There's a different reality where Dollhouse goes toe to toe on the television with The Walking Dead to give us our post apocalyptic jollies. That would probably be a reality with Whedon's special sauce all over the Marvel universe. In any case these comics are light years away from the imprint of the week the show seemed like initially. I bought this on a whim at a comic book store sidewalk sale and it was worth the price of admission.

longer review on mentatjack.com, but this is the meat:

The titular briar patch offers us views of very unlikely worlds. Time and presumably other aspects of physics behave differently. Mermaids and Giants and vampires and more that would become central to a more run of the mill novel become part of the scenery. This meta world next door to ours is introduced as a convenient, if dangerous and somewhat eccentric, method for avoiding rush hour traffic. It’s more than that and the scenery makes a point of not staying flatly in the background.

The characters include a ghost, a magic car and its driver, a depressed and jaded immortal, a sociopath, a doppelganger and an explorer. Fitting each of the characters into the above mentioned pigeon holes, is a fun exercise for the reader. There’s also the central character of Darrin and his college buddy Nicholas. All the characters are actively seeking something. They manipulate and are manipulated. They find shortcuts in the briarpatch. Relationships solidify and crumble. Darrin is seeking to understand why his girlfriend left him and then, a few months later, committed suicide by jumping off of the Golden Gate Bridge. This central mystery introduces him to the larger cast of characters. Once everyone’s role is understood, the briar patch gives everything a good shake and we get to see exactly who gets what they’re seeking.

Suicide and Cult are both mentioned on the back cover of Briarpatch. Death is a big issue wrestled with in the novel and more than one character are stuck like a broken record in the denial stage of grieving. Their lives are defined by those that they’ve lost. The implications of immortality are explored and fit nicely into the structure of the narrative. What does someone who can’t die fear? Just as the briarpatch lies outside of our consensus reality, each character, whether obsessed with life or obsessed with death, offers us something to think about what lies beyond our current existence. These are weighty issues, offering much for contemplation, but there’s plenty of action and exploration (and sex and food and photography) along the way.

The first 1/2 of the novel involves most of the characters confused and disconnected and the narrative structure mirrors this confusion. The story is presented non-linearly and almost every character gets a point of view scene. Later as everyone has a bit more clue about what’s going on, the story settles into smaller group of point of view characters and proceeds in a more straight forward march toward the final conflicts. There’s a portion of the second half that provides a relatively short montage of months of travel in the briarpatch. It works infinitely better than just saying “X months later,” but I suspect an entire series of novels could fill that space like the real numbers between 2 integers. This is my favorite Pratt so far and I’d recommend it to anyone who likes their fantasy mixed with contemporary reality, but is searching for something more (and weirder) than the typical urban fantasy.

In New York 1893, an accomplished painter, Piambo, is offered a strange commission to paint the portrait of a woman solely based on the stories she tells hidden from view behind a screen. There’s quite a lot of money at stake and from the offset it feels like an extrapolation of the tug of war between the commercial and creative needs of a professional artist. Each tale she tells of her childhood and later history is more fantastical than the next and draws strange parallels with Piambo’s experiences.

One by one even the most unbelievable of her stories is validated or in some mundane way explained, yet the narrative tapestry she weaves and increasingly strange events Piambo witnesses progressively increase the feeling that our painter, narrator is doomed. However, Piambo’s desire as painter and his personal philosophy strive to present the truth of a subject, not just their outward appearance. We see this in the opening of the book as he paints an idealized portrait of wealthy donor while none to subtly implying the truth by including in the frame wilting flowers in an expensive vase and goldfish bowl. Another example bookends the novel as Piambo considers a series of landscapes his self portrait.

The particular creative driving force of our protagonist subverts the manipulations of his subject. It’s clear from the beginning that she derives some sense of satisfaction from asking the impossible from a talented individual. As the story progresses it becomes clear that she’s mentally disturbed and has over the years managed her deteriorating mind by dressing it up as creativity and showmanship. The power play she initiates with a truly talented individual in Piambo is a last ditch effort to gain control of her sanity. It may have worked in the past, seemingly transferring the worst of her mental issues to various egotistical artists, but in this case she’s revealed for who she is and is undone.

Ford expertly pieces this story together, each narrative twist, whether part of Piambo’s adventures or Mrs. Charbuque’s stories or the introduction of colorful side characters are all in dialog. The result is a delightfully self referential piece that attempts to answer twin identity related questions raised explicitly by the narrator early in the novel: “What have I become?” and “What am I now to do?”

Complete review: http://mentatjack.com/2015/02/16/review-the-portrait-of-mrs-charbuque/