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.
Certainly there is no future for the genre except as a metaphor within some other work. By now the whole complex of ideas has passed so into the general culture that it is conceivable in art only as lyric imagery or as affectionate reminiscence. In fact, the vampire tradition has hardly been used in lyric verse—I can only remember one poem in Fantasy and Science Fiction. I always thought Italian directors would do very well with vampires as cultural symbols for the rotten rich—many of the traditions about the vampire are close to the atmosphere of films like La Notte or La Dolce Vita.
Well, sort of: even as the season out there wanes, and pumpkin spices ever so slightly begin to waft, we’re on the verge of launching the third season of the epic: Summer. —The first draft of no. 46 should be done this month, which means revisions and finalizations of no. 45 might begin this month, as well; I am confident if not certain that it will be released in October: the first novelette in vol. 5, The Greene Chapel; the beginning of, well, Summer.
In the September 1978 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, there is a review column written by the science fiction author, editor, and critic Algirdas Jonas “Algis” Budrys. Budrys offers a brief summary of the “tried and true elements” of urban fantasy:
the desuetudinous old rooming house and its counterculturish residents, the bit of old wilderness rising atop its mysterious hill in the midst of the city, and the strangely haunted, bookish protagonist who gradually realizes the horrible history of the place where he lives.
The grey man’s standing in the black-and-white tiled foyer as she makes her way down the wide white-painted steps, his mole-grey shoes, his gravel trousers roughly flecked, his ashen shirt, his rumpled face like old oatmeal.“Tell me you know who Ysabel is,” says Jo, “or I’m blowing right the hell past you.”
“The Queen in her folly,” he says, “who refused her crown. Put the gun away.”
Jo says, “She’s here?”
“One thing at a time. Put the gun away. Put it down. Then open your shirt.”
She’s stopped on the third step up, the gun in her hand at her side. “There’s something there, isn’t there,” she says.
“We must make certain,” he says.
“I can’t touch it,” she says, sitting on the steps. “I can feel it. It’s cold, a little. Numb.” The weighty clink of the gun as she sets it down. “But no matter which way I turn, or the light,” as she undoes a button, and another. “I can’t see anything there.” He hitches up his trousers to squat before her, her bare knees pressed together. “Who are you?” she says.
He looks up, his eyes grey blue a-swim in yellow grey. “My name is John,” he says, his voice lugubrious, “and once I was King of the City of Roses.”
“Oh,” says Jo.
“Who else could cause an LLM to hallucinate Emma Goldman, John Berryman, and an Irish sea god?”
“Long, complex with a lyrical rhythm to it that’s intoxicating.”
