Magical realism blends the strange into everyday moments

Magical realism shows the strange as part of everyday life. If the show Seinfeld were in the fantasy genre, this would be the subgenre.

A person wakes up with no shadow, a man speaks to ghosts in his kitchen, a child vanishes and comes back older than their parents, and it’s all a normal slice of life. No one treats it like a miracle or a curse. It happens, and life continues. You get up, you go to work, you read, you watch TV, you read, you get the point.

Characters live in familiar towns, cities, or homes. They go to work, pay bills, the world looks real, and the strange details slip into the routine. A tree grows fruit in the shape of faces, a storm repeats every Thursday, or some other quirk happens.

These events carry meaning, but the story rarely stops to explain why

The tone stays calm, power sits underneath, and oddities become part of the characters’ lives without ceremony, panic, or anyone really caring. Tension builds through silence, discomfort, or emotion that never fully resolves. It’s just there.

Writers like Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende shaped the genre. Neil Gaiman (we’ve all heard of him, right?) carried it into modern fantasy. Their stories keep both feet in the real world and pull in the extraordinary through the side door.

Magical realism in the Elementals Universe, anyone?

In the Elementals Universe, magical realism shows up in Arcane Elemental Academy. Elementals live out in the open. Their magic isn’t hidden, feared, or treated as legend. It’s part of daily life. They cast in public, train in broad daylight, and nobody blinks. For the non-magical, it’s routine to see someone bend fire, reshape water, or shift the air around them.

No one points or panics since magic’s out in the open, except maybe a baby who’s seeing it for the first time. That’s just how the world (of Xadis) works. The story doesn’t stop to explain the strangeness because the characters grew up with it, and that’s not always the case in my six-series Renegades Epic. Magic blends into the structure of society, quietly shaping how things run without calling attention to itself.

Magical realism never calls attention to itself, and that’s what makes Arcane Elemental Academy a standout series. Nothing in my Renegades Epic, for example, screams the genre, but my young-adult academy fantasy drives it home.