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.
The aptness of this satire in 2025—in which the law is even presuming to rule on biological “reality”—draws attention to the similarities between the 2020s and the 1920s, which seem much closer to the present now than, say, the 1940s or 1950s. Like our current government, the good burghers of Lud-in-the-Mist can’t counter, or even account for, the ongoing collapse of the dominant symbolic order around their ears because they are unable to recognise on ideological grounds the very forces that are opposing them.
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.
Pounding pounding, hurling herself against the demure brown door, “You must!” she cries. Adjusting her baggy grey coat she rattles the knob that will not turn. “Open!” she roars, kicks, hurls herself again. It shivers inward, tripping her staggering into a stairwell with a spray of splinters, “Hello?” she calls, pushing back her cloud of white-gold hair. Something saggy flops in her other hand.
Up the stairs then, pounding, back along a balustraded hall past the first door, ajar, to the second. She smacks it with the heel of her hand. “Open!” she calls. “I must speak with you!” Pounding. “Hello!” A deep breath. “I know you are within,” she says, more quietly. “It is of vital importance that I speak with you.”
Clack and scrape, the rattle of a bolt. The door opens enough to show a man peering over a taut-stretched security chain. “You shouldn’t be here,” he says, low and close.
“But I am. I bear news of utmost importance.”
“I don’t give a shit if it’s life or death,” he hisses, “if you wake her, I’m gonna,” but then he catches himself, deflating.
“It concerns the roof over her head,” says Marfisa, “the floor, beneath her feet.”
He leans close to the gap, scowling. “How did you,” he says. “Who are you.”
“Eddie?” a querulous voice from somewhere behind him. He sags even more, shaking his head, dwindling hair of it clipped close. “Nothing, ma’am,” he says. “Solicitor. Go on, now. You need your rest.”
“Nothing, hell,” that voice. “Go on. Let ’em in.”
“It’s like Twin Peaks had a baby with Once Upon a Time.”
“The surrealism, the lush detail, and the loving attention to local Portland culture…”
