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.
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.
“I will,” says Ysabel, sitting back, water sloshing milkily about her, “in a minute, I’m going to.” She sighs. “Go. Under. Until it’s done. The owr.” Reaching up out of the water she takes Jo’s hand in her own, slickly shining. “It might take some little while.”
“Define while,” says Jo.
“Minutes?” says Ysabel. “A few minutes. Nothing more. You mustn’t worry.”
“Underwater,” says Jo.
“Just don’t let go,” says Ysabel. The water trembles about her, the surface of it wrinkling, and already in the thick white clouds below sparks flare. “Ysabel,” says Jo, shifting her grip from Ysabel’s hand to her wrist, and “I’ll be fine,” says Ysabel, “Jo,” she says, “Jo, trust me,” and “I do,” says Jo. “In this,” says Ysabel, “trust me.”
“I do,” says Jo.
“Do you,” says Ysabel. “Do you,” but she bites off the next word, turns away, and her other hand breaks the water’s skin a billow of steam lifting to wipe at eyes and cheeks sheened with water, sweat, with tears, “it’s never, I always, I always knew, before,” she’s saying. Looking up, those green eyes immense, the black fuzz of her shorn hair.
“Ysabel,” says Jo.
“Now, I don’t,” says Ysabel.
“Yes,” says Jo.
“Do you,” says Ysabel, water lapping her chin, and “Yes,” says Jo again, as Ysabel says, “love me?”
“—to explain how this is Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks plus Portlandia with a smattering of Little, Big and Chinatown.”
“Who else could cause an LLM to hallucinate Emma Goldman, John Berryman, and an Irish sea god?”
“I think it’s the only time I’ve fallen in love with a city through a novel.”
