The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Humans by Matt Haig

Book #78 of 2022:

The Humans by Matt Haig

This 2013 novel is one part a Douglas Adams-esque assortment of absurdist reflections on humanity, and one part a K-PAX plot of someone who looks like a regular human claiming to actually be an alien, to everyone’s reasonable disbelief. Yet whereas that latter title — which is namechecked here, so I’d say the homage is intentional — follows a psychiatric doctor worried his patient has concocted a delusion to suppress a trauma, this tale is rooted in the extraterrestrial’s perspective instead. We’re also plainly meant to accept that protagonist’s claims as genuine, since people do witness his powers and another member of his species at one point.

In truth, I think the story might have been stronger if it had held back on that last front, maintaining an ambiguity over whether the math professor had honestly been replaced by an off-world doppelgänger looking to erase all traces of his supposedly dangerous research or if this stranger confused by earth’s customs and how to relate to its inhabitants were just that same man experiencing a breakdown from stress. (That’s partly because such a reading is always going to be my preference in this kind of thing, and I know author Matt Haig manages that unresolved tension neatly in his later work The Midnight Library, but I do feel there’s good textual evidence for it here that’s ultimately squashed.)

Nevertheless, this is a fun and surprisingly moving affair overall, with a murderously problematic fave who’s sweet in his gradually-strengthening efforts to connect with the population around him. Although the writer is clearly still learning his craft, I’ve enjoyed this quite a lot.

[Content warning for attempted suicide.]

★★★★☆

Like this review?
–Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
–Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
–Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6288479-joe-kessler
–Or click here to browse through all my previous reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog

Book Review: The Burning Room by Michael Connelly

Book #77 of 2022:

The Burning Room by Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #17)

Another perfectly competent police procedural with detective Harry Bosch, looking into a pair of cold cases from decades back: a shooting recently upgraded to a homicide after the victim finally succumbed to his injuries and the bullet could be extracted from his spine, and an apartment building arson that the veteran cop’s new partner survived as a child. Neither crime’s details are particularly distinctive against the protagonist’s lengthy career at this point, and they both peter out in somewhat downbeat fashion by the end, but they’re solidly interesting enough to pass the time beforehand. My only slight complaint is how silly and superstitious he sounds to keep harping about the momentum of the investigation(s) and the need to push on immediately from one development to the next, given how many years have already passed in each matter.

For long-term readers of the series, it’s the changes in the hero’s personal life that will likely carry greater importance, despite being sidelined by the novel’s episodic plot. Harry’s daughter Maddie is now sixteen, dating, and showing an interest in following her parents into law enforcement, for instance, and her father is nearing his mandatory retirement age with the LAPD. These notes suggest possible future storylines more than they impact the present, but the serialization helps brighten up an otherwise run-of-the-mill volume.

[Content warning for gun violence, racism, death of children, and domestic abuse.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Saturday Night Live, season 47

TV #19 of 2022:

Saturday Night Live, season 47

This is the fifth season of SNL in a row that I’ve watched straight through as it aired, so at this point I feel pretty confident in my ability to rate a given span against the program’s typical output. So, what was different for the long-running sketch comedy show this time around?

First, the new cast members. Sarah Sherman brings an offbeat surreal energy that doesn’t always land for me but is distinctive enough that it’s generally refreshing. James Austin Johnson throws himself gamely into roles and is just incredible at the Trump and Biden impressions for which he was hired — a big improvement over anyone the show had used in either capacity before. Aristotle Athari, though, other than his delightful “Laughingtosh 3000” segment on Weekend Update, has failed to really register much all year. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him cut from the roster after this.

Then there’s the size of the cast. At 21 players, this is the largest ensemble Saturday Night Live has ever fielded, and it shows. Some of the senior performers are absent for long stretches of time filming other projects, but when everyone’s around it’s common for some folks to get only a stray line all episode, as often happens with Athari. I personally think the series is best when it feels like a tight-knit troupe, and that’s not exactly what we’ve been getting lately. Luckily four stars have already announced their departures — Aidy Bryant, Kate McKinnon, Pete Davidson, and Kyle Mooney, the first two of whom I’ll especially miss — so if Lorne Michaels and the other producers can hold off on replacing them directly, we might have a more reasonable group going forward.

That count of 21 doesn’t even include Please Don’t Destroy, a trio of writers added this run who also do their own prerecorded skits. These guys are sort of like Lonely Island at making a smaller show within the show, but they haven’t scored anywhere near the hits of that older crew yet. I don’t mind them and I always appreciate a creaky beast like SNL trying new things, but I wouldn’t miss it if this experiment turns out to be one and done.

All of which is to say that overall, season 47 isn’t much better or worse than usual. The laughs are reliable despite some recurring bits yielding the expected diminishing returns, and the political comedy has its heart in the right place even if it doesn’t seem to ever quite live up to the program’s sharp critical reputation. I’m still impressed they manage to throw everything together in a week each time, and it’s a nice distillation of the cultural zeitgeist that I don’t get as cleanly from the scripted series I follow. I wouldn’t call it a favorite this year or any other, but it’s solidly entertaining through and through.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Test by K. A. Applegate

Book #76 of 2022:

The Test by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #43)

This Animorphs novel is a direct sequel to ghostwriter Ellen Geroux’s earlier story #33 The Illusion, in which Tobias gets tortured by the unhinged sub-visser “Taylor.” The same antagonist is back for this tale, quickly recapturing the hawk boy after he makes the local news for leading rescuers to a missing child who’s lost in the woods during a raging storm. It’s an early example of the difficult moral questions looming over this volume: Should our protagonist risk his cover to help save the deaf kid? Can he trust that his abuser is earnest in her request for a partnership against their common foe? Will he participate in a terrorist attack on the Yeerk pool, knowing it would kill thousands of unwilling human hosts and noncombatant enemies along with the strategic target?

That’s the mission that Taylor proposes, even freeing Tobias to bring the offer to his friends. Claiming to now oppose Visser Three, she wants them to morph Taxxons and dig a tunnel connecting a natural gas pipeline to the pool, which she will then carefully incinerate with just enough fuel to wipe out everyone inside the underground cavern without damaging its structure — which her new regime will still require to feed — or anything on the surface.

It’s a tough moment for Tobias, who bluntly informs us that he’s still dealing with PTSD from his last time in her clutches and clearly can’t stop her from getting under his skin once more, but also for Cassie, who bravely stands up against her fellow Animorphs and refuses to take part in an operation requiring so much collateral damage to innocent lives. In a twist of deeply cruel dramatic irony, that positions the pacifist girl to step in and save the rest of the team when Taylor inevitably betrays them and tries to set off a massive explosion instead… which Cassie is only able to prevent by viciously battling a half-dozen human Controllers, something the teens have all sought to avoid whenever possible.

Because Tobias is narrating this adventure, we don’t get to witness that fight firsthand. But we see the brutal aftermath of their unconscious, barely alive bodies along with the effect on Cassie, who’s out of morph sobbing, clutching herself, and unresponsive when he and the others arrive. In the meantime, we’ve also been shown the terrifying all-consuming hunger of the Taxxon morphs, which nearly results in Tobias and Ax both trying to eat their allies and overstaying the morphing limit to be stuck in those forms forever.

In the end Taylor is gone and presumed dead, and the only real victory the heroes have accomplished is escaping without external injury and without having to actually bear the expected amount of death of their conscience. (Spoiler alert: it turns out the entire plot was a ploy Visser Three devised to try and slaughter the Andalite bandits and the faction of Yeerks favoring peaceful coexistence, who had organized to feed at the pool en masse at that time.) I would have preferred more space for Cassie’s perspective given how much she ultimately anchors the narrative along with Tobias, but overall this is another powerhouse production of teenage trauma and the bleakness of war from Geroux and credited series author K. A. Applegate.

[Content warning for ableism, body horror, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal

Book #75 of 2022:

The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal (Lady Astronaut #3)

I’m still enjoying this alternate-history sci-fi series about the ramifications of a natural disaster accelerating the space program as humanity in the mid-twentieth century seeks a way to get most of the population off-planet, but I consider this third volume to be a minor step down from the two before. We’ve switched protagonists to someone I find less interesting — astronaut Nicole Wargin, a prior supporting character — with this book following her activities on earth and the moon during the timeline of the Mars expedition from the previous one. Much of that turns out to be a scramble for survival in the face of a polio outbreak and potential saboteurs on the lunar colony, and author Mary Robinette Kowal continues to exhibit great technical prowess in exploring how such problems would arise and be solved within the limits of 1960s technology. (I’d definitely recommend these stories to fans of The Martian!) But the plot drags a bit over too many pages, and its mystery angle isn’t enough of a whodunnit investigation to really hook me.

[Content warning for disordered eating, gun violence, racism, and death of a spouse.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Cold the Night, Fast the Wolves by Meg Long

Book #74 of 2022:

Cold the Night, Fast the Wolves by Meg Long

The protagonist of this YA novel reminds me strongly of Katniss Everdeen: a teen girl, cold and toughened beyond her years, forced to enter into a deadly spectacle where she puts her wilderness survival skills to good use and gradually comes to open up and realize depending on others doesn’t have to be a weakness. In this case, the sci-fi action takes place on a future colony planet that has been ravaged by exploitative corporations, worsening the already-icy temperatures and dangerous storms. The path to the most profitable mining region, inaccessible to heavy-duty spacecraft and reached only by genetically-engineered wolves pulling sleds behind them, has become an annual event with an entire cottage industry around it — from the locals training to participate in the race, to their off-world patrons, to the audiences watching the drone feeds and gambling on every team’s odds. While it’s not as bloodthirsty as the Hunger Games, the competitors are encouraged to sabotage one another’s operations en route, above and beyond the inherently treacherous terrain.

The worldbuilding doesn’t provide too many cultural details on this society, but debut author Meg Long brings the harrowing setting to life in viscerally descriptive prose. As our viewpoint character reluctantly gets drawn into this contest that killed her mothers, she finds herself torn between their two respective worlds: the population of racers who are at least tacitly supporting the capitalistic forces of climate change and the tribe of settlers who have renounced those ways and retreated to seek harmony with nature. She also bonds closely with the feral wolf that a local gangster has asked her to train as a prizefighter, a tender relationship that forms the true emotional core of the story. When she ultimately frees the animal and flees the settlement, she has no choice but to join a group of friendly scientists as they embark on the race, helping them towards their research site and hoping to earn enough credits to travel literally anywhere else in the galaxy.

That mission only starts about halfway through the plot, but both before and after this point, it’s an absolute pulse-pounding rush. I am very impressed, and although the volume has been marketed as a standalone, the ending is open enough that I’d happily come back for a sequel. Maybe by then I’ll have finally stopped feeling the chill from this one.

[Content warning for frostbite, violence against animals, amputation, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross

Book #73 of 2022:

The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross (The Laundry Files #1)

This 2004 publication — which in my edition includes the novel The Atrocity Archive followed by a sequel novella “The Concrete Jungle” — introduces the Laundry, a secret British intelligence division dealing with magic and related otherworldly threats. It’s urban fantasy, but broadly Lovecraftian, with the explanation that particularly advanced forms of technobabblish math can attract unwanted attention from outside our universe. The protagonist is an IT technician recently promoted to field agent, and is probably the most distinctive element in this book, which largely plays out along conventional lines for the genre as he faces possessions, Nazi cultists, and the like. It’s a competent adventure that the shorter story at the end improves upon, but the bureaucratic organization and its members are lacking the compelling (albeit dysfunctional) personality of a Torchwood or a Checquy, to pick just two similar concepts for comparison.

There’s also a lot of low-key sexism in the James Bond tradition here. I wouldn’t go so far as to call the hero a misogynist himself, but the narrative around him sure leans in that direction. His first big case involves a beautiful civilian who immediately develops feelings for him, and who later winds up kidnapped, stripped, bound, and tortured as part of a trap. The other women in the plot aren’t treated too well either, which makes it even harder to accept the tricky blend of dry humor and gee-whiz pulp enthusiasm that author Charles Stross seems to be aiming for as a tone. Could the series get stronger from this debut? Maybe! Again, the novella already feels like a bit of a step forward with a more interesting challenge and a better handle on its female characters. But I don’t know that I feel invested enough to check this setting out any further regardless.

[Content warning for gun violence, eugenics, body horror, and gore.]

[I read and reviewed this title at a Patreon donor’s request. Want to nominate your own books for me to read and review (or otherwise support my writing)? Sign up for a small monthly donation today at https://patreon.com/lesserjoke !]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry

Book #72 of 2022:

We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry

This novel is told from the first-person plural perspective of a 1989 high school girls field hockey team, sometimes narrowing in on one specific member or another but generally seeming to come from the generalized collective, a la “we shivered at the prospects of this, some of us shivering with excitement and most of us shivering with dread.” That’s a striking stylistic choice that well fits the tale of these Salem teens taking oaths and making sacrifices to bind themselves to dark forces in order to gain confidence and win more of their games. The book also keeps somewhat coy about whether those rituals are ultimately real or not, caring more about how the would-be coven experiences them than if any demonic influence actually exists.

I’m on board with nearly all of that, and I think this story is a great illustration of just how weird and wild teenagers can be when investing totems with in-group meaning. It’s a good representation of queerness without the constriction of labels, too. At the same time, however, I can’t help complaining as a reader that there’s basically no plot here: no stakes, no dangers, no particular objectives, no narrative structure, and no character growth. Should we be worried about these kids and the powers they might be unleashing? The text doesn’t suggest that outright. Instead we simply hear matter-of-fact reporting of one thing they do and then the next, again and again and again.

Not all of the experimental elements work for me either, like one player’s fringe of hair being anthropomorphized throughout with a personality and a name. And I never quite feel as though author Quan Barry reconciles the supposed legacy of local witchcraft with the acknowledged truth that those people executed in the seventeenth-century were innocent of the wicked charges laid against them — far more innocent than the writer’s protagonists, in fact.

I do like the prose and the basic idea behind this title, but it just seems like there are some significant pieces missing from it as a finished product.

[Content warning for gaslighting, rape, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie

Book #71 of 2022:

A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #4)

As far as mystery hooks go, it’s hard to beat an ad being placed in a sleepy village newspaper, politely informing its readers of the place and time of an upcoming murder — where sure enough, someone winds up killed and someone else injured, surrounded by the curious residents who have assembled thinking it’s a joke or a game and the homeowner who professes ignorance of the whole affair. But this is one of those Agatha Christie stories where I seem to have run ahead of the investigator(s), noticing claims that are taken at face value by everyone rather than independently verified, which quickly narrows me in on the correct culprit and soon after, much of the motive behind their actions.

I can never decide whether it’s fair to give a lower rating to a novel like this just because its puzzle couldn’t stump me, but I will say, this is another Miss Marple vehicle that sidelines her for far too long, and the other characters don’t make much of an impression on me in her absence. The amount of falling action at the end, after the main secret has been revealed, also seems a bit excessive. One element I genuinely enjoy is how — spoiler alert — the emphasized fact that person X can’t recognize person Y on sight is a red herring to obscure the more meaningful corollary, which is that person Y obviously can’t identify person X, either. But overall, this hasn’t been one of my favorites despite the exciting initial premise.

As a side note, I’m willing to entertain the idea that some of my difficulty in engaging with the text is due to audiobook narrator Joan Hickson, who does little to distinguish the tone or voices of her reading. I don’t think I’d have loved this particular volume anyway, but I’m definitely going to try to avoid her in the future.

[Content warning for racism, antisemitism, and gun violence.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Journey by K. A. Applegate

Book #70 of 2022:

The Journey by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #42)

In another riff on a classic sci-fi premise, this Animorphs novel by ghostwriter Emily Costello — fresh off her dubious success with Alternamorphs #2 — finds the team shrinking down to microscopic size, in order to chase a squad of Helmacrons who have stormed into Marco’s body for… unclear reasons. (They’re in Cassie’s barn to get the blue box again, and when Rachel trips and accidentally knocks him out, they dart up his nostril to hold him hostage from the inside, rather than continue their efforts to simply seize the thing outright.) Honestly, the whole plot is pretty clumsy, and a thin justification for author K. A. Applegate plainly just wanting to utilize the Fantastic Voyage trope of traveling into a human body. That original 1966 movie even gets name-checked here, as does the Magic School Bus cartoon where I probably first encountered the idea.

So the heroes follow the megalomaniacal bad guys up their friend’s nasal cavity and beyond, delivering lots of gross-out humor at the mucus and other bodily fluids they encounter along the way. It all feels rather silly, such that even when our main narrator Rachel is experiencing her skin burning off from stomach acid or temporarily thinks Marco is either dead or about to be trapped in cockroach morph, there’s an unavoidable impression of a throwaway romp to all this. In a departure from how these books normally go, Marco himself even narrates a few chapters, although his section of the story isn’t much better. Someone snapped a photo of the group demorphing before the tiny aliens showed up, and while his insides are under siege, Marco gets bored and decides to break into their apartment and steal the disposable camera. It’s an astonishingly bad move from the supposed coldblooded strategist, and it results in him being bit by a rabid guard dog.

(What did that stranger think they were photographing? What were they going to do with the picture? Why were they just casually keeping a dog with rabies around their home? The text doesn’t have time for these mundanities.)

It’s not the worst Animorphs out there, and there are enough interesting wrinkles around the edges to make up for the lesser elements somewhat. If you’re a Rachel/Marco shipper, this two-hander shows them squabbling to hide their plain worry about one another, while in their private chapters he references a dream about marrying her and she has an idle thought comparing him to an underwear model. In the opening battle before things turn south, the teens are raiding a Yeerk factory where mass production on portable Kandronas is underway, which would have dire implications for the resistance war by removing the Yeerk pool as an enemy weakness. And we learn that morphing an animal and back can heal a person more than previously imagined — like treating their rabies, for instance — which will likewise prove important down the road.

Overall, though, I can’t say that this is one of the highlights or necessary touchstones of the series.

[Content warning for body horror and gore.]

★★★☆☆