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.
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 blade swung slowly parries up, to the left, low, to the right, and then a long low lunge, a stately thrust, a gleam slipping down the edge of it to splinter in the glittering guard about the hilt. Her free hand dropped back in a fist pulling herself back up, and tucks up close against her chest again.
“No,” he says.
Jo all in black shakes out her arms, works her head back and forth. Takes up her stance again, blade upright before her again, and again the parries, the lunge, the thrust.
“I can hear you thinking,” he says.
“I’m not,” she says, pulling back, “trying,” and the parries to all four quarters again, “for fast–”
“I don’t mean speed,” Roland says, “it’s,” his hands in fingerless bicycle gloves reach up, grasping, closing into fists about nothing. He claps them together, pushes himself up from the base of the engine hulking quietly idle, the housing of it painted an industrial pea-soup green, the great nest of gears racked vertically behind, waist-high and higher, glistening with grease. “The flow,” he says. The sword he’s holding is long, and straight, with a heavy golden pommel bright in the shadows. He plants himself before her in the narrow aisle, right foot forward, off-hand loosely curled against the small of his back, and he’s already moving, swipe and step and cut and back and down into a lunge, his off-hand swinging down and back, extending, pulling him up again, the sword returning, “Just so,” he says. “Again?” Falling forward into a lunge, pulling back, the sword licking at this parry, that. “You see?”
