City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon, only with more sword fights: a wicked concoction of urban pastoral and incantatory fantastic, where aspirants are knighted in Forest Park, and the Devil keeps a morgue in an abandoned big-box store.
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.
The sound of bottles clinking in the distance. Ysabel tips back her head the hood of her parka slumping. She doesn’t so much blow the smoke from her mouth as let it drift, tugged back as she walks on down the sidewalk. A little parking lot beside them before a pale building that says West Bearing & Parts over dark awnings. She hands the glowing cigarette to Jo, who says, “Feeling better?”
Ysabel shrugs, nods, blows the last of the smoke from her mouth. “How do you feel? Besting the Chariot, two for two?”
Looking down the empty street Jo takes a drag and shrugs. “Does that one even count?” she says, and they cross, against the light.
“You touched steel, this time,” says Ysabel. The corner before them blocked with flimsy orange fencing and a sign that says Construction Sidewalk Closed by City Permit, and up and up behind the fence a thicket of naked girders and beams. They jog across to the opposite corner as a red hand flashes, stop, stop, stop. Jo says, “Do you think he’s right, about the Duke?”
“Do you think he’s right about me?” says Ysabel. A sleekly low-slung chair isolated under a spotlight in the store window behind her.
“I don’t know,” says Jo. “What’s with the cramps?”
“I just needed fresh air, and a walk. I told you. I feel so much better now.” As Jo glaring turns to walk on, Ysabel grabs her arm, pulls her back. “I did, I really did see what will be, Jo. I saw myself as Queen. I saw you and your sword at my side.”
