The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones

Book #111 of 2022:

Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones

A strange little horror novella that’s not as unsettling as I feel like it’s aiming to be, yet not funny/campy enough to constitute a good parody. The high school protagonist makes a lot of bizarre intuitive leaps, and while I think the intent is to show how he’s unraveling under the strain of worrying that a department-store mannequin has come to life to murder his friend group and their families — the first such wild notion, albeit one that’s somewhat reasonable by genre standards — it makes it hard to care about any of his ensuing struggles. (At one point, this kid is convinced on the evidence of a ripped-open fertilizer bag that his unnatural foe is eating the stuff to become kaiju-sized.)

The slasher carnage has a postmodern twist that’s deployed late enough I don’t want to spoil it here, but it’s one of many elements in this title that probably could have used more space to develop and breathe. As is, I don’t really feel attached to any of these characters or the rather hokey premise around them.

[Content warning for gore and death of a dog.]

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher

Book #110 of 2022:

Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher

An exquisite dark fairy tale, about a woman seeking the services of a necromancer to save her sister from the abusive husband who’s likely to murder her as soon as she produces a male heir. There are impossible tasks met with fierce determination, hard-won and painful lessons, and brusque strangers who turn into devoted allies, all under a delightfully macabre atmosphere of eldritch graveyard magic and righteous vigilante justice against the patriarchy. It’s basically Gideon the Ninth meets The Two Princesses of Bamarre, which is a combination that really shouldn’t work as well as it does here (somehow skillfully avoiding the tonal whiplash of author T. Kingfisher’s earlier title, A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, while maintaining just enough humor to keep the grimness at bay). The most whimsical elements are probably the various animal familiars that populate the text, but one of those is possessed by a demon, another is cursed to be helpful under pain of death, and the third is a reanimated skeleton already. So I still wouldn’t exactly say it’s a walk in the park. Nor would I call it a YA novel given the 30-year-old protagonist, though it shares a few common beloved tropes with that coming-of-age genre.

This is a book that got its claws in me well before the ending, and only grew stronger as I neared that emotional powerhouse of a conclusion. My lone complaint is a minor structural one: we begin in media res and alternate for a while between the heroine on her quest and the backstory that’s brought her to it, but there’s no particular payoff or plot reason for arranging the narrative that way, and I think a more straightforward presentation would have let the story blossom into itself sooner and more naturally. Nevertheless, I love the final effect too deeply for me to rate this any lower than a full five stars.

[Content warning for cannibalism, gore, body horror, death of a dog, suicide, and rape.]

★★★★★

TV Review: Ms. Marvel, season 1

TV #33 of 2022:

Ms. Marvel, season 1

The back half of this season stumbles a bit, both in setting up / dealing with its various villains and in the messy narrative transition from Jersey to Karachi to an episode-long Partition flashback and back, at which point a few dropped plot threads have to be hurriedly picked up again. By and large, however, it’s another MCU success story, and a nice return to form for the Disney+ side of that franchise after the recent Moon Knight miniseries failed to stick its own landing. The nerdy yet empathetic and brave Kamala Khan is an immediately winning personality, and her teenage concerns carry a real Spider-Man vibe that’s most welcome in an often adult-centered genre. (Among the other prospective members of a future on-screen Young Avengers team that we’ve seen so far like Kate Bishop, America Chavez, or Kid Loki, she’s the first to have any meaningful relationships with her peers.) At the same time, the show’s portrayal of its heroine’s Pakistani Muslim immigrant family lends a great cultural specificity as an integral part of the plot throughout.

Most Marvel titles inevitably serve as bridges to whatever’s ahead, and so it’s no surprise that this series is a prelude to next year’s movie The Marvels, which will properly introduce Carol Danvers to her biggest fan (alongside the grown-up and newly-powered Monica Rambeau). And of course there are other hints of big continuity moves on the horizon, like a certain not-so-subtle musical sting in the season finale. Yet Ms. Marvel’s debut here builds out such a warm and well-realized environment for her origin on its own terms over these six episodes that it largely stands apart just fine.

[Content warning for Islamophobia and gun violence, including government agents storming a high school and shooting at kids.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: A Far Wilder Magic by Allison Saft

Book #109 of 2022:

A Far Wilder Magic by Allison Saft

I was initially drawn to this YA novel by its #ownvoices Jewish element, having heard that although it’s a fantasy story set in a different world, the heroine’s religion is a recognizable stand-in for my own. In fact, the situation is even more clear-cut than that: Yu’adir straight-up is Judaism, right down to concepts like chochmah and tikkun olam presented in those familiar Hebrew names. Similarly, the Sumic minority faith is obviously Catholicism, complete with its pope, bishops, confessionals, rosaries, and so on, and the WASPish Katharist majority in society is, well, Protestant. This sort of direct copying is an embarrassment of worldbuilding, and it extends further to the lands that are plainly meant to be Ireland and New England. The year 1718 is even given at one point as being “nearly two centuries ago,” in a setting that, yes, seems from its technology like the early 1900s. I honestly don’t know why this wasn’t just written as historical fantasy, since author Allison Saft hasn’t taken the opportunity to invent anything beyond the magic of alchemy and a mystical fox hunt.

Even setting all that aside, I’m pretty disappointed by the representation of (thinly-disguised) Jewishness in this text. The protagonist’s parents were an interfaith couple, but her Yu’adir father left when she was young, and while she half-remembers a few rituals and teachings, they aren’t a part of her present life. Instead, her experience of this aspect of her identity is limited to the discrimination she faces around her town, which does not appear to have any other residents who share that background. She’s exposed to whispers about Yu’adir controlling banks and orchestrating wars, and because theirs is an ethnoreligion like its real-life counterpart, some of her more aggressive neighbors talk openly about the girl being tainted by degenerate blood. There is no Jewish joy and there is no Jewish community here, and while that may ring true for certain readers — I don’t want to speak for Saft — it’s not a depiction I particularly appreciate myself.

As for the plot beyond such matters, the two teenage leads don’t have any other friends and basically fall for one another at first sight, though they refrain from acting on that for a time by instead focusing on their partnership in the upcoming hunt. She thinks winning the contest will finally earn her absentee and emotionally-abusive mother’s approval; he hopes the prize money will convince that same alchemist to accept him as her apprentice, as well as help support his large Irish-Catholic family. It’s all rather rote and predictable, give or take some weirdness with their quarry and the philosopher’s stone that isn’t adequately explained. So I’d have to say that overall, the whole title feels very half-baked to me.

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

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Defunctland: Guide to the Magic Kingdom by Kevin Perjurer

Book #108 of 2022:

Defunctland: Guide to the Magic Kingdom by Kevin Perjurer

This first written spinoff of the eponymous Defunctland YouTube channel presents the same focus on change within theme parks and attractions that are no longer operational, but in the specific context of Disney World’s Magic Kingdom as it exists in the present. Author Kevin Perjurer takes us systematically through the Orlando park, discussing in each section what’s there now and what used to be. This approach sacrifices the depth of his web content for greater breadth, but it makes the title a good launching-off point for readers to seek out the former. If a few paragraphs about the defunct ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter pique your interest, for example, why not check out one of Kev’s deep-dive videos or podcast episodes on the subject? Similarly, anyone who’s already finished those won’t get just a repeat here, as the framing concerns more of the current landscape instead.

I don’t love how the text is presented as a tongue-in-cheek but still roughly plausible guide to visiting Walt Disney World yourself, though, because so much of the advice considered in that light is simply absurd. It’s fine to organize an overview this way, but no guest should actually progress steadily through a Disney Park one themed land at a time, ignoring peak crowd sizes and queue times. This man honestly suggests Carousel of Progress — a dated audio-animatronic show about technological advances that will never see a wait longer than ten minutes to enter — as your second stop of the day! He also lets his personal feelings vent in a few caustic displays about attractions he hates and won’t ever go on again, which I consider unnecessary and a tad obnoxious.

In the end the whole thing devolves into an extended joking suggestion that you sneak into the underground cast member ‘Utilidors’ and look for discarded pieces of older rides to take home with you. That part makes me feel better about some of the earlier impracticalities, and I do like the writer’s eventual grudging reflections on the phenomenon of theme park evolution: that Disney as a company owes more to the 99% of visitors who don’t know about / mind Mr. Toad giving way to Winnie the Pooh than to the passionate minority who do, and that an attraction disappearing doesn’t erase the joy and fond memories anyone got from it while it was still around.

One ironic truth about this publication is that it has already grown outdated. In the four years since it was released in 2018, Disney has scrapped the FastPass+ reservation system for a rather different Genie+ / Individual Lighting Lane alternative, discontinued the Magical Express shuttle to and from the local airport, altered the arrangement of ‘Extra Magic Hours’ for resort hotel guests, and more. A new Tron-themed roller coaster is being built in Tomorrowland, and Splash Mountain will soon be replaced / rethemed into Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. For readers who notice those details as they affect Perjurer’s descriptions and recommendations, the book itself has become an inadvertent time capsule for the Magic Kingdom of a particular moment in history.

Nevertheless, I think this is an interesting read for anyone who appreciates theme parks or is planning to go to this one, so long as you keep in mind that its advice probably shouldn’t be taken literally. I haven’t liked it quite as much as the author’s videos, but I’ve still learned a lot and would happily pick up any subsequent volumes covering Epcot or the rest.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Under Dog and Other Stories by Agatha Christie

Book #107 of 2022:

The Under Dog and Other Stories by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #31)

Hercule Poirot remains a character I can find either entertaining or frustrating on occasion, and I regret to report that in this collection, he leans decidedly towards the latter. He makes more guesses than strict deductions, and when his friend Hastings calls him out on that, he protests that he is simply applying “psychology” to the situation. At several points, he also lies to a witness or suspect in order to entrap them and secure their cooperation, which is both a devious trick and a sign of how unchallenging these particular cases are when everyone is so easily hoodwinked. (One culprit is caught merely by the detective loudly announcing he has found a piece of evidence that will be kept securely in his room and then having his valet wait to see who comes to steal it.)

There’s some repetition for anyone reading through the Poirot series in publication order too, for although this volume was released in 1951, the nine stories within all date back to the 1920s, and a few had already been reworked into other titles that author Agatha Christie published separately. “The Plymouth Express” is an early version of her 1928 novel The Mystery of the Blue Train, for instance, and “The Submarine Plans” was expanded into the novella The Incredible Theft and included in the 1937 book Murder in the Mews. None of these are nearly strong or remarkable enough to be worth revisiting in this way, which further adds to my low impression here.

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

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: The Ellimist Chronicles by K. A. Applegate

Book #106 of 2022:

The Ellimist Chronicles by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs Chronicles #4)

This final Animorphs companion novel is a risky departure even by the standards of the Chronicles sub-series, which has previously left the teenage morphers behind solely to flesh out backstory periods of galactic history whose species and major events are already known to the audience as deeply impacting the present. It was important to see those prequels up-close, in a way that doesn’t feel as immediately evident for the Ellimist’s origin. He’s a nearly-omnipotent meddler locked in a universe-spanning conflict with his opposite, theoretically wanting to help against the Yeerk invasion but bound by the rules of his ineffable game to only effect the subtlest interventions. That’s always been a reasonable enough concept within the genre of science-fiction, and learning more about how this particular being got to that position isn’t especially necessary or rewarding to our understanding of the canon, beyond the tidbit that he was once a youth suddenly thrust into battle himself.

So this story is a bit adrift, vaguely paralleling our customary heroes inasmuch as any YA protagonist would, but largely painting upon a brand-new canvas. We’re millennia in the past and lightyears away from anything familiar for the bulk of this plot, so it really has to stand on its own far more than any other release in the extended Animorphs saga.

Luckily, in the confident hands of author K. A. Applegate, the project still more or less succeeds. The space opera worldbuilding is inventive and fun, following the protagonist’s unusual journey from daydreaming gamer to warrior, refugee, last surviving member of his people, tortured prisoner, cyborg gestalt, and on into the vast consciousness that exists beyond space and time as we’ve known it before. These shifts between “lives” are sometimes rather abrupt, but it’s altogether a neat transhumanist fable (despite the character never being exactly human in the first place). And I do love how this book functions to open up the setting, recontextualizing the massive drama that we’ve witnessed from Andalites, Hork-Bajir, and humans in all their heartfelt and hard-fought blood, sweat, and tears as ultimately occupying one small corner of an unimaginably big reality.

Where the Ellimist’s account falters for me is when it does finally bump up against that existing framework, awkwardly shoehorning in too many coincidental connections. In a crisis of faith, the narrator hides out among the residents of a random planet, who happen to be early Andalites. As he reemerges to thwart his eldritch enemy Crayak, it’s with the fate of earth in the era of dinosaurs on the line. Earlier, he personally creates the Pemalites, a species formerly unlinked to him in the mythos. It’s all a little hard to accept, particularly without the go-to excuse of a higher intelligence — aka, the Ellimist himself — that can usually be posited to explain away plotting contrivances. While no single one of these individual elements is out of place here, they seem odd as they stack up without any overt discussion of destiny or repercussions. We’re apparently meant to ascribe no deeper meaning to the recurrences, which is not the most satisfying writing choice.

I also think the war with Crayak, which occupies the last quarter of the text, misses the opportunity to incorporate things already associated with it, like that creature’s servants the Howlers or the Drode. The former represent a particularly baffling omission: previous entries have established that the Pemalites were killed off by Howlers, that the Howlers are Crayak’s prized legions, and that Crayak and the Ellimist are rivals. This title explicitly connects the remaining side of that square by naming the Pemalites as children of the Ellimist, but doesn’t so much as mention the shock troops opposing them.

Like many Animorphs volumes, then, this is a strong but not a flawless work, and I’d certainly call it the low point of the generally-outstanding Chronicles run. It’s distinctive in focus, but it tends to pull its punches in the rare moments when it doesn’t need to be. As much as I’ve enjoy the read regardless, I feel frustrated to recognize the shape of the potential better story we could have gotten instead.

All that’s left to address is the framing device of its start and end, which reveal — spoiler alert — that one of the Animorphs is dying, and reaching out to the Ellimist for the boon of reassurance that the fight was worth it. Upon publication alongside #47 in the main series, that constituted a flash-forward surprise, although this book could probably be picked up just about anywhere, especially on a reread. Strictly speaking, the child soldier isn’t identified by name or gender, but the context clues narrow it down to being presumably Jake or Rachel, “an unwitting contribution from the human race to its own survival” (in contrast to Tobias and Marco with their family ties and Cassie as a temporal anomaly, all of whom were confirmed chosen by the Ellimist in Megamorphs #4). And I guess in a continuity with time-travel and alternate realities, we can’t know for certain at this juncture that that death is genuine and irreversible. But it’s a moving sequence nevertheless, and one that casts a dark cloud of foreboding over the upcoming final stretch, in addition to adding a touch more weight to the proceedings here. That’s enough to cement a four-star rating, for me.

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

This volume: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★★

Volumes ranked: The Hork-Bajir Chronicles > Visser > The Andalite Chronicles > The Ellimist Chronicles

Book Review: The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are by David M. Henkin

Book #105 of 2022:

The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are by David M. Henkin

This nonfiction title explores an interesting and new-to-me topic, which is the obvious yet rarely-considered point that the seven-day cycle we know as a week is entirely cultural, having no relation to observable patterns in nature like a day (one rotation of the earth on its axis, measured in a period of light and then one of darkness), month (one revolution of the moon around the earth, measured in its appearing to wax and wane when seen from here), or year (one trip of the earth around the sun, measured in the changing of the seasons). Although the week may seem just as natural to us as these, its length of time is wholly arbitrary — and in fact, there are some cultures that did not develop such a concept, with the modern-style week really only establishing a global dominance in the past two hundred years.

As author David M. Henkin details, we use the artificial structure of weeks to divide work from leisure, but also to organize our recurring commitments (like a class that meets each Wednesday) and to take regular inventory of our lives in terms of last week / this week / next week. Even historical calendar reforms that alter the month and date have generally left the progression of weekdays alone, and in that steady unfolding, particular days with their associated activities come to acquire certain individual characteristics for us. Accordingly, we are unsettled whenever we realize we’ve gotten the day wrong, or even simply when we experience, e.g. a Tuesday that doesn’t feel like a Tuesday for whatever reason. In the height of the early Covid-19 pandemic, amid usual scheduled routines getting disrupted by widespread lockdowns and telework, that sort of untethering was commonly reported as days and weeks stretching uncomfortably into one long indistinguishable span that some sardonically nicknamed “Blursday.” In a somewhat roundabout fashion, this work attempts to get at why people reacted so strongly to the perceived lack of that traditional framework, and how we continue to rely upon the week to apply order to our existence.

Unfortunately, while such provocative ideas are floated throughout the text, the writer primarily focuses on his own existing area of expertise, which is the journal-keeping habits of nineteenth-century America. I believe the intent here is to showcase the different uses of the week that were then entering into common practice, but it reads more as just a dry catalog of recitation tenuously linked to Henkin’s surrounding theoretical thesis. He spends a lot of space, for instance, discussing the evidence that Thursday was once a popular day for weddings, but then doesn’t build to any specific conclusions from that. I would have loved a book that actually flowed from the discussion raised in the Introduction, but I don’t think this one ever quite gets there for me.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: The Shield, season 2

TV #32 of 2022:

The Shield, season 2

The same bitterly funny anti-cop police drama, back for a follow-up round of continued corruption, complicity, and arrogant ignorance. I’d rate this season as a slight step down from the debut, but mainly only because as great as all that remains, the series has already staked out that particular thematic territory and proven itself there, and this second year doesn’t ever really escalate matters appreciably. In fact, with Chief Aceveda now explicitly agreeing to turn a blind eye to the strike team’s methods in exchange for their success boosting his political campaign, there’s less internal pressure on Vic and his crew, and so our antihero protagonist spends a lot of this run going up against a crime boss who seems written so heinously as to make it easier for us to root for his downfall at the hands of the crooked detective.

Luckily Claudette has started catching on to his extracurriculars as well, part of her steadily emerging as the effective conscience of this department. Don’t get me wrong: she’s still as compromised as the rest of them, hindered by her moralizing and her snap judgments and certainly willing to bend the rules or look the other way herself upon occasion. But with Dutch too often puffed-up on his own ego or fretting about his failures, the patrol officers like Danny and Julien unable to set their own biases and poor impulses aside, and the remainder of the ensemble basically criminals with a badge, she’s the closest thing we’ve got to a straightforward force for good. Having such a flawed would-be savior is very in line with the overall ethos of this program, and it makes her apparent career trajectory opposite Vic’s particularly exciting.

Nevertheless, a lot of that feels more like setup for future fireworks than a full story here and now, as do the Mackey marriage troubles, new arrival Tavon, and the robbery of the Armenian money train that closes out this stretch of the plot. These are minor structural critiques of a show I’m very much enjoying watching despite the preponderance of disturbing material, and hopefully a sign of pieces being moved into play for another strong presentation of anti-copaganda ahead.

[Content warning for gun violence, torture, gore, burning alive, drug abuse, pedophilia, rape, racism including slurs and lynching, homophobia including slurs and lynching, transphobia, domestic abuse, Islamophobia, fatphobia, and sexism.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Stranger Things, season 4

TV #31 of 2022:

Stranger Things, season 4

Late-stage Stranger Things has a character problem, in that there are simply too many of them at this point for the narrative to function remotely efficiently. Even with the cast (somewhat clumsily) split into four or five geographically separate storylines, this season often finds six or more of the protagonists all sharing a scene together. In that sort of chaos, it’s hard for anyone’s personal dilemmas to register, and so we end up with a lot less specific character work in the writing, and more dialogue that’s just trading exposition back and forth. I can’t help but compare this to Game of Thrones, which for all its eventual faults understood throughout that you build compelling arcs primarily out of scenes with 2-to-4 people, max. Swapping them around can still let you manage a massive ensemble that way, without individual voices getting lost in the crowd. The best moments on this show tend to be when pairs or trios do find a way to steal away from the bigger party they’re in and have some quiet conversations, but that’s obviously more difficult to orchestrate the more folks there are crammed into a single location.

The bloating also manifests in a certain degree of plot armor, where despite how deadly Hawkins / the Upside Down can be in general, our numerous heroes are continually making it out of their scrapes unscathed. I know it’s silly to talk about realism in a series with psychic children and mind flayers and all that, but the absurd lack of consequences to any of the supposed danger — setting aside the finale, which I’ll try not to spoil — does limit my audience buy-in. And since new additions continue to join the pack and its accompanying protective umbrella, this is an issue that’s only growing worse with time. At one point this year four of the teens are stranded out in California — Mike, Jonathan, Will, and new dude Argyle — and I couldn’t help but think about how little any of them are actually adding to the main story. A more disciplined creative team could have written off that entire delegation, whether terminally or not, but instead, we spend valuable minutes each episode checking back in on them in a delayed plot that serves only to eventually reunite them with El. Elsewhere, Joyce and Murray are on a similar zero-progression quest to sneak into Russia and link up with Hopper again.

It’s all frankly a bit of a mess. Vecna at least presents a big-bad antagonist with some personality for once, and I do love the Kate Bush runner and how it’s apparently doing unexpected wonders for her real-life music career. Overall the program is skating by on inherited investment in familiar faces and its fun 80s horror pastiche vibes, but this penultimate outing hasn’t exactly been its finest hour. Hopefully the upcoming final season can straighten out its act to give us a proper meaningful conclusion.

[Content warning for gun violence, violence against children, and gore.]

★★★☆☆