City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon: an urban fantasy mixing magical realism with gonzo noirish prose, where duels are fought in Pioneer Square, and union meetings are beseiged by ghost bicycles.
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.
Those wicked talons blackly shining relax their hold, lift, stretch, and he leans back, hands up in abeyance, as they resettle about the wooden dowel, rasp and clack, two curled about the front of it, and two behind. The insistent buzz of the electric lantern by his knee. He leans in close again. Wrapped about the knobbled yellow-grey leg above those talons a bit of olive canvas, and with great care he pinches it, the gleam of a brass snap winking in the shadow of his thumb. His other hand up to gently steady the feathered bulk looming above. Somewhere up there a shining eye, blinking, unconcerned, and the black curl of a wicked beak.
Setting the buzzing lantern on a rickety table of old grey boards, a crumpled leather notebook there beside it. That olive strap in his rough-edged palm, and pinned to it a dented metal capsule of that same olive color, absurdly small against his fingertips. Head tipped back and a breath sucked through his teeth, he sets to carefully unscrewing the wee top of it.
A bit of yellow ribbon just a couple inches long, unrolled, weighted down at either end with pennies, and tiny symbols scratched in brown ink down the length of it. He’s squinting at them, writing pairs of characters on a leaf of the notebook, IS, LK, CI, GF, FO. Off in the shadows back behind him cages creak, a rattle of chains, claw-clacks and the fluffs of settling wings. He’s circling letters, sketching arrows and lines from this one to that, then lifts the pen, looks up, peers down at the floor there by his booted foot. He’s returning to the page when it happens again, the faint knock somewhere below, but then there’s the crash of breaking glass.
“…a flicker of sharp impressionistic scenes skittering atop a deeply imagined alternate present.”
