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.
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—
This is a good place to discuss point of view in The Emperor of Gladness. Perhaps it is dry, technical, and petty, but point of view matters a great deal to me as a reader. Point of view describes the organizing intelligence of a story. It controls the time signature, the outlay of information, the mode of telling, the mediation of backstory, the integration of event and description into experience, which itself compounds into meaning. Point of view isn’t just first, second, or third person. It’s also verb tense. It’s whether something is experiential or summarized. It’s whether or not a story is retrospective. Whether it’s told focalized through this character or that other character. It controls what feels right in a story versus what feels extraneous or improper.
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’—
A four-digit code, entered on a keypad, “Hey, Becker?” says the woman leaning in the doorway. “You clocked in?”
“Just about,” he says, pressing enter. Arnold Becker, says the screen, the computer a rounded blob all smoked plastic and bondi blue. 11:03 AM 03/21.
“Help Dorena get the lunch out,” says the woman in the doorway, “but then you and Tish are on Trans this afternoon.” Orange cats-eye glasses hang from a strand of beads about her neck.
“I thought,” he says. It’s a small room, not much more than a closet, and the wall behind him looming metal shelves, stuffed with jugs of soap and bundles of paper napkins and tubs of powdered milk. “I was on Wobblies this week. With Rose.”
“Sam’s out early today,” says the woman with the glasses, “and no way can Tish handle them by herself.”
“Okay,” says Becker, pulling on a dark blue apron, the front of it printed with a stylized Y in purple and white. Child Development Center, it says.
“Okay,” Becker’s saying, “okay,” as children swarm about, red and white stripes and blue and green stripes, blue and purple, wild bright blue shirts and solid reds and purples from royal to lavender, flower prints and appliqués and comic book prints and calicos and robots in orange and red, all of them hastening to sit in low little plastic chairs at low wide round tables that come up to about Becker’s knee. He’s holding up a plastic tray loaded with plates, each with an identical scoop of spaghetti in tomato sauce and a precise wedge of apple, white-fleshed, red-peeled. “Who’s ready for worms?” he says, and a lusty chorus of “No!” and “Eww!” erupts. “Who ordered the toad? Anybody?” Beaming as he leans over, setting a plate before each child.
Leaning back against a credenza, paper towels ready in either hand, “Spaghetti,” he mutters. “Why’d it have to be spaghetti.”
“—over the top, long winded, unnecessary, grossly elaborate and just bloated beyond all proportion.”
“—people who like urban fantasy written in a rather jumpy unusual style will like this book—”
“The characters are both subtly human and bold rock-opera caricatures and why do they both work—”
