City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon: a wicked concoction of urban pastoral and incantatory fantastic, where a grocers’ warehouse might become a palace, and an antique bank is hidden beneath a department store.
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.
Monte Carlo, says the sign, Pizza, Steaks, the lettering scratched and fading from the filthy windows of the corner storefront. Down the block the other storefront’s boarded over with graffiti’d plywood, a rust-raddled chain knotted about the handles of its big double door, under the skeletal frame of a grand awning that once sheltered the sidewalk. Between the two storefronts a demure door painted a brown that melts into the brickwork, and small black squares of tin nailed above it, each printed with a brassy numeral, 1018. It’s opening, a man’s stepping out, blue and white track suit, running shoes, locking the door, looking up in time to see the woman headed past the Monte Carlo window, around the corner, brown coat, pale bloom of hair.
Quickly after her, around that corner. Letters flaking from a side window above say Live Music Every Nite. The street slopes down, and past the brick the looming blue-grey bulk of a warehouse, long windows high above that stretch between concrete pillars, square panes painted over white or caked with old dust or smashed out, jagged shadowed holes, and the wall beneath illegible with graffiti. A fence has been slapped up against the wall, tipped poles canted drunkenly, an old worn sign hung from the mesh that says Wilson Properties in blocky type. She’s maybe a quarter of the way down the length of it, leaning a shoulder against the ringing, squealing fence as she pushes the mesh away from the pole, sharp cut ends of it bright clean sparks. “Hey!” he yells. “Hey! You can’t go in there!”
“I assure you,” she calls back, “it’s easy enough. I’ve but to lift my foot,” and she does, straddling the mesh, careful of the white paper bag in the one hand, the cup-carrier in the other, and three tall white paper cups.
“I think it’s the only time I’ve fallen in love with a city through a novel.”
