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.
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.
Perhaps all men, by the very act of being born, are destined to suffer violence; yet this is a truth to which circumstance shuts men’s eyes. The strong are, as a matter of fact, never absolutely strong, nor are the weak absolutely weak, but neither is aware of this. They have in common a refusal to believe that they both belong to the same species: the weak see no relation between themselves and the strong, and vice versa. The man who is the possessor of force seems to walk through a non-resistant element; in the human substance that surrounds him nothing has the power to interpose, between the impulse and the act, the tiny interval that is reflection.
Where there is no room for reflection, there is none either for justice or prudence. Hence we see men in arms behaving harshly and madly. We see their sword bury itself in the breast of a disarmed enemy who is in the very act of pleading at their knees. We see them triumph over a dying man by describing to him the outrages his corpse will endure. We see Achilles cut the throats of twelve Trojan boys on the funeral pyre of Patroclus as naturally as we cut flowers for a grave.
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—
Across the empty parking lot a looming box of a store, the façade of it a great oblong thrust above the high flat roof, and stained across the front of it where a sign once hung, and now just holes punched in sheet metal where once were struts and electrical conduits. By the blankly dark front doors a sheet of plywood’s nailed to a frame of two-by-fours, and a plastic sheet tacked to the plywood, Future Home, say faded black letters, Columbia River Campus Advanced Disaster Management Simulator. A heavy chain is looped about the handles of the doors, and a padlock, bulky with a keysafe. She brushes a finger down the keypad set in the front of it, and it falls open with a clunk. She starts back, looks around, Leans in, twisting the lock free of the chain, and it clanking falls away.
Dust within, and darkness. Light scraped by scratched door-glass falls to thinly flop against a stack of drywall, a couple of buckets that say Sheet Rock All Purpose Joint Compound. Past that, across stained concrete, a shadowed mound of gutted cardboard boxes, glinting with shucked plastic clamshells. What might be a desk lamp’s shining beyond, somewhere behind a curling row of slender columns in all that enormous darkness, and the faintly tinny chirps of music playing to itself. “Hey, hello?” calls Jo. “Chazz?”
They’re filing cabinets, those columns, a dozen or so in a wide circle about the warm glow of that lamp, tall, five drawers each and each of them painted a dull institutional green, dented, scratched, rusted along the corners and edges. Some of those drawers hang open, crammed with manila folders stuffed with sheets of onionskin and glassine all protecting photographs, glossy photos stuck up, haphazardly tucked away, and more spilled on the dusty floor about, dozens of them, hundreds, and on the desk in the middle of the cabinets, stacks of photos piled atop folders and more folders stacked atop the piles, and a high thin voice singing over stinging strings and piano, William William William Rogers put it in its place, blood and tears from old Japan, and he leans forward to shut off the little radio, dressed all in black, his pink head gleaming.
“Devil,” says Jo.
“It’s what urban fantasy might be now, if it’d gone in different directions.”
“…a flicker of sharp impressionistic scenes skittering atop a deeply imagined alternate present.”
