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.
Work proceeds apace: I have reached the part of the draft of the 46th novelette where I can loop back to finish the unfinished draft of the 45th novelette, and when that’s done I can skip ahead to what of the 46th novelette follows immediately thereafter to write that down and then, finally, settle back to finish what’s left of them both. And then? Revision, and polish, and cut to fit, and to press; and then, the third season will finally have begun.
Meanwhile: might I draw your attention to an avenue of support, for the city? There’s Patreon, for those who favor the tried and true, more commercial end of the market, but also Comradery, for the scrappy upstart end—
This is a good place to discuss point of view in The Emperor of Gladness. Perhaps it is dry, technical, and petty, but point of view matters a great deal to me as a reader. Point of view describes the organizing intelligence of a story. It controls the time signature, the outlay of information, the mode of telling, the mediation of backstory, the integration of event and description into experience, which itself compounds into meaning. Point of view isn’t just first, second, or third person. It’s also verb tense. It’s whether something is experiential or summarized. It’s whether or not a story is retrospective. Whether it’s told focalized through this character or that other character. It controls what feels right in a story versus what feels extraneous or improper.
Many readers of The Night Land, and more still who give up on the book, gag on its prose; The Night Land is a famously “difficult read.” For The Night Land, Hodgson devised an eccentric, faux seventeenth- or eighteenth-century style, convoluted and orotund, which even Lovecraft found “grotesque and absurd.” A few critics have supported Hodgson’s stylistic choice (Greer Gilman in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, Nigel Brown in “An Apology for the Linguistic Architecture of The Night Land”), but Murphy mounts an innovative defense. He asks us to see the difficulty of reading as an intrinsic element of weird fiction, a twinning of the reader’s efforts with those of the characters’—
“Berlin,” he says, huddled unbelted in the passenger seat, head against the window, loose hair stirred by the howl of a heater on high, his bare legs, bare arms pricked with gooseflesh, wet bare feet clutched one over the other on the floorboard.
“I thought it was Dubai,” she says.
His head rolls side-to-side against the glass, “I was never,” he says, and then “stop it,” and “What?” she says, the car, slowing. “Not you,” he says. “Not you. I was never in Dubai.”
“I could’ve sworn,” she says.
“The abandoned,” he says, “limousines. Himmelblau. Ellenellenellen Ell,” he says.
“The show, right, that was the summer Katarci had that amazing,” and “Please,” he says, quietly, “that sublet,” she says, “down by Yaam Beach.” Clack and swipe of windshield wipers. She’s made a turn, they’re sweeping up a ramp. “You’d just met that guy, what was it– that obnoxious little fucker?”
“Charles,” says Mr. Keightlinger.
“Really?” Her black hair’s spiky short. Her hoodie’s black, of some rubbery felted stuff. What can be seen of her tattoo, stretched up along her throat toward the point of her jaw, leaves, branches, a songbird’s beak, all sharp black lines. “I thought it was weirder than that.”
“No,” he says, folding his arms about himself. “It was only ever really Charles.” They’re going across a bridge. Through the rain-smeared glass behind his head the city, stood up about a curl of river, and more bridges, there and there and there.
“It is fast, funny, sexy, and sometimes violent—”
“Just a glorious bit of writing, I can’t recommend it highly enough.”
“Also there’s some bits that are sexy as hell so like, be prepared for that…”
