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 aptness of this satire in 2025—in which the law is even presuming to rule on biological “reality”—draws attention to the similarities between the 2020s and the 1920s, which seem much closer to the present now than, say, the 1940s or 1950s. Like our current government, the good burghers of Lud-in-the-Mist can’t counter, or even account for, the ongoing collapse of the dominant symbolic order around their ears because they are unable to recognise on ideological grounds the very forces that are opposing them.
Certainly there is no future for the genre except as a metaphor within some other work. By now the whole complex of ideas has passed so into the general culture that it is conceivable in art only as lyric imagery or as affectionate reminiscence. In fact, the vampire tradition has hardly been used in lyric verse—I can only remember one poem in Fantasy and Science Fiction. I always thought Italian directors would do very well with vampires as cultural symbols for the rotten rich—many of the traditions about the vampire are close to the atmosphere of films like La Notte or La Dolce Vita.
Well, sort of: even as the season out there wanes, and pumpkin spices ever so slightly begin to waft, we’re on the verge of launching the third season of the epic: Summer. —The first draft of no. 46 should be done this month, which means revisions and finalizations of no. 45 might begin this month, as well; I am confident if not certain that it will be released in October: the first novelette in vol. 5, The Greene Chapel; the beginning of, well, Summer.
“Oh,” says Jo, and then, “that can’t be right.”
“Holed up in St. Johns, with Chad and his dad. I was up there a couple weeks, sleeping in the damn, the dang basement.” Christian takes a drag from the cigarette and holds it out to her. “I’m supposed to be quitting,” she says as she takes it. “He got ten years. No way he’s out so soon.”
“Good behavior,” says Christian, and Jo snorts smoke. “Danny fucking Moody?”
Christian takes the cigarette back. “Maybe he broke out. Maybe five-oh’s closing in. Hard target search!” Another drag. He offers it to her, but she shakes her head, “It would’ve been in the news,” she says.
He lets the butt drop, grinds it into the mud. “Film at eleven.”
“The hell you were doing up there, anyway,” says Jo. Looking away down the unpaved alley, crowded by garage doors, high back fences, drifts of green grass up to the knee. “Two fucking weeks? The hell, Christian? You walk away from me, you walk away from everything I was gonna do for you, you walk away and you fucking go to the goddamn Dread fucking Paladin?”
Christian turns away. The gate behind them, leaning drunkenly from a single hinge. “Say what you like, the XO still runs the gutters. And for a racist motherfucker, he never stiffs me on what I bank with him?” Tucking his hands up under his bulky pullover, winding and unwinding. “I was gonna sleep up under the Marquam, but then he went and told me Moody’s back,” his elbows pulled in tight, “so I went elsewhere.”
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