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.
Harsh light on steel, his blade the length of it broadening from pointed tip to palm-width ricasso, there about the flatly cruciform hilt held lightly in both his gauntleted hands, hers a shorter, slender thing, needle-whip and wick about in her one hand netted by the glittering silver guard of wiry strands, thrust and thrust and slipping slice, and each assault brushed off by the merest twitch of his long impassive blade, that here and there tips forward, a simple riposte, wildly batted back, and every steely strike another clang wrung from some antique carillon.
She steps back, away, around, feet bare on polished concrete. Restlessly jagged slashes at the air. Her free hand in a fingerless cycling glove held up against her chest, her plain black T-shirt, her black tights, her wine-red hair. His bootheels click a stately tempo toward her, his blade held up and straight ahead, the flat of it parallel to the floor, tip of it squarely toward her eyes, one of his elbows crooked up at an angle, tight white tank and brown jeans and his cap of black hair shining. Jo springs right, jogs left her shoulder dipping, swing and up a thrust he bats aside with a slight twist, his sword still high, still flat, still stepping toward her, click and click as she scrambles back. “You let me control the field,” says Luys.
Another long step back and right again a straight hard thrust scraped off the tip of his blade turned to parry, to slice past, to poke at her. A leap back, her back toward the big white SUV parked near the wall, her blade up at an angle, guarded, “Like a goddamn tank,” she says.
“At least make me work for it,” he says, “my lady,” click and click, blade up, elbow cocked.
“I think it’s the only time I’ve fallen in love with a city through a novel.”
“…a flicker of sharp impressionistic scenes skittering atop a deeply imagined alternate present.”
