. An ancient prophecy known only to a select order shows up in a prog revival band's chart-topping new song is almost as weird as a prog song cracking the top 40. Cthulhu wasn't real, until Jacques Cousteau made him real, the perfect instrument of his will to purge the world of excess humans (look him up on Wikipedia, he really did get pretty malthusian at the end of his life). 

By now, Cthulhu is known, understood, like Dracula or Super Mario. But no one expects Cthulhu to rise from the waves with Jacques Cousteau's submarine embedded in his head, the mechanism through which the inventor of scuba diving controls his monstrous creation. Google how many people have walked on the moon, then figure out which one was a werewolf. 

The astronaut is a sorely underutilized figure in urban fantasy. I want you to picture one simple image: an astronaut holding a medieval longsword. That image alone has a kind of echoing uncanniness beyond any mere tentacled sea monster.