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.
The existence of the murals had leaked out of the rail yards by the late 1940s. “Art blooms in strange places but in all Portland perhaps the strangest is under the Lovejoy ramp to the Broadway bridge,” the Oregon Journal offered in passing.
A reporter at The Oregonian took a wrong turn coming out of downtown one evening, dodged an oncoming freight train, and unexpectedly found himself “surrounded by birds and animals” as well as “a fantastic half-tree, half-human that grappled with the night.”
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.
Six of them in the room, and him, slouched in the doorway, hands tucked in the pockets of his grimy sweatshirt. “That you spend time,” the withered old man is saying. “And I pay money, for that time.” A low, incantatory growl, a bellows-rasp of breath between each phrase. “That I buy, your time. How. How can I, buy time.” Sunlight glowers behind heavy ruddy drapes drawn over a picture window. “Hand me some time. Put, in my hands, an hour of your day.” He’s sitting in the big brown leather recliner, leaning forward, soft shoulders warmly wrapped in an old quilt. “See what good,” he says, and under the quilt a hand jolts, and another wheeze of breath, “it does. Either of us. Some of you.” One of those eyes squinted shut by a snarl of wrinkles, radiating from that sunken nose. “Think it’s your effort. Not time, but labor. Work. That if you try. That if you strive. That’s what I want. That’s what I pay for. But I don’t. Pay you. What I want. What I want.”
The XO’s there, across the room, frowning around the stiffness of his scar, and three men on the couch, the two of them at either end upright, elbows on knees, the one in a soft plaid workshirt, a steaming cup in his hand, the other in a brown and blue down vest, empty hands scraped rawly red about the knuckles, and between the two of them Jasper, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, grizzled head in his hands. “We, built,” the CO’s saying, from his recliner, “the finest country, the shining city, our green Jerusalem. We did that.” One hand springs from the quilt, clawed in a fist. “No one paid us. No one. Paid. Us.” There in the corner, Moody sips his coffee, watching the XO, who’s watching the CO. “We built it. It was ours. Until the others came, and took it.”
At that, he pulls his hood up, ducks back around the doorway, away down the unlit hall.
“Who else could cause an LLM to hallucinate Emma Goldman, John Berryman, and an Irish sea god?”
“—to explain how this is Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks plus Portlandia with a smattering of Little, Big and Chinatown.”
