City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon, only with more sword fights: a wicked concoction of urban pastoral and incantatory fantastic, where aspirants are knighted in Forest Park, and the Devil keeps a morgue in an abandoned big-box store.
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.
“The first order of business,” says the man at the head of the table, “in any face time we take with potential occupancy partners, we need to assess how the anticipated anchor’s gonna impact their appraisal and availability approach.” It’s a long table, a slab of wood the color of pale flesh, polished to a striking gleam that’s broken here and there by a phone or a computer tablet laid before this person or that, until down at the very other end of it, a couple of comb-bound reports bristling with post-it flags, a spill of colorful diagrams, a worn redweld holding a couple of file folders upright, a small black notebook splayed open, the wispy scratch of a fountain pen, APPRAISAL written in ruddy black ink, AVAILABILITY, then three sharp underscores. “It’s not,” the man at the head of the table is saying, “that we anticipate an antagonism toward the anchor, on the part of any potential partners?” His flat grey suit’s a touch too big, the collar of his soft blue shirt’s undone, his sparse beard neatly trimmed. “But by anticipating,” he says, “their respective stances vis-à-vis their individualized brand engagement profiles which, let me assure you, we will be reviewing in a thorough manner before we, we take up any,” he’s trailing off, “tête-à-têtes,” blinking quizzically. The room about them’s walled in cool sheets of green-tinged glass on all four sides and more beyond refracting, reflecting, shimmering desk lamps and fluorescents, computer screens, heads popping up over cubicle walls, turning, following the figure swimming up through them, one glass door after another opening before her, “I,” says the man at the head of the table, “excuse me,” as the final glass door swings open, she’s sweeping into the room, Ysabel in her long white coat. “I tried to tell her,” someone’s saying, a receptionist maybe, bobbing in her wake, and “Do you mind,” says an older man, halfway down the table, a hand on his phone on the wood, but she’s glaring at the very other end of the table. “How dare you,” she says.
“Sorry, folks,” says Lymond, screwing the cap onto his fountain pen. “Think we might have the room a minute?”
“It’s serial fiction done right.”
“Who else could cause an LLM to hallucinate Emma Goldman, John Berryman, and an Irish sea god?”
