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.
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.
Booming banging rattling crash she yanks down the overhead door to close with a clang, driving home the bolt with a shove, snapping shut a conspicuously shiny padlock. Up out of the dying echoes a slender guitar-line picks its way to a shambling arpeggio, out in the cavernous space all around the low walls of the narrow stall about her, lined with framed, postcard-sized drawings of street corners, storefronts, houses hatched in ink with fiendish care. She stumps her way through confetti and bobbing drifting balloons, blue and white and silvery mylar, skirts of her high-waisted gown bobbing and belling, her long black hair threaded with silvery ribbons and gathered in two great hanks.
Next stall over, the door’s already closed, an enormous photo hung over it, all silvery black bared legs and buttocks bunched and ropey with muscle in a plié, filmy skirt lifted high by a rusted hook at the end of a heavy chain. A woman stands before it, black jeans, a slick black jacket, turning at the rustle of skirts, “Oh,” she says, “are you closing? Is it time to go?”
“We’ll probably shut the lights off, in a bit?” says Gloria Monday, and off behind her that guitar’s settled into a swaying round of strums and plucks, climbing and falling and back again. “But we’re not yet kicking anybody out.”
“Okay,” says the woman all in black, and then, “but, do you need any help? Sweeping up, or anything?”
“What, this?” says Gloria, kicking a blue balloon away. “Nah, we got this, thanks.”
“Long, complex with a lyrical rhythm to it that’s intoxicating.”
