City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon, only with more sword fights: an urban fantasy mixing magical realism with gonzo noirish prose, where duels are fought in Pioneer Square, and river gods retire to comfortably shabby apartments.
Want to make carnitas without all the fat? Bolognese without the wait? Why? Why when there are so many pork dishes that are not confited, so many Italian pasta sauces that don’t require hours of simmering. If “that” is to be avoided for whatever reason, it feels like a failure of the imagination to stay stuck on “this.” We, editors and readers alike, are all drinking the same very contemporary, very American flavor of Kool-Aid, keeping up the charade that we can have everything we want and nothing that we don’t, even as our lives feel harder and tighter.
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.
Hand in hand from glaring sunlight wisp of bare feet thump of shoes, a sudden swell of darkness as the door swings shut behind them, shadows to foil yellow hair and gleaming shoulders, arms limned with the last of that thin-stretched light. “Wait,” says Ettie, pulling Chrissie back to her, pulled close, and arms folding about and cheek by cheek, an embrace there before a washer and a dryer, hidden away under a drape of patterned cloth. And then, “How could you,” she says, stepping back.
“She asked.”
“It’s been two weeks.”
“I know.”
“How could you possibly.”
“It’s been two weeks.”
“God,” says Ettie. “You smell like a piña colada.”
“We burn so easily.”
“You’ll spoil the look.”
“It’s, like, SPF 150 or something.” And then, “You could lay out, too–”
“As if,” says Ettie. “You left!”
“She asked.”
“She’s asked a lot of people!” cries Ettie. “Whatever it is. I’ve met some of them. They all,” and then, throwing up her hands, “dammit, she broke your heart!”
“But my heart isn’t broken,” says Chrissie.
“It’s like Twin Peaks had a baby with Once Upon a Time.”
“It’s what urban fantasy might be now, if it’d gone in different directions.”
