The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Fairy Tale by Stephen King

Book #141 of 2022:

Fairy Tale by Stephen King

This new portal fantasy from Stephen King is fine, but its tale of an ordinary kid finding his way into a magical world is not exactly breaking fresh ground for the author of such works as The Waste Lands or The Talisman. There’s also an awful lot of setup here, with over a quarter of this rather lengthy novel devoted to explaining the origins of the Marty McFly-Doc Brown friendship that exists between the teenage protagonist and the old man who eventually reveals the hidden gateway to him. (The curse of being one of King’s “Constant Readers” is that I can’t help but contrast this with the writer’s time-travel thriller 11/22/63, which introduces a similar plot device in a bare handful of pages.) With so much lead-in space dedicated to the hero’s regular life before his mythic quest, it’s somewhat jarring at the end when his ultimate return and transition back to normality isn’t given a parallel treatment.

But the bulk of the story is neat. I don’t know that “Fairy Tale” is the best title for it, since King is mostly just riffing on Jack and the Beanstalk rather than attempting an Into the Woods sort of ur-text mashup, but I like the minor Lovecraftian vibes and the idea of the narrator sneaking into a dystopian giant’s kingdom with his elderly dog in order to find a supernatural way to make her young again. Not all of the component elements quite work for me — like an overly-long dungeon stay while he’s separated from his pet — but as a core concept, the unlikely pair exploring this strange landscape is fun enough. More people in genre fiction should bring animal companions along on their adventures.

My biggest disappointment — beyond a weird editing oversight referencing news events from 2016 in a book set three years prior — is probably that this all turns out to be generally unrelated to the author’s established Dark Tower mythos, with which it shares some obvious thematic dimensions. (There are two direct quotes from that series, but one is unexplained and one is described as something once read in a book, so they function more as sly winking references than overt connections.) It feels like a real missed opportunity to not set these stories explicitly in the same multiverse continuity, especially for a creator who usually revels in that kind of crossover. Still, it’s a solid standalone piece overall.

[Content warning for alcohol abuse, gun violence, racism, ableism, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty

Book #140 of 2022:

Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty

I don’t love this book, but it’s significantly better once you realize it’s been falsely marketed as a collection of short stories when it’s actually a disjointed composite novel. Each entry ends somewhat abruptly, but they are not telling unrelated plots with distinct sets of characters. Rather, they present vignettes from across the life of a single narrator, shuffled around out of order (and without apparent reason) a la Catch-22. So although the individual chapters are more open-ended than I would like, at least there are connections that a reader can draw to plausibly fill in certain gaps in the overall account of the protagonist’s dysfunctional family and their various tragic misadventures.

The strongest element of this title is its #ownvoices portrayal of the Penobscot Tribe of Maine, the small northeastern community of Native Americans to which debut author Morgan Talty belongs. That authenticity is striking throughout his text, even while I personally want more of a sense of purpose and organization to the narrative here.

[Content warning for alcohol and drug abuse, sexual assault, domestic abuse, and infant death.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

Book #139 of 2022:

What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

This creepy little novella is a retelling of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher by way of Mexican Gothic or The Girl with All the Gifts — which is to say, it posits that a rare breed of mushroom colony at the family’s rural estate has gotten its spores into doomed siblings Roderick and Madeline, thereby driving their strange illness and madness. The fungus has also spread throughout the nearby population of wild hares, jerkily controlling their bodies even after death, and appears to be trying to communicate with its human hosts. These animals produce some nice moments of eerie zombie horror, and for an unsettling period, the guests at the secluded manor aren’t sure whether they’ve been exposed and might be carrying the infection, too.

Author T. Kingfisher diverges from the original most in the narrator and supporting cast. Our protagonist now has a name and a more specific identity as a nonbinary friend of the Ushers who uses the genderless ka/kan pronouns of kan home country’s military class, and ka is joined by a few other visitors like a fictional aunt of Beatrix Potter who happens to be an amateur expert on mycology. The queerness is a minor yet welcome note, and the story is less open-ended than its predecessor while maintaining a hint of its ambiguous menace. It’s overall a quick read, but a fun one.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Star Wars: The Princess and the Scoundrel by Beth Revis

Book #138 of 2022:

Star Wars: The Princess and the Scoundrel by Beth Revis

This Star Wars novel — not to be confused with Alexandra Bracken’s 2015 junior novelization of A New Hope, entitled The Princess, The Scoundrel, and the Farm Boy — is slow on plot but rich in characterization, and covering a period that should be of interest for many fans: the time immediately following Return of the Jedi, when Princess Leia and Han Solo get engaged and married and embark on their honeymoon (which doubles as a public expression of confidence that the Empire has been shattered and call for unity in the new Republic government, due to the identity of the bride). The story moves at a languid pace, spending its entire first quarter with the protagonists still on on the forest moon of Endor and then most of the rest with them on an interstellar cruise ship, but the action does pick up near the end as onboard intrigue spills into open conflict with a remnant of imperial forces who refuse to believe that the Emperor is dead.

And while that summary may not sound like much, the whole enterprise is honestly a delight. Author Beth Revis maintains a tight focus on her two POV leads — avoiding the most common issue I have with spinoff material for this franchise — but she really captures the essence of all the returning figures, right down to the impatient and self-important Chief Chirpa of the local Ewok tribe. She also goes into great depth on the newlyweds’ lingering traumas from the events of the movie trilogy that often get ignored in such sequels: Han losing a year while frozen in carbonite and struggling to adjust to how his friends have changed in his absence, and Leia enduring the destruction of her home planet, torture on the Death Star, and discovery that her assailant there was her birth father. Unlike Luke, she is plainly not ready to forgive Darth Vader and accept his last-minute change of heart, which adds an interesting tension to her character throughout. The romantic relationship at the core of the title is likewise developed at length, showcasing why these lovers mean so much to one another while simultaneously underlining the stress points that will eventually lead to their separation. It’s a tricky balance, pulled off rather well.

Less successful in my opinion is the primary setting itself: the Halcyon starship, better known as the fictional theming for the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel now open at Walt Disney World in Orlando. I have not stayed there — and probably won’t anytime soon, given the exorbitant price tag — so I’m not sure how many of the details here are fun references that would make a visit more immersive versus new inventions from the writer herself. But the book hypes the luxury of the cruiseliner to a frankly absurd degree, with some sections that feel directly lifted from corporate ad copy in their lavish descriptions of the food and guest quarters. I’m assuming the volume was commissioned primarily to help market the resort destination, and I don’t begrudge Revis for working within those constraints. (In fact, I think it’s remarkable how good a yarn she’s spun despite them.) But this aspect of the text is distractingly silly, like when the stars of a TV show start talking about how much they love the new features of the car brand that happens to be sponsoring their episode.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connelly

Book #137 of 2022:

Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connelly (Ballard and Bosch #1)

Detective Renée Ballard has only appeared in one Michael Connelly book before this, but there’s still a frisson of crossover thrill when she encounters the author’s more established hero Harry Bosch early in this volume. After cautiously feeling one another out and recognizing a certain mutual competence, the two cops team up as unofficial partners, looking into the cold case of a murdered teen runaway that Harry took on as a favor to the dead girl’s mother at the end of his previous adventure. Each protagonist has other assignments too, and while none feel as gripping, they introduce their share of complications to pad out the story — including Bosch getting abducted from his home by gun-wielding mafiosos, which is a short-lived but interesting change of pace for him.

It’s a decent installment for the most part, with the writer’s typical verisimilitude in describing both police activity and the neighborhood specifics of the L. A. setting. The ending is a bit of a letdown, however. Spoilers in the rest of this paragraph: first Renée’s big clue comes from a random meeting instead of strong investigative work — there’s even an earlier lead that occupies a sizable chunk of the text but gets dropped without comment and never revisited once she finds the better suspect — and then she foolishly goes on her own to break into the guy’s workplace late that night, rather than waiting to gather evidence through legal means. (The murder is from nine years ago; they could have taken another six hours to solve it.) Finally, when Harry shows up in the nick of time to save her from the inevitable confrontation, he resorts to torture to get a confession, breezing past the cruelty and inadmissibility of that move alike, and then turns the man over to potential vigilante justice at the hands of a victim’s father.

So that’s odd and somewhat frustrating, but at least the new partnership feels promising for the future of the franchise. I’m almost caught up at this point, since this novel came out in 2018, but I understand Ballard and Bosch have continued to work together in subsequent releases. Here’s hoping that they show a little more restraint going forward.

[Content warning for gun violence, gore, suicide, drug abuse, rape, and pedophilia.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Sacrifice by K. A. Applegate

Book #136 of 2022:

The Sacrifice by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #52)

The last story with Ax as its sole narrator is also the strongest one yet. The plot is deceptively simple: together with the rest of their small resistance force, the Animorphs propose, debate, and ultimately carry out a bombing assault on the local Yeerk pool. Unlike their early-series raids, this promises to represent a significant blow against the occupying enemy, but it’s also one that will likely cause heavy human civilian casualties too. And so most of the book is actually a tense atmospheric piece in the run-up to what they fear will be a suicide mission, with ample space for meaningful character moments around the team’s fugitive home in the woods punctuated by quiet outbursts of sorrow and fury.

The mood is subtly altered, and the once-cohesive band of friends is fracturing along predictable stress lines. Jake is still wracked with guilt over not being able to save his family, and angry at his girlfriend Cassie for letting Tom’s Yeerk escape with the morphing cube, though no one else knows the reason for his animosity at first. Meanwhile she’s upset that everyone is even considering taking innocent lives, while all of them are concerned that Rachel’s bloodthirsty battle rage may be spiraling out of control.

Aximili is standing back and watching all this, but he’s caught up in the emotional drama too. When Cassie’s secret comes out, prompting Marco to yell and her best friend to almost punch her, the Andalite finds himself feeling genuine hatred towards the girl. His thoughts draw explicit parallels between Cassie and Seerow, the disgraced member of his species whose “Kindness” of providing technology to an alien race first unleashed the Yeerks on the rest of the galaxy, and he coldly reflects that she’d have been executed for treason on his planet. Speaking of which, we learn that he’s been in clandestine communication with the military leadership back home, who tell him in their latest exchange that they’ve decided to “quarantine” the earth rather than help defend it, and that they don’t want any major action on the ground to interfere with their plans. Reading between the lines, the cadet understands that this is effectively a death sentence for humanity if he obeys the command to call off the attack.

As a protagonist, his arc in these novels has always revolved around his conflicting loyalties between his own people and the Animorphs, and it’s a well-earned triumph to see him elect, after much soul-searching, to stand with his young companions for good. He’s one of the volunteers at the end to ride the bomb-laden subway car into the Pool, but he also realizes he was too hasty to judge Cassie, whose objection that some of the opposing soldiers may wish for peace proves apt when Controllers help them open the cages to give captive humans a chance to flee. He sees that the power to morph might grant Yeerks a way to escape their parasitic nature, and in setting a delay on the explosives and issuing a warning first, he and the rest of the heroes embrace the new mantra that she proposes: “Defeat the Yeerks. Don’t become them.”

Prior to the fireworks of the big finale, we get another great scene of the teens — now confirmed to be high school age, though we don’t know exactly how much time has elapsed since book 1 when they weren’t — explaining the reality of the invasion to a group of strangers, which will never stop being weird and delightful following all the secrecy of the initial volumes. Rachel’s mom Naomi proves surprisingly useful for once, and has some nice exchanges with her daughter and nephew that seem to bring closure to their respective strife. Even here outside the camp, however, the endgame aura of dread is palpable. Yeerks can morph into deadly creatures of their own, which results in more human Controllers getting killed rather than just dodged or left unconscious. Thanks to the governor’s speech from the last title, news of extraterrestrial invaders is out there in the world, producing unease even when not wholly believed. And the very route that the group uses for their strike has been built at Visser One’s command for speedy processing of masses of new host bodies, in a continued abandonment of the slow infiltration favored by his predecessor. The shocking imagery of “people being rounded up and forced at gunpoint onto trains” recalls the horrors of the Holocaust even before Rachel makes that point explicitly.

In essence, then, everything is reaching a boil here, creating a heady effect for long-time readers. The trauma that these war-hardened children have experienced has never felt more acute, nor Cassie’s concerns over the morality of their actions more apt. It’s our final volume not penned by credited author K. A. Applegate herself, and returning ghostwriter Kimberly Morris delivers on just about every conceivable level, making this the finest of the ghostwritten lot in my opinion. It’s a climactic moment all around, leaving only two installments remaining until the bitter end.

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

★★★★★

Movie Review: Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)

Movie #14 of 2022:

Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)

Another Marvel feature that’s solidly entertaining in the moment but pretty disposable in the long-term franchise view. Leaning heavily on the space-rocker tone set by director Taika Waititi’s earlier Thor: Ragnarok, this sequel slides into the status of second-best Thor movie more or less by default. It’s got the requisite Marvel action sequences, comedic banter, and crowd-pleasing soundtrack. It just doesn’t have much of a coherent plot or anything new / meaningful to say about its characters.

Best served by the script is probably a returning Natalie Portman as Dr. Jane Foster, now dying of cancer and discovering that she can wield the power of a rebuilt Mjolnir to channel her ex-boyfriend’s might into vitality and thrilling superheroics (which is somehow also killing her faster, in one of the film’s many bizarre contradictions). Thor as usual is the dullest part of his own story, and Christian Bale as the piece’s villain opposite him becomes the latest figure to disappear under the weight of his own makeup, ultimately registering no more personality than previously vanquished Marvel baddies like Lee Pace as Ronan the Accuser or Christopher Eccleston as Malekith the Accursed.

I see two big, somewhat overlapping problems with Gorr the God Butcher — these supervillain names! — one on the micro-level of his present excursion and one on the macro-level of the MCU at large. In the immediate issue, his motivation and aims are all over the place. He’s mad that his personal deity didn’t intervene to save his daughter (and is basically a jerk all-around), so he decides to kill him and all his kind. That’s an idea with potential for interesting philosophical engagement! But… he’s also being influenced in all this slaughter by a corrupt ‘necrosword’ that’s never explained beyond its label. And about halfway through, he reveals he wants to go to the one spot in the universe where apparently any wish can be granted — something that surely should have been in play in several previous adventures, right? — to just make all the gods dead at once. As a foundation for a character it’s a bit abstract and confusingly written, and it doesn’t give Bale much to work with in the end.

The bigger franchise complication is that the notion of what a god even is in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has become hopelessly muddled by this stage. Thor is called one because ancient earthlings didn’t have any other way to conceptualize his alien grandeur, as we learned back in his very first outing. But he doesn’t have any modern worshipers whom he could ignore and betray in the way Gorr objects to, and it’s not clear why the unpowered Asgardians, now just a diaspora population living in Norway, would be on his chopping block either. Is he also going after the Egyptian gods on Moon Knight, or the djinn on Ms. Marvel, or the demons that Dr. Strange battles, or all manner of other powerful non-humans we now know exist throughout this fictional cosmos? Can we even come up with a plausible definition of godhood in this series that excludes, say, Gorr himself?

So it’s kind of a mess. A generally fun one, to be clear, and an installment that incrementally pushes Marvel’s queer representation up another fraction despite the absence of a much-missed Loki, alive in some form on his own show but dead for all intents and purposes here. (Valkyrie is now explicitly said to have a slain female love interest, Korg has a living male one — though his species might be single-gendered — and Heimdall’s son rejects his birth name in a scene that has some arguable transgender undertones.) As I often say at the end of a 3-star review: it’s not a bad title! It’s just not an especially good one, either. Watch it if you feel like you’ve got the two hours to spare, but there doesn’t seem to be anything too critical for the future of the MCU that you’d miss if you don’t.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Book #135 of 2022:

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

This loose retelling of the 1896 classic The Island of Doctor Moreau relocates its action to Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, a setting that #ownvoices author Silvia Moreno-Garcia paints as vividly as she has in previous releases like Mexican Gothic, now against the backdrop of the historical indigenous uprisings that were happening around that time. She also introduces a new character, the titular mad scientist’s child, although I might have been more impressed with this addition if I hadn’t already read the very similar premise in Megan Shepherd’s 2013 novel The Madman’s Daughter and its sequels. (While this volume of course can and should be judged on its own merits, the two works are rather alike, right down to their love triangles and the unsurprising reveal that Moreau’s daughter is — spoiler alert — actually one of his hybrid animal creations.)

The plot here is generally decent, but the book has a few issues holding me back from embracing it fully. First, on a structural / stylistic level, we’re alternating between two POV figures, which would be fine, except for how the end of one scene often gets immediately and unnecessarily repeated from the other person’s perspective, to no apparent payoff. More importantly, I’ve found the second protagonist to be thoroughly unlikeable, largely due to the inappropriate relationship he pursues with the young woman in his care. They are both consenting adults, but with a significant age gap, and when he meets her at the beginning of the story, she’s only 14 whereas he’s 29, a divorced man in a completely different life stage. He then joins the household and watches her grow up, and when we jump to six years later, his sections regularly include thoughts about how her body now oozes sexuality or how he wishes she were one of the prostitutes he visits in town. It’s pretty gross, especially since the couple do — predictably — wind up in bed together at one point.

Perhaps that’s a reflection of my distaste over problematic romances in fiction and not a flaw in the narrative per se. My 3-out-of-5-star rating (“I liked it,” on the Goodreads scale) hopefully captures that this tale does more right than wrong, on balance. But all I can ever offer in a review like this is an effort to critically work through my own subjective reactions to the media piece in question. And in this case, the writer I’ve enjoyed in the past has missed the mark for me.

[Content warning for racism, domestic abuse, gun violence, body horror, suicide, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: What We Do in the Shadows, season 4

TV #43 of 2022:

What We Do in the Shadows, season 4

Probably the strongest run of this supernatural comedy yet, with clear arcs for just about every major character except the Guide. Colin Robinson has been replaced by a rapidly-growing junior version of himself — a concept allowing fresh new jokes for his different ages with each passing episode and some inspired effects creepily placing Mark Proksch’s head on a succession of child body doubles — and is being brought up by his old friend Laszlo, who gets to work through his own daddy issues on top of the bittersweet parental feelings of watching his ward’s childhood end too soon. Meanwhile, Nadja is focusing on her new dream of opening up a vampire nightclub (“like in the movie Blade!”), and Nandor is trying to find love again, generally by using a weary djinn for all manner of hilariously petty wishes.

And then there’s Guillermo, who’s back to his long-suffering bodyguard / familiar / caretaker / aspiring vampire status, and getting increasingly frustrated with his housemates. (In another runner throughout the year, their home has been absolutely trashed in everyone’s temporary absence, due to Laszlo’s neglect and halfhearted HGTV-loving renovation efforts.) If I have one complaint about this stretch, other than how quickly it undoes all the cliffhangers from the season before, it’s that the show still doesn’t quite know how to approach its central relationship. The pieces are there: Gizmo finally comes out as gay to his family and to us, and Nandor is shown to have more explicit sexual interest in men, rather than simply being open to Laszlo’s occasional passes. There’s ample romantic subtext between them, especially when Nandor wishes for his current partner to like everything he likes and she begins falling all over his human companion.

And yet, this element of the plot again doesn’t go anywhere, even in a fairly momentous finale. I can handle Nadja’s embezzlement thread ultimately serving as a futile punchline, but four years into this will they / won’t they dance, in an era of television that’s delivering canonical queer romance in stories like Our Flag Means Death — which shares two executive producers with What We Do in the Shadows!! — it’s frustrating for this one to remain so nebulous and deniable. I wouldn’t even say I particularly ‘ship’ the two characters involved; I just don’t understand what the writers are doing with the shape of their story if it isn’t intended to lead down that route.

So that’s why I’m still holding off on a five-star rating, despite the program demonstrating a steady improvement of characterization and structural complexity and a serious preponderance of laughs. This is a very funny and distinctive and ambitious sitcom! It just needs to either commit to bringing its two leads together or work out something different to try with those protagonists. Until its final scene, the last episode hits the reset button hard on this season, reining in its excesses like Baby Colin and the club and the ruined house for a return to the old status quo. Only that closing moment, paying off Guillermo’s own established stealing and a minor figure from earlier, suggests that we might be in for a significant change ahead. But Shadows has walked back such important-seeming endings before, which makes it difficult to get my hopes up too high over this one.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Night Shift by Alex Finlay

Book #134 of 2022:

The Night Shift by Alex Finlay

An excellently twisty thriller in the Gillian Flynn fashion that’s kept me guessing throughout, with plenty of plausible culprits and a compelling group of protagonists striving to uncover the truth behind two identically horrific murder scenes, fifteen years apart (although the action mostly takes place in the present with a few flashbacks, rather than the parallel timelines and full-on 90s nostalgia I expected when I picked up this book). Back then, it was three teenage girls working late at their Blockbuster Video store who were stabbed to death, with a fourth barely surviving the attack. Now grown and a therapist specializing in trauma, she learns that a similar massacre has just occurred at a nearby ice cream shop, likewise leaving only one young survivor amid three slain peers. The police’s main suspect from the first case vanished from their small New Jersey town after posting bail, never to be seen again. Was he truly guilty or not, and is the same serial killer responsible for the later crimes, or is there a new copycat to blame?

Our other focal viewpoint characters are the fugitive’s kid brother, now a public defender hoping he can someday clear his name, and an FBI agent with major Marge Gunderson from Fargo vibes, who’s assisting the local cops as a favor despite being eight months pregnant with twins. As they each learn more about the figures connected to the slaughters and their respective investigations converge, the plot goes to some fittingly dark places. But author Alex Finlay’s tight control over the story never wavers, and brings all the threads together for a satisfying resolution in the end.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, gun violence, suicide, gore, pedophilia, and rape.]

★★★★☆