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 knock. “Majesty?” pitched to carry through the door. “I mean to come within.” Ysabel, sat naked on the closed lid of the toilet, looks up as the door opens, “You would dare,” she says, “come gowned and trammeled to my presence, here?”
“Your pardon, lady,” and a rush of taffeta underskirts as Annisa kneels on the bathmat, bowing her black-scarfed head. “Needs must. You’re required below.”
“Required,” says Ysabel.
Butterflies of silver thread sparkle through that scarf as Annisa looks up. “Requested,” she says. “I’d help my lady dress, if such were to be your wish.”
“And are you now my mistress of the robes, or of the stool?” says Ysabel, as Annisa plucks up a scrap of lace and satin. “I am my lady’s servant in all things,” she says, brushing one bare foot, and when Ysabel deigns to lift it, slipping the underwear on and up, hands brownly warm against cool olive shins. “Your point is made,” says Ysabel, getting to her feet, pulling the underwear up about her hips. “It’s him, isn’t it,” she says. “He’s come back.”
“Yes, ma’am,” says Annisa, fetching the chemise, trailing pale gold ribbons. “He waits without, in his car.”
“Persistent,” says Ysabel, pulling the chemise over her head.
“And is he really not the Pinabel?”
“He really isn’t,” says Ysabel, tugging and settling.
“And the King is not the King.” Annisa gets to her feet.
“And the medhu will not turn,” says Ysabel, “and the Court still has no Bride.” Looking to Annisa then, all in purple and black under the yellow light. “Yet you’re still here. Is that not strange?”
Annisa blinks slowly, once. “Do you mean to say that we are rivals, now?”
Ysabel laughs.
“…like Little, Big crossed with Revolutionary Girl Utena.”
“—over the top, long winded, unnecessary, grossly elaborate and just bloated beyond all proportion.”
“The surrealism, the lush detail, and the loving attention to local Portland culture…”
