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.
While I’m writing a story, I am subject to a set of tensions indistinguishable from those that overtake me when I write poems. The distinction is most of all technical, because I find the idea of “poetic stories” more horrifying than yellow fever, and I am always very careful that what happens in my stories suggests to the reader a definite structure, a given reality, as unreal as it might seem to the eyes of a newspaper reader and those beings with-their-feet-on-the-ground. (What are feet? What is the ground?) If I find in your stories a fraternity that excites me and makes me want to be your friend, it is precisely the supreme nerve with which you plant your word trees.
The book established Whitehead’s intelligence and originality as a novelist, but I wasn’t too excited by the world of elevator inspection, and I was frankly irritated by the author’s choice of Lila Mae as the protagonist. Although it’s technically impressive and theoretically laudable when a male novelist succeeds in inhabiting a female persona, something about the actual practice makes me uneasy. Is the heroine doing double duty as the novelist’s fantasy sex object? Is the writer trying to colonize fictional territory that rightfully belongs to women? Or does the young literato, lacking the perks of power and feeling generally smallened by the culture, perhaps believe himself to be, at some deep level, not male at all?
I think “solidarity” is what Freaky Tales would call it, a movie which, believe it or not, I’m actually going to talk about. But again: I’ve given myself permission to write the longest essay anyone will write about Freaky Tales, as an exercise, experiment, statement, and/or self-indulgence; I like writing, and I am enjoying writing this, so I am. But the more I write, the more that length gives permission to anyone who doesn’t want to read it—even encourages them—to close the browser and move on. You’re not stuck with me, after all, the way you have no choice but to see a mural as you drive past it each day. You can go find something you like better and leave me to my fun.
An apron of bare dirt slopes from a retaining wall down to a row of slender columns upholding the bridge above, a file of proscenia framing the quietly empty cross street, dimly lit, the one-lane ramps arising close by either side. A couple of old dome tents pitched right up against the wall, beneath criss-crossed stripes of whitewash palimpsesting old graffiti, before flattened cardboard laid out, an impromptu parquet floor, but everyone hooting and hollering’s gathered about the wide circle scratched in the dirt, down by the arches, where all is vaguely lit by an orange haze of sodium vapor. She’s on her hands and knees in that circle, coughing, groaning, wrapped in a puffy ski jacket of some filthy color, impossible to name, and he’s strutting shirtless about her, preening for the crowd, skinny arms spread wide, fingers beckoning for more, nodding that head under a slop of dark hair, stringily greasy, sharp nose, sharp chin, those sharply eager eyes, “Another?” he roars, and they all bellow their approval. He rears back a heavy brown boot and hurls it forward, an unsteadying kick to her belly that lifts her bodily off the dirt, and a plosive burst of breath. He drops to a squat, sharp-bent elbows braced on sharply bended knees, teeth bared, waggling his tongue. Moaning she’s pushed herself back up on hands and knees, her mismatched shoes scuffing the dirt, “Oh, no!” he cries, sharp angles unfolding to lever him upright. “You ain’t got permission to leave, Bambi!” Stalking around to plant those boots once more between her and the sketchy edge of the circle as, grimacing with a labored sob, she pulls herself down, in, curling about herself as the crowd about them jeers. “Oh, no, indeed,” he says, quiet and close, as he tugs something free from the small of his back. “Bambi Jo, you ain’t never gonna leave.” An elaborate swing of his goosefleshed arm to bring to bear a long and tapered poignard, the hilt of it wrapped in wire.
“Dread Paladin.”
Silence falls about those two words, spoken, not loudly, but with cuttingly definite purpose.
“It’s serial fiction done right.”
“Just a glorious bit of writing, I can’t recommend it highly enough.”
“Our reviewers loved the world-building and well-drawn characters.”
