The Strange Adventures
of Rangergirl

A super-powered outlaw escapes his comic-book confines and comes gunning for his creator

	The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl
	By Tim Pratt
	Bantam Spectra
	Trade paperback, Nov. 2005
	416 pages
	ISBN 0-553-38338-8
	MSRP: $12

Review by Paul Witcover

arzi is the night manager of Genius Loci, the hippest cafe in Santa Cruz, where the walls are decorated with the fanciful murals of an artist named Garamond Ray, who disappeared in 1989 during the Loma Prieta earthquake. Marzi is also an artist; she writes and draws a comic book, a cowpunk fantasy that bears the title of this novel, Pratt's first. Two years prior to the start of the novel, Marzi dropped out of art school following a nervous breakdown, one symptom of which was a paralyzing and seemingly irrational fear of opening doors. Largely recovered, she is just beginning to feel confident again in herself and the world. Her best friend, Lindsay, a flirtatious omnisexual currently enamored of a lesbian biker named Alice, is trying to set her up with Jonathan, a metrosexual art-history grad student who is living above Genius Loci for the summer in order to study Ray's murals firsthand.

Marzi's recovery, if not her romance, is set back when a mud-caked woman named Jane shows up at the cafe and attacks her, accusing her of imprisoning the "dark goddess of the Earth." As if this weren't disconcerting enough, she starts having quasi-hallucinations in which elements of her comic are superimposed over the real world. Is she suffering another crackup?

If only. Because in a back room of the cafe is a door that leads into "a world just beyond the visible," where an ancient and malevolent entity has, in fact, been imprisoned—and from which it seeks to escape. The last time it got out was 1989, and the destructiveness of the Loma Prieta earthquake was just a taste of what it has in mind now. Marzi's creative abilities have mysteriously made her the entity's jailer but also given it the means to break out, for her artistic imagination, as expressed in the Rangergirl comic, also shapes the world behind the door, so that the entity becomes the villain from her comic, the Outlaw—and everyone knows there is no jail cell capable of holding the archetypal outlaw.

Blazing six-guns firing blanks

A great novel will someday result from the shotgun wedding of the western and fantasy genres, but The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl is not it. Pratt's first novel is mediocre at best, a sloppy production that lacks focus and cohesion, as if it were written piecemeal over many years and then, in a caffeine-fueled frenzy, stitched together over the course of a few sleepless nights.

His characters, from Marzi on down, are as clichéd as his Outlaw, who has at least the excuse of being, literally, a walking cliché. But Marzi, Lindsay, Jonathan and the rest seem to have strayed from an alternate-world episode of Friends—a world in which that sitcom was even less amusing, its characters even more smugly annoying, than in this one. Marzi is supposed to be a comic auteur, yet there is little sense that being an artist is an integral part of who she is; rather, it seems a tacked-on quality, necessary to the plot but otherwise extraneous to her character. When the Outlaw reveals that Marzi's artistic genius is shaping the reality behind the door, the reader can fairly object that Pratt has adduced scant evidence of it beyond the accolades he has placed into the mouths of his other characters.

Although the action takes place in a populous city and involves outrageous happenings in broad daylight, before witnesses, Pratt refuses to allow real-world ramifications to interfere with his plot. At one point, acts of wanton destruction and murder performed by the Outlaw and his gang bring the police; so far so good. But then the Outlaw escapes by running over terrain where the police vehicles cannot follow. It's not the speed of the Outlaw that is objectionable here but the absence of helicopters for pursuit. Pratt is not playing fair with readers or with his own concept by failing to follow through on the logic of a situation just because it is inconvenient to the plot. Similarly, the fantastic world behind the door is explored and explained only perfunctorily and to the extent necessary for Marzi to get from point A to point B. It is difficult to care about characters or to be swept up in events when the deck is so obviously stacked. Rangergirl is a book to get through, not get lost in.

The glimpses we get of the comic-book world of Rangergirl are more interesting than anything in the novel itself, and I wish Pratt had given the comic equal time. —Paul

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Also in this issue: Orphan's Destiny, by Robert Buettner

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