City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon: an urban fantasy mixing magical realism with gonzo noirish prose, where duels are fought in Pioneer Square, and union meetings are beseiged by ghost bicycles.
This is a truly magnificent passage and we see in it Eddison’s similarities to Tolkien, Peake, and earlier pre-genre fantasy writers who understood landscape—and the artful rendering of it in literary form—to be absolutely integral to making their fantasy worlds, in some sense, real or real-seeming, and a key aspect of the verisimilitude so many fantasy writers use at the same time to denaturalize readers’ from their own world, rendering “reality” in new, critical perspectives. The scene begins with a moment in the changing of the seasons that quietly transitions readers from the big reveal at the end of the first chapter, and from there pulls the reader almost as a camera might move slowly through a forest in the opening scene of a film, lingering on tiny images and small happenings that each seem so delicately real and together prove the hapticity of this fantasy world.
Now that nos. 45 and 46 are complete and in the world, a number of elements of this new season, Summer, the third season of the epic, might well be coming into focus. —Head over to Chapbooks, and scroll down to the brand new section where the third season chapbooks will be collected, and you’ll notice that no. 45 is the first installment of vol. 5, the Greene Chapel—and that no. 46 is the first installment of vol. 6, Eleleu Ie.
The aptness of this satire in 2025—in which the law is even presuming to rule on biological “reality”—draws attention to the similarities between the 2020s and the 1920s, which seem much closer to the present now than, say, the 1940s or 1950s. Like our current government, the good burghers of Lud-in-the-Mist can’t counter, or even account for, the ongoing collapse of the dominant symbolic order around their ears because they are unable to recognise on ideological grounds the very forces that are opposing them.
Slouching through the door, grey yoga pants and a hoodie under a ruddy down vest zipped up, hood up, head down. Black gym bag in the one hand and the other a quick wave for the man behind the bar, spiky black hair and a faceful of stubble, skinny arm up to wave back. Drums clatter a sashay under a popping fanfare, that’s when you know you’re close, a woman’s voice, sometimes you gotta work hard for it. Past the bar, the mostly empty tables, the tiny empty stage, brushing the column of chain at the corner of it, a gentle ring that’s swallowed by the blaring horns. A nondescript door in the shadows there, a narrow hall, dark, beyond, at the one end a door half-open on white light, papers piled atop an old grey cabinet, but down the other end a small room painted black so many times the regular lines, the dimples and pocks of the cinderblock walls are softened, blurred, shining in the light of lamps ablaze about a row of mirrors. Squeezing in, behind a woman blending red and blue in a sloppy arc over an eyelid, behind a woman adjusting a bit of white lace, down to a short red velvet chaise against the far wall. Gym bag up on the chaise, unzipped, thrown open, digging through lace and satin, feathery gauze and fringe and stiff black rubber to pull out a plastic sandwich bag, heavy with golden dust, dropped on the counter with the tubes and the bottles and jars.
“Dead out there,” says the woman mascaraing her lashes.
“Thursday morning,” says the woman gathering up her thick blond hair.
Lotion white on a rough palm sprinkled with gold. “I can take the first dance.”
“You’re early,” says the woman checking her ponytail in the mirror, arms and thigh, flank and chest all looped and filigreed with tattoos, the largest a black-letter motto arcing her belly that says Der Bauch lügt nicht!
“I think it’s the only time I’ve fallen in love with a city through a novel.”
