City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon: an urban fantasy mixing magical realism with gonzo noirish prose, where duels are fought in Pioneer Square, and union meetings are beseiged by ghost bicycles.
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’—
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.
Those wicked talons blackly shining relax their hold, lift, stretch, and he leans back, hands up in abeyance, as they resettle about the wooden dowel, rasp and clack, two curled about the front of it, and two behind. The insistent buzz of the electric lantern by his knee. He leans in close again. Wrapped about the knobbled yellow-grey leg above those talons a bit of olive canvas, and with great care he pinches it, the gleam of a brass snap winking in the shadow of his thumb. His other hand up to gently steady the feathered bulk looming above. Somewhere up there a shining eye, blinking, unconcerned, and the black curl of a wicked beak.
Setting the buzzing lantern on a rickety table of old grey boards, a crumpled leather notebook there beside it. That olive strap in his rough-edged palm, and pinned to it a dented metal capsule of that same olive color, absurdly small against his fingertips. Head tipped back and a breath sucked through his teeth, he sets to carefully unscrewing the wee top of it.
A bit of yellow ribbon just a couple inches long, unrolled, weighted down at either end with pennies, and tiny symbols scratched in brown ink down the length of it. He’s squinting at them, writing pairs of characters on a leaf of the notebook, IS, LK, CI, GF, FO. Off in the shadows back behind him cages creak, a rattle of chains, claw-clacks and the fluffs of settling wings. He’s circling letters, sketching arrows and lines from this one to that, then lifts the pen, looks up, peers down at the floor there by his booted foot. He’s returning to the page when it happens again, the faint knock somewhere below, but then there’s the crash of breaking glass.
“It is fast, funny, sexy, and sometimes violent—”
“—people who like urban fantasy written in a rather jumpy unusual style will like this book—”
“Long, complex with a lyrical rhythm to it that’s intoxicating.”
