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.
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’—
The jingle of the bell over the door, and the whole crowd filling that front room turns, green work shirts and blue, brown coveralls, uniforms in black and taupe and white, breast-pocket insignia and badges and nameplates, here and there a plain white T-shirt, or dark blue, and styrofoam cups in every hand, and they’re staring at him in his grimy sweatshirt, the hood of it up, his hands in the pockets of it, the door propped open against his shoulder, and the street behind him filling with morning light.
“Come in if you’re coming,” says Gordon, stood behind the counter laden with almost-empty donut boxes and a couple of platters and a box of coffee. Christian steps inside, the door closing behind him, and shakes off his hood. “You already got the window fixed,” he says.
“You here to kick another hole in it?” And then, “Hold up, hold up,” as a muttering murmuring unrest sweeps through them, “let him be, let him be.”
Christian looks warily about them all, shifting and looking away from him, a sip here, a cough there, and then a woman in blue coveralls, her hair under a kerchief, lays a hand on the arm of the man beside her and steps back, gently urging him back with her, and across from her a burly little man in a boilersuit steps back, and yanks the elbow of the much taller man beside him, until an aisle is cleared through that small front room, and chest swelling with one great breath and both hands still in his pockets Christian steps along it up to the counter, and then with some effort tugs from the pockets a shoe that he sets down by a platter still holding a handful of pinwheel sandwiches. It’s a simple, well-made shoe, of shining oxblood leather, closed with a single monk strap.
“Just a glorious bit of writing, I can’t recommend it highly enough.”
“—people who like urban fantasy written in a rather jumpy unusual style will like this book—”
