Book #21 of 2026: The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald by John U. Bacon As made famous in the Gordon Lightfoot ballad the following year, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald was a cargo ship that sank in Lake Superior in 1975, “when the gales of November came early.” The exact cause …
Author Archives: Joe Kessler
TV Review: Wonder Man, season 1
TV #5 of 2026: Wonder Man, season 1 This Marvel miniseries is a little shaggy in its storytelling — did we really need an entire episode devoted to the minor character Doorman, in a season with only eight installments in total? — but it pulls its various threads together enough to satisfy me in the …
Book Review: Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones
Book #20 of 2026: Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones This 1984 fantasy novel offers a weird and problematic little bildungsroman. Author Diana Wynne Jones excels as usual at the quotidian slice-of-life business and the unexpected intrusion of magic into the ordinary, but there are a few major hurdles that readers will need to …
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TV Review: Our Flag Means Death, season 1
TV #4 of 2026: Our Flag Means Death, season 1 These ten episodes improve as they go along, particularly once the writers lay down their cards and start embracing the queer themes directly. Though the series has gained notoriety as the gay pirate show, the only indication of that status early on is that a …
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Book Review: Long Chills & Case Dough: A Sanderson Curiosity by Brandon Sanderson
Book #19 of 2026: Long Chills & Case Dough: A Sanderson Curiosity by Brandon Sanderson [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.] This short novella was written in the early 2000s and included as an extra gift to backers of author Brandon Sanderson’s massive Kickstarter campaign in 2023 (now subtitled as A Sanderson Curiosity, …
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Book Review: The Heir Apparent by Rebecca Armitage
Book #18 of 2026: The Heir Apparent by Rebecca Armitage Three-and-a-half stars, rounded up. I generally don’t like when a narrating protagonist keeps important things hidden from the reader for so long, but the character in this case is so well-rendered that it’s easy to be invested in her dilemmas regardless. She’s not a perfect …
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Book Review: Yellow Jessamine by Caitlin Starling
Book #17 of 2026: Yellow Jessamine by Caitlin Starling This horror-fantasy title has potential, but the novella format ultimately works against it by not offering enough room for adequate development of its ideas. An herbalist and shipping magnate in a blockaded city becomes aware of a strange new illness spreading through the population, rendering its …
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Movie Review: Rocky (1976)
Movie #5 of 2026: Rocky (1976) The original Rocky film is one of those neat pieces of media where the on-screen plot aligns nicely with the behind-the-scenes story. Viewers get to see a poor boxer plucked from obscurity to fight the heavyweight champion in a nationally-televised bout, going further than anyone thought possible thanks to …
Book Review: Privateers by Ben Bova
Book #16 of 2026: Privateers by Ben Bova This 1985 sci-fi novel is the debut volume that author Ben Bova wrote in what became his Grand Tour sequence, although it would subsequently be rendered non-canonical by real-life events influencing how the later books developed. The story here is set in the mid-twenty-first century, in which …
Book Review: Doctor Who: The Highest Science by Gareth Roberts
Book #15 of 2026: Doctor Who: The Highest Science by Gareth Roberts (Virgin New Adventures #11) Author Gareth Roberts hasn’t had any fiction published professionally for almost a decade, ever since falling down the same transphobic pipeline as J. K. Rowling. (I can’t say how much of that is by choice versus industry blacklist, though …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 