The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Book #159 of 2025:

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith (The Ripliad #1)

Tom Ripley, as depicted in this 1955 crime thriller, its four sequels, and their various screen adaptations, is a pretty great creation. He’s insecure and sociopathic, with author Patricia Highsmith painting him as almost pedestrian in his casual amorality and petty jealousies. He’s neither as smart nor as in control of his emotions as he’d like to think he is, and although his outbursts of violence can be shocking, the real surprise is in how quickly he starts fretting over the logistics of getting away with his impulsive actions. While many writers could tell the basic beats of this story with Ripley as the villain, it takes a true artist to force the audience to so neatly identify with his self-centered nihilism and to feel so dirtily complicit in his misdeeds and their elaborate coverups.

The plot is admittedly thin: our shady protagonist is approached in New York by the rich father of a distant acquaintance, who doesn’t realize he’s a low-level criminal scraping by on scamming people into paying him their supposed overdue tax fees. The son he barely remembers is lounging about in an Italian beach town on his family’s dime, so can Tom please go there and convince Dickie to return home? He’s of course happy to accept the free ticket, and to steadily ingratiate himself into the younger man’s carefree lifestyle upon his arrival. Things turn bloody when that chapter seems to be closing for him, and the rest of the novel finds the antihero scrambling to first impersonate the friend he’s now murdered and then defuse the suspicions of the local police.

When I read and reviewed this book back in 2018, I mentioned “some problematic queer-coding that implies a connection between Ripley’s ethical deviance and his ‘sissiness’ / potential sexual orientation.” This time through — perhaps influenced by the recent Netflix miniseries — I’m more sanguine about that element. Highsmith was known in her private life as a lesbian herself, and though her title figure denies it, he’s plainly not straight either, evincing both a fascination for male bodies and the sort of platonic masculinity he somehow can’t perform and a hatred of women and the idea of any conventional romance or sex with them. I no longer see the text as suggesting that that facet is a root cause of his dark nature, however, but rather that his repression has curdled into loathing and hollowed out the human core of him. Overall, it’s a nuanced depiction well-befitting this twisted midcentury character study.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Unnatural Inquirer by Simon R. Green

Book #158 of 2025:

The Unnatural Inquirer by Simon R. Green (Nightside #8)

One of the blander adventures in this urban fantasy series, further hampered by a streak of sexism and unaddressed poor behavior from the protagonist. And look, I get that John Taylor is something of an antihero — the whole crux of this installment involves his one-off companion realizing in dawning horror that he’ll murder his enemies with no remorse when he has them at his mercy — but that sort of stark morality is at least quasi-defensible. It’s a lot harder for me to accept how he repeatedly cheats on his serious girlfriend by kissing this new character, who says he deserves to be with someone that can stand to touch him (Suzie having an established aversion to physical intimacy due to certain experiences in her past). In the end our detective hero rebuffs the newcomer, but only because the scarred bounty hunter is fine with all the killing and he feels that ‘monsters’ like the two of them deserve one another. No mention is made of how he’s been happily making out with the other woman regardless.

It’s problematic to say the least, and it’s particularly glaring due to not much else of interest happening throughout the novel. The local tabloid that gives the piece its title has hired the paranormal investigator to retrieve a supposed taped broadcast from the afterlife, but the plot doesn’t really build and ricochet in the way these books can do at their best. Instead the characters linearly chase one dead-end lead after another, with a smidgen of serialized development in the greater Nightside power struggle taking place on the margins. It’s altogether dull and nasty, rather than the typical clever fun that I come here for.

[Content warning for gun violence, fatphobia, incest, rape, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Movie Review: The Bourne Legacy (2012)

Movie #14 of 2025:

The Bourne Legacy (2012)

The beginning of this piece is choppy and overwrought, doing little to sell the already-flimsy idea of telling a Jason Bourne story without Jason Bourne. It weaves in and out of the events of the previous film, The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), in a manner that’s alienatingly hard to follow even for someone like me who just watched the thing. In the process, it painstakingly manages to convey the basic premise here, which is that the conspiracy Bourne’s been unraveling reaches far beyond the CIA. The military is involved as well, running a taskforce of elite operatives around the world whom they now begin killing off to cover their tracks as news of the Treadstone program goes public.

Eventually, the script settles into itself, with Jeremy Renner’s character the sole survivor of the attempted purge. He has no canonical connection to the old Matt Damon role, but his journey progresses similarly, using his tactical skills to protect the civilian doctor he’s with (Rachel Weisz, filling the Julia Stiles position of sidekick-who’s-not-quite-a-love-interest) and evade the enemies hunting them down. It all stays close enough to what we’d expect of a Bourne flick that it’s easy to miss how we’ve jumped genres here to science-fiction if not Renner’s more familiar superheroics: Jason may have been a trained assassin experimentally conditioned not to question his orders, but this new cohort take a viral drug to boost their physical and cognitive abilities and become literal super-soldiers. Our protagonist Aaron Cross is even in a Flowers for Algernon situation, where he was mentally incapacitated before starting the treatments, giving his quest to find more medication or a permanent fix considerable weight.

In the end, I don’t think this installment is as strong as the original trilogy — which I’ve liked but not exactly loved anyway — so I’ll rate it accordingly. The closing act is particularly disappointing, featuring the requisite franchise car chase and an antagonist who’s hilariously revealed as a member of an even more experimental and clandestine division in a frankly silly escalation of stakes. There’s no confrontation with the true villain played by Edward Norton, despite an early flashback establishing that he and Aaron have a personal history together, which winds up being the only scene they ever share. Nothing really gets resolved on the wider plot front either, although a couple Ultimatum characters are bizarrely trotted out at the last minute for a quick cameo appearance.

This might work better if further Aaron Cross sequels had followed, but my understanding is that the next (and apparently final) movie in the series opts to ignore this one entirely, rendering it a curious aberration instead. I don’t regret watching it, but it’s by far the weakest Tony Gilroy effort I’ve seen to date.

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

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser

Book #157 of 2025:

Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser

Interesting and well-written, and yet beholden to a bizarre structure that ultimately weakens the work. Essentially there are four threads that author Caroline Fraser develops here, interweaving them as she goes:

1) a true-crime history of American serial killers throughout her life, beginning in the early 1960s, and discussion of how many like Ted Bundy lived or spent significant time in the Pacific Northwest around Tacoma, where she’s also from,

2) an account of unchecked corporate pollution across that same era, particularly of arsenic and lead, with a focus on the nearby ASARCO smelting plant,

3) a running list of fatal vehicle accidents on the local bridges, and

4) her own coming-of-age story amidst all that, with a controlling father in the Christian Science faith who didn’t believe in modern medicine.

The first two items are tenuously linked, at least. The book is arguing in support of the lead-crime hypothesis, which holds that regular exposure to such toxic chemicals can yield an increase in mood swings and violent urges and therefore the sort of sadistic acts that she describes. It’s an idea that I find persuasive but hardly conclusive, and the writer’s engagement with it is pretty surface-level. She presents no evidence that her area of Washington was ever more afflicted by the unsafe materials than similar factory towns around the nation, for example, which suggests to me that some other factor may be required to account for just why it gave rise to so many unhinged rapists and murderers.

The remaining topics are considerably more afield. I can understand the urge to incorporate memoir elements, although the presentation makes it seem like there’s some dark family secret waiting in the wings that never actually arises. But the traffic fatalities don’t connect to anything else at all, reading like Fraser simply wanted them told to the wider world in some manner but knew they couldn’t carry the title alone. In the end I’ve learned things within these pages — uncomfortable, terrifying details about the crimes of the unrepentant prowlers detailed here — but I’m not especially satisfied with the construction of the piece overall.

[Content warning for gun violence, torture, rape, child sex abuse, violence against children, necrophilia, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison

Book #156 of 2025:

So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison

I appreciate that this vampire title is less straightforward than author Rachel Harrison’s earlier werewolf novel Such Sharp Teeth, but as it turns out, unpredictability doesn’t necessarily translate to a stronger work. Although I didn’t know quite where the plot was going, its tale of two women in their mid-thirties getting turned into bloodsuckers on a friends retreat never really has any clear point to it. There’s no consideration of their strained dynamic, no payoff to the heroine’s husband’s infidelity, and no resolution to the fundamental genre question of the undead’s need to prey upon the living. (Sloane is more reluctant to do so than Naomi, but opportunities to feed on scummy men keep allowing her / the text to sidestep the matter. I’m reminded of that old piece of writing advice that bad luck can get your characters into a situation, but good luck shouldn’t get them out of one.)

Is this a story about toxic friendships? About feminist rage? About the invisibility a woman in a loveless marriage might feel as she gets older? There are glancing aspects of those themes, but in my opinion they aren’t ever developed at a satisfying length. At the same time, however, the bloody action isn’t nearly interesting or distinctive enough in its details to carry the book on its own.

And then there’s the requisite love interest, a 600-year-old man who tells the still-mortal protagonist on the night that he meets her, “It’s beyond attraction, what’s between us.” I’m sorry, but that kind of line is just way too cheesy to take seriously, and his subsequent characterization as a beatnik in a dirty van robbing blood banks to survive doesn’t come anywhere close to explaining his appeal. That’s another element that could have been intentionally honed — critiquing his sexist sense of entitlement, perhaps — but in practice feels utterly lifeless on the page.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Mickey7 by Edward Ashton

Book #155 of 2025:

Mickey7 by Edward Ashton (Mickey7 #1)

A fine little science-fiction novel that never quite kicks into a higher gear. The premise and obvious anticapitalist themes seem fun: the protagonist is of the ‘expendable’ underclass on his inhospitable colony world, meaning that he’s given all the truly dangerous tasks and cloned from a saved backup in the event of his inevitable demise. (He technically signed up for the position, although it was a last resort brought on by gambling debts and a bloodthirsty bookie.) As the title suggests, Mickey7 is the latest iteration of himself, and the trouble begins when he survives what’s been written off as another fatal accident. By the time he makes it back to the settlement, an eighth version of him has already been printed out, in an error that’s supposed to result in one of them sacrificing their life so that they don’t drain the community’s scant resources. Instead, the two clones decide to coexist in secret, taking turns venturing out of their quarters and splitting their assigned rations to starvation levels.

But all of that is the basic setup, and the plot doesn’t really go anywhere interesting from there. We get a dose of backstory and worldbuilding dumps, and the hero butts heads with the local authoritarian leader, but things neither escalate in action nor achieve the madcap black comedy tone that feels promised at the start. The Mickeys mostly just sit around hungry and at one point hook up with each other and their shared girlfriend. And while the text nods to philosophical ideas like the ship of Theseus, the character gives no real sign of ever grappling with the fundamental issue that he won’t survive his looming death sentence, even if somebody else wakes up with his stored memories later on. I realize plenty of genre works like Star Trek have problematic readings in that vein, but here it reads as too central to so thoroughly ignore.

It’s possible these matters are improved in the sequel — or in the film adaptation, which for some reason changed the name of the piece to Mickey 17. Running through more of the duplicates, rather than sticking with the same couple for the entirety of the storyline outside of flashbacks, might help liven everything up. But as is, this volume is ultimately landing as more good than great for me overall.

[Content warning for gun violence, suicide, cannibalism, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

Movie #13 of 2025:

The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

Although still an amnesiac, Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne has by this point in the franchise firmly established himself as a skilled super-spy, seemingly able to infiltrate any security setup and evade detection in any crowded metropolitan area. He’s also continuing to hunt for answers about his past, which kicks off this third film, set only six weeks following the last one. (Amusingly, it even recontextualizes the closing coda from The Bourne Supremacy to be part of the middle of the drama here.) In an eyeroll-inducing development, it turns out that neither of the previous two CIA bosses he’d confronted were really the head of the program that once deployed him as an assassin, and the actual commander is now gunning for him after he gets in the way of a strike on a reporter who was getting too close to the truth.

This is apparently the highest-rated Bourne movie, but in my opinion, it’s the weakest of the original trilogy. Take that duplicated scene that I mentioned above, where the protagonist is calling an agency contact: the Supremacy version ends on the line, “Get some rest, Pam. You look tired,” coolly revealing to both her and us that he’s been in the building opposite her this whole time. In this updated take, the surprise is ruined for the audience by showing him setting up in the first place, and then further underscored by the eavesdropping villain helpfully spelling out, “He’s looking right at her!” The script is full of clunky moments like that, although I do enjoy the hero’s later phone exchange with that same antagonist:

“Where are you now?”
“I’m sitting in my office.”
“I doubt that.”
“Why would you doubt that?”
“If you were in your office right now, we’d be having this conversation face-to-face.”

The hand-to-hand combat and requisite car chases are fun as always, and I think the decision to deepen the series mythology by establishing that Bourne and his cohort were brainwashed is a good instinct. The shakycam is more egregious than ever, though, especially with the preponderance of overly dramatic zooms throughout, and the amount of physical damage Damon’s character can shake off is truly absurd. Ultimately it’s a fine enough action spectacle, and curiously prescient in its pre-Snowden premise of massive illegal government surveillance, but it’s pretty far from the smart thriller it believes itself to be.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: I See You’ve Called in Dead by John Kenney

Book #154 of 2025:

I See You’ve Called in Dead by John Kenney

The initial satirical premise of this novel — in which a newspaper obituary-writer drunkenly posts a sardonic memorial for himself, resulting in the company software miscategorizing him as deceased — got enough of a chuckle out of me that I pushed on to finish the story, but in hindsight, I wish I hadn’t. That protagonist is the worst sort of pretentious middle-aged divorced man, nowhere near as funny as he thinks he is, who at the instigation of a local manic pixie dream girl begins attending the funerals of strangers. He’s also accompanied by his inspirational disabled friend, who seems blatantly in the narrative only to die at the end and theoretically tug on our heartstrings in furtherance of the hero’s self-actualization.

I saw another review compare the idea here to Fight Club meets Tuesdays with Morrie, and I can’t really argue with that description, although I’d add that it’s more like A Man Called Ove if the title character weren’t ravaged by grief but merely obdurately full of himself. Are we supposed to be on his side as he jokes about people’s pronouns and sexuality and paints himself as the victim in the ensuing HR conversation? Or later when he shows up at work after being fired and violently assaults his replacement (to the cheers of the surrounding office, for some unfathomable reason)? Nothing about this book works, on any level.

★☆☆☆☆

Book Review: Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

Book #153 of 2025:

Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

This fantasy novel does a great job capturing the terrifyingly mundane lows of graduate school: the uncertainty, the depression, the stress, the disordered sleep and eating habits, the precarious financial situation, the emotionally abusive professors, and so on. My own experience wasn’t ever so bad that I would have considered literally descending into hell in pursuit of the diploma, but, like, I get it.

This is a story about two grad students going into the underworld to retrieve the soul of their dead advisor, but I also think it reads best as a metaphor for higher education itself. (They have to give up years off their life expectancy to activate the spell! The denizens of the afterlife they encounter are obsessed with writing papers to satisfy some absent authority’s inscrutable standards! It’s too perfect, really.) Author R. F. Kuang draws on her academic background for both text and subtext here, and the result is a thoroughly unglamorous depiction of what it’s like to toil away at the lonely research of a doctoral program.

Unfortunately, I don’t feel that it works as well as an actual plot. The worldbuilding is too vague and the characters too unlikeable, and their eventual romance seems more generically proximity-based than grounded in anything specific about their personalities and interactions. The tone is off too, alternating moments of despair and extreme gore with flippantly silly magical theory using logical paradoxes to trick the universe into misbehaving. It’s by far my least favorite title that I’ve read from this writer, despite the commentary on academia delivering a seriously welcome sting.

[Content warning for sexism, ableism, and sexual assault.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: Nightshade by Mark Gatiss

Book #152 of 2025:

Doctor Who: Nightshade by Mark Gatiss (Virgin New Adventures #8)

Mark Gatiss is a true Doctor Who multihyphenate, having written nine scripts for the revived post-2005 series and appeared as an actor in another five episodes (with one overlap, in the uncredited cameo role of a spitfire pilot in his own Victory of the Daleks). As an author, he was also an early contributor during the so-called Wilderness Years when the show was off the air after 1989, beginning with this 1992 novel in Virgin Publishing’s New Adventures line.

It’s a horror title, specifically reminiscent of that Stephen King archetype of a secluded village getting gradually overrun by a malign influence (‘Salem’s Lot, The Tommyknockers, Needful Things, etc.). In this case, a buried presence in 1960s northern Britain is awakened by a local research station and begins manifesting ghastly figures drawn from people’s strongest memories — often their dead loved ones, but for one retired actor from a program that seems an amalgam of The Quatermass Experiment and Doctor Who itself, the fictional bug-eyed aliens he once fought on-screen. These ghouls then proceed to feed off the residents they’re haunting, thereby causing the size of the cast to steadily shrink.

The Seventh Doctor and Ace arrive in the middle of this, and she’s frustratingly in her generic plucky teenager phase, rather than the capable world-weary operator Andrew Cartmel gave us a couple installments ago. She even falls instantly in love with another youth in the area, for no apparent reason that I can ever detect. Immediate attraction to a guest star like that is the kind of thing that the television show could occasionally carry off with the help of committed performances, but on paper, there’s just nothing that stands out about the guy to justify her extreme reaction. A few serialized elements don’t quite work, either: the Doctor thinking about giving up his wandering, Ace planning to stay with her new beau whether he does or not, the Time Lord then betraying his companion and essentially kidnapping her at the end, and so on. These developments aren’t terrible in and of themselves, but they come out of nowhere and to my understanding are never picked up by any further sequels. That’s a fault of the series editors more than Gatiss in my opinion, but it does make the volume harder to appreciate on its own terms.

Still, the plotting is otherwise fine, the apparitions are suitably creepy, and the writer is plainly having fun with all his references to the franchise’s past, in addition to the meta angle of the TV monsters coming to life. The story’s flaws hold it back, and the author’s future involvement with the Whoniverse makes it seem more momentous than it properly is, but it’s certainly not the worst of its lot.

[Content warning for racism, domestic abuse, and gore.]

★★★☆☆