Urbantasm, Book One: The Dying City is Young New-Adult Winner for the 2019 Indie Book Awards, Young Adult Winner for the 2019 Kindle Book Awards, Young Adult Finalist for the 2019 Wishing Shelf Book Awards, Young Adult Finalist for the American Fiction Awards, and was included on the New School’s 2019 Alumni Summer Reading List.
Urbantasm, Book Two: The Empty Room is Young Adult Winner for the 2020 Kindle Book Awards.
Urbantasm, Book Three: The Darkest Road is Young Adult Winner for the 2022 Kindle Book Awards.
“Through vivid characters and mind-bending twists, Coyne delivers an evocative coming-of-age page-turner. A book for teens – but really a book for everyone – trying to understand the universal struggles of fear, fate, love, and hope. A shrinking city grows a magical epic.”
— Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, New York Times bestselling author of What the Eyes Don’t See
“Urbantasm: The Dying City is a novel of wonder and horror — but I don’t mean that in any traditional sense. Though preternatural elements impinge on the story here and there, what really fuels both the wonder and the horror is Connor Coyne’s uncanny portrayal of early teenhood, when every dimly understood new vista promised ecstasy untold, and every wrong move or unintentional difference could mean social death — or worse. This is a tough, tender, and unsettling rumination on coming of age in a dying industrial city, and I’m both eager and terrified to see what happens next.”
— William Shunn, author of The Accidental Terrorist
“A book that values risk. Coyne managed to make gritty urbanscapes and the conflict therein technicolor.”
— S.C. Megale, author of This Is Not a Love Scene
“The first volume of Connor Coyne’s epic novel Urbantasm imbues a neglected part of America with an azure luminescence. Portrayed with sensitive and romantic candor, this tale’s young protagonists are never despairing but perpetually haunted. Coyne understands that to survive is to be wounded, and Urbantasm illuminates the shadows of a nation that has always exploited the defenseless and the forgotten.”
— Jeffery Renard Allen, author of Song of the Shank
“The fate of Flint, Michigan can often be hard to believe. Yet Connor Coyne skillfully captures the tarnished essence of a thinly veiled Vehicle City — known as Akawe in Urbantasm — with a compelling blend of noire and Rust Belt magical realism.”
— Gordon Young, author of Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City
“Combining an ongoing love of noir atmospherics with memorable character development, Connor Coyne’s Urbantasm takes readers into a vivid and utterly authentic world of adolescent angst, yearning, fear and love. Coyne’s teenaged narrator John Bridge is a brilliantly shaped character, both wise and deeply attentive to the world on the inside and painfully awkward, vulnerable and intrepid on the outside. Perhaps the greatest treat of all in Urbantasm is Coyne’s writing, which with all senses intensely engaged, is remarkably original and full of heart. His rich, often disturbing, and loving evocation of the urban landscape where his struggling adolescent characters wander honors the ‘dying city’ – and suggests, in fact, it isn’t dead at all, but pulsing with stubborn, surprising, and resilient life.”
— Jan Worth-Nelson, author of Night Blind
“While I appreciate the universal chords in Urbantasm [Book One: The Dying City] it is the delivery, the writing style, that engaged me. The writing propels this story. So do the characters as they reveal themselves through the writing. Coyne’s fluid prose is the perfect vehicle to carry an epic allegory. The wordsmith in me particularly enjoyed the stylistic change-ups he would throw.”
— Robert R. Thomas, East Village Magazine
FULL REVIEW
“The blue bottle glasses and the listening whispering maple roll on into Book Two like a faithful call-and-response chorus witnessing to the tale and its realities. Here John focuses his quest in growing up succinctly: “I want to be real.” To that end, of course, there are fiery tests. So it goes in the land of life and death that is fictional Akawe as well as its rust-belted model, Flint.”
— Robert R. Thomas, East Village Magazine
FULL REVIEW
“[Urbantasm, Book 3: The Darkest Road] is a massive creation from Coyne’s omnivorous mind, and an often gripping evocation of the throes of a struggling city.”
— Robert R. Thomas, East Village Magazine
FULL REVIEW
“The denouement of [Urbantasm, Book 4: The Spring Storm] is in the aftermath, in the survivors’ attempts to rise up in various ways from the horrible realities of their very real self-destructive surroundings.
Coyne’s epic allegory is a morality play focused on mortality, not black magic thinking. It is also a grand serial narrative, a giant urbantasm of a serial novel in its own right. What it is not is a dystopic downer tale of tragic proportions. It is a wise universalist fable nimbly narrated. ”
— Robert R. Thomas, East Village Magazine
FULL REVIEW
“[Urbantasm, Book 1: The Dying City] nails the longing, the sensitivity, the insensitivity, the insecurities, the violence, the homophobia, the hard times and lives of teens and hard-working people trying to make ends meet.”
— Tim Lane, Author of Your Silent Face
FULL REVIEW
“[Urbantasm, Book 2: The Empty Room] captures a blue-collar way of life that I grew up with, and asks questions about friendship, loyalty, love, fear, sex, death, respect, meanness, acceptance and empathy. Connor Coyne takes chances, and his books have a breadth that I admire.”
— Tim Lane, Author of Your Silent Face
FULL REVIEW
“The intricacy and scope of the overarching plot [of Urbantasm, Book 3: the Darkest Road] is impressive, and the action and drama really pick up here. Coyne’s sense of poeticism and unabashed maximalism are fine-tuned and in good form. I’m a fan.”
— Tim Lane, Author of Your Silent Face
FULL REVIEW
“The final book, [Urbantasm, Book 4: The Spring Storm] concludes the series well. I didn’t want it to end. The characters were well-developed and under my skin. The plot was genius. I also enjoyed the allusion to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.”
— Tim Lane, Author of Your Silent Face
FULL REVIEW
“Incandescent prose illuminates the darkest underground passages of a town ruined by an auto company, where gangstah drugs turn everything dreamy, mysterious, and deadly. And you can’t look away, sentence by gorgeous sentence, from the drama caught writhing and screaming, squinting its eyes against the light.”
— Tantra Bensko, Author of Glossolalia: Psychological Suspense
“Connor is a great writer. His ability to create amazing characters in a richly painted fictional background is something to be truly admired… This is a coming of age tale, crime story, thriller, suspense novel and a use of fiction to condemn and glorify urban decay and corruption… From a pure storytelling perspective, this is a fantastic read. Realistic characters in real peril and dealing with real-life situations… Then a bizarre pair of sunglasses is found and things get — weird. It’s breathtaking writing. I feel Urbantasm is destined to be a classic.”
— Bryan Alaspa, Author of S.P.I.D.A.R.
FULL REVIEW
“Urbantasm: The Dying City recognizes that adolescence is magic — your understanding transforms, you are consumed by desires of and just beyond your body, you know your friends in a way you didn’t before. Coyne combines this magic with the sociology and cartography of Akawe, Michigan — a ‘dying,’ but by no means dead, incarnation of 1990s Flint — and a pair of strange blue sunglasses to pull seventh-grader John Bridge and his friends towards something raw, complex, and new”
— Gemma Cooper-Novack, Author of We Might As Well Be Underwater
“[Urbantasm, Book 1: The Dying City] is a coming of age story told with such specificity that it becomes universal. A tale of first kisses, contrived plans for new identities and the utter confusion that comes from being thirteen years old.”
— M.L. Kennedy, Author of Things You Leave Behind
FULL REVIEW
“[Urbantasm, Book 2: The Empty Room] walks a tightrope of gritty realism and mythological storytelling… It’s a sprawling meditation on love and loss and sex and sexuality.”
— M.L. Kennedy, Author of Things You Leave Behind
FULL REVIEW
“[Urbantasm, Book 3: The Darkest Road] is about being fifteen, where nothing matters and everything matters too much. When you are still a kid, but you might be drinking, having sex or doing drugs. Or you might be having a snowball fight.”
— M.L. Kennedy, Author of Things You Leave Behind
FULL REVIEW
” It’s fair to say that Coyne has saved the best for last. [Urbantasm, Book 4:The Spring Storm] has upped the urgency and momentum, bringing this massive story to a worthy conclusion.”
— M.L. Kennedy, Author of Things You Leave Behind
FULL REVIEW
“The realest portrayal of angry young people I’ve ever read.”
— Amanda Steinhoff, Author of Lily and the Golden Lute
“[Urbantasm] features a well-constructed plot with a bit of mystery, drama, death, and teen romance. The author manages to keep all of the balls in the air and consider all of the problems that come with a city on the decline and trying to grow up there… the images created by the words will stick with the reader… The trials of being thirteen are truly captured. These characters are growing up fast and not perfect by any means.”
— The BookLife Prize
FULL REVIEW
“As tragic as the falling apart of the city was and is, these kids had a lot of nerve, spirit, and guts, probably because they didn’t know any better… so much depth and courage.”
— Writers’ Digest Self-Published Book Awards
FULL REVIEW
“[Urbantasm, Book 1: The Dying City is] ‘a dark, gritty YA novel. A FINALIST and highly recommended.’
— The Wishing Shelf Book Awards
“[Urbantasm, Book 2: The Empty Room features] ‘strong characters facing a host of real problems many teenagers might relate to.’”
— The Wishing Shelf Book Awards
“[Urbantasm, Book 3: The Darkest Road is] ‘a cleverly crafted novel for older teens with a dark, gritty feel to it.’”
— The Wishing Shelf Book Awards