Reviewed by Jess
TITLE: Portrait of a Ghost
AUTHOR: Parker Avrile
PUBLISHER: Self-published
LENGTH: 210 pages
RELEASE DATE: September 17, 2018
BLURB:
Twenty years after a tragic accident, Mark still lives alone in a haunted house. Can a young artist from Brooklyn break the spell?
Leo has never had a serious relationship. He’s all about the art. And then he meets Mark, a man with a face that compels him to create portrait after portrait. Is this obsession? Or is it something deeper?
REVIEW:
The story of Dorian Gray is a classic tale of art, mortality, and the price of youthful beauty, and it’s especially relevant in the gay literary tradition. While this book isn’t a retelling, it certainly takes inspiration from the Oscar Wilde original. Mark Arrowwood is a man frozen in time, his appearance half of his actual age, who is stuck in a beautiful old house that seems to want Mark all for itself. But when he meets Leo, a handsome young artist from Brooklyn, he comes alive for the first time in years—and also sprouts his first gray hair. We’re left wondering—does Mark even want this apparent immortality? Or would be rather have another chance at love?
It certainly sounds like a compelling story, but the execution consistently disappoints. First of all, the emphasis on Mark’s looks just never created the tension it wanted to. The major conflict for the first half of the book was quite simply Mark’s young appearance—a man in his early forties who looks barely twenty. It’s odd, sure, but it made no sense to me as a main conflict. I mean, we’ve seen people like Andy Samberg and Gabrielle Union. We all know of a gorgeous person in their forties who could easily pass for someone twenty years younger. It’s not enough to form an entire story around, and even when it started becoming a piece of a larger puzzle, it still underwhelmed.
Then the haunted house elements appear. I love a good haunted house story, and I think the parts of the story in which Mark is held back by a possibly jealous and vengeful old ghost are the best parts of the book. They’re classically chilling, and a perfect way to end September and greet the spookiest month of the year. I also like how we’re kept in suspense about the actual entity holding Mark back. Is it really a spirit (possibly one of a jealous deceased lover), or is it just Mark himself, afraid to take the next step towards a new life? Unlike the tension involving Mark’s “immortality,” this suspense actually works, and I was eager to see how it ended.
The romance with Leo had some high points, but it veered too close to Twilight territory for my taste. It’s a case of true insta-love—their physical attraction is immediate, but the emotional attachment faded into the background. These two are in love (maybe even enough to break a 20-year curse), but we don’t really see it happen. And their sex scenes followed a familiar pattern for Parker Avrile—some juvenile exploration of each other’s bodies, some light sensory deprivation. Avrile’s love scenes have never been a strong point for me, and this book is no different.
By the last 10% of the story, things start coming together. Is it a government conspiracy? Alien technology? Your classic poltergeist? A case of mass hysteria? Maybe it’s a little bit of all of the above. We get a satisfying ending, but it’s a generally unsatisfying story about love and letting go of the past. As Mark moves forward with Leo, so does everything else—his appearance, his house, even his town. But we never feel the necessary tension or high stakes to make us really invested in this man who has been frozen in time for 20 years.
So Mark moves on. But before he did, I just needed to care more.
RATING: 
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