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.
Perhaps all men, by the very act of being born, are destined to suffer violence; yet this is a truth to which circumstance shuts men’s eyes. The strong are, as a matter of fact, never absolutely strong, nor are the weak absolutely weak, but neither is aware of this. They have in common a refusal to believe that they both belong to the same species: the weak see no relation between themselves and the strong, and vice versa. The man who is the possessor of force seems to walk through a non-resistant element; in the human substance that surrounds him nothing has the power to interpose, between the impulse and the act, the tiny interval that is reflection.
Where there is no room for reflection, there is none either for justice or prudence. Hence we see men in arms behaving harshly and madly. We see their sword bury itself in the breast of a disarmed enemy who is in the very act of pleading at their knees. We see them triumph over a dying man by describing to him the outrages his corpse will endure. We see Achilles cut the throats of twelve Trojan boys on the funeral pyre of Patroclus as naturally as we cut flowers for a grave.
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’—
A jagged crack across the black glass face of it, and she takes great care, laying it on the pillow, inserting the power cord. Knelt there, wavering, exhaustion perhaps, sagging with sudden relief when the screen of it flickers to life, a black bitten apple on a white field. A photo appears, herself, brown hair short and tufted, cheek to cheek with Ysabel, long black curls, knowing smile. 12:19, say slender floating numerals above. Friday, May 4.
Steam billows from the shower, but she’s by the sink, long robe of buffalo plaid tied off about her waist, empty sleeves a-dangle. She’s smearing creme over her sunblasted shoulders, wincingly persisting till she catches sight of herself in the artfully oblong mirror, ragged hair, that nose, her thin-lipped grimace. From the rumple of robe about her hips a faintly puckered seam runs pinkly up and pale to an ovoid dimple the size of a thumbprint, sheened with a vague iridescence, canted in the middle of her breast.
Wrapped in that robe, squatting in the doorway, she works a plug in a socket. Strings of little yellow lights flick on. Up then, across the kitchen, past a dead bouquet, the counter littered with desiccated petals, brown-pink, black-purple. Down the three low steps into the open room beyond, windows left and right in walls that narrow to a point, and at the top of the room a great dark chair. Knee on the cushions, leaned close to the window, she looks down. A car preternaturally silent passes through the intersection. The marquee of the theater across the way is dark, but the letters can still be made out, Reds 600, Cinco de Mayo la Batalla, 930.
A pot left on an unlit burner, and something dried within rattles loose when she picks it up, sets it frowning in the sink. Shakes out a wadded dishtowel, folds it, leaves it a neat little square on the counter. Opens the fridge on a shrunken lemon half, a couple of wilted scallions, some cans of diet cola and a cardboard takeout box. A slender carton of milk, red and white, Alpenrose, it says. She pulls it out, pinches it open, tips it over a blue-lipped glass, but what pours out is thickly lumpy slopping, fouled, she hurls the carton splattering away to drop a-splot in the sink.
“…like Little, Big crossed with Revolutionary Girl Utena.”
“It’s serial fiction done right.”
