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.
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.
Ysabel, a silhouette in the doorway, and behind her the hall, stellated by those strands of little yellow lights. “Jo?” she says. “Are you awake?”
From the mounded white comforter, blued in the darkness, a sigh resolves itself into a word: “Yes.”
“I wish you had come,” says Ysabel, stepping down as she kicks off her shoes, clump-thump. “The piano, in this one song,” and she twirls about, white coat slipping from her shoulders, flump to the floor. Careless drips of golden glitter spangle her bared arms, her thigh, down about her knees. “It was magnificent,” she says, sitting at the foot of the futon.
“There’s the, Samani? In the morning? Knighting of knights? Luys is gonna be here in, stupid early,” grabbing her phone from the clutter on the table by the futon, ghostly flash of her face in the light of the screen. “Three hours,” she says, putting it back.
“You might’ve brought him with you. Made a night of it.”
“Some of us need our sleep, your majesty?”
“Sleep, your grace, is highly overrated.”
“Just a glorious bit of writing, I can’t recommend it highly enough.”
“The characters are both subtly human and bold rock-opera caricatures and why do they both work—”
“…a flicker of sharp impressionistic scenes skittering atop a deeply imagined alternate present.”
