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.
Booming banging rattling crash she yanks down the overhead door to close with a clang, driving home the bolt with a shove, snapping shut a conspicuously shiny padlock. Up out of the dying echoes a slender guitar-line picks its way to a shambling arpeggio, out in the cavernous space all around the low walls of the narrow stall about her, lined with framed, postcard-sized drawings of street corners, storefronts, houses hatched in ink with fiendish care. She stumps her way through confetti and bobbing drifting balloons, blue and white and silvery mylar, skirts of her high-waisted gown bobbing and belling, her long black hair threaded with silvery ribbons and gathered in two great hanks.
Next stall over, the door’s already closed, an enormous photo hung over it, all silvery black bared legs and buttocks bunched and ropey with muscle in a plié, filmy skirt lifted high by a rusted hook at the end of a heavy chain. A woman stands before it, black jeans, a slick black jacket, turning at the rustle of skirts, “Oh,” she says, “are you closing? Is it time to go?”
“We’ll probably shut the lights off, in a bit?” says Gloria Monday, and off behind her that guitar’s settled into a swaying round of strums and plucks, climbing and falling and back again. “But we’re not yet kicking anybody out.”
“Okay,” says the woman all in black, and then, “but, do you need any help? Sweeping up, or anything?”
“What, this?” says Gloria, kicking a blue balloon away. “Nah, we got this, thanks.”
“It’s like Twin Peaks had a baby with Once Upon a Time.”
“—people who like urban fantasy written in a rather jumpy unusual style will like this book—”
