City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon, only with more sword fights: an urban fantasy mixing magical realism with gonzo noirish prose, where duels are fought in Pioneer Square, and river gods retire to comfortably shabby apartments.
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’—
I've written before, about my, well, I wouldn't say discomfort with the zine scene, no, I mean, maybe I'd go as high as out-of-placeness, but you put it like that, I mean, I tend to feel out of place just about anywhere I go, so. City of Roses is a number of things, a website, some books, an epic, an oddity, what I do with what time I can spare, but it has always been a zine.
France commissioned the original statue in 1870 after losing the Franco-Prussian War, a glittering likeness of its patron saint to boost morale. It sits outside the luxe Hotel Regina in Paris’s first arrondissement, framed by the Jardin des Tuileries and the Louvre. Nancy, France; Melbourne, Australia; and New Orleans and Philadelphia all have their own copies made from sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet’s original molds. Though Portland’s souvenir may have the quirk of being the trickiest to access, protected on its humble, grassy loop de loop by an unrelenting swirl of traffic.
Level A, Furniture, says the sign laid into the floor under her feet, but as she steps off the escalator she isn’t looking over ersatz rooms, each on its island of carpeting, the queen-sized beds heaped with clashing pillows, the rectilinear sofas, all chrome and black leather. Tock and plock of bootheels, her houndstooth skirt, her tan trench coat, she heads off to one side, an alcove there where a couple of full-length mirrors in bulky wood frames are leaned against a wall. Cater-cornered from them a swinging door, lit by a small glass square criss-crossed with chicken-wire. She pushes through it into a service corridor crowded with pallets loaded with stuff, anonymous cardboard boxes swaddled in plastic wrap, patio furniture strapped in teetering stacks. She ducks under an enormous plastic candy cane, barber-striped, sidles past a throne all threadbare velveteen and worn gold-painted wood. Pushes away a stuffed reindeer, its nose an unlit bulb. There, beneath a stretch of dented duct, a portholed door, and beside it a boxy intercom grille, and no button or level or latch. Over the porthole blocky letters, carefully painted, say Boiler Room. She stoops over the grimy yellowed intercom, “Ah,” she says, “Anna Nirdlinger, from Welund Rhythidd, to see Mousely.”
After a moment a squawk from the box, a gabbled squelch in a rising pitch. She leans closer. “Anna,” she says. “Rhythidd? Mousely.” And then, “Mousely.”
Far below, something dings, there’s a groan and a climbing whine of cable, grind and squeak, a clang as light rises to fill the porthole settling as the noises drop with a thump back to a hum. The door sides open, she steps inside. The elevator begins its descent with a cacophonous jerk, and she resettles her narrow, black-rimmed glasses, clutching her shoulder bag close to herself. A deep breath in through her nose.
“…like Little, Big crossed with Revolutionary Girl Utena.”
“It’s serial fiction done right.”
