The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Revolution by John Peel

Book #88 of 2025:

Revolution by John Peel (2099 #4)

This middle-grade sci-fi series stalls out a bit here, though I’m hoping the final two volumes are able to recapture the original momentum and fun. (It’s been a quarter-century since my last read, so none of this is particularly clear in my memory.) The subplot with the heavy-handed riot police on Mars is probably the most interesting, which is a problem when that corner of the narrative remains so disconnected from everything else. Otherwise the characters mostly spend this installment regrouping and making plans for the future, which isn’t the most entertaining sort of fiction.

Still, it’s a quick enough book overall, and I’m picking up on some likely Babylon 5 influences that obviously went over my head as a kid, so that’s neat to see. But proto-Orphan Black continues to be the primary vibe, which leaves me hopeful that we’ll get more scenes of the clones interacting with each other soon.

Side note: no idea what’s happening with the cover here, since the story is about three 14-year-old boys with genius programming skills, not an army of flying soldiers. I suspect the artist wasn’t given much of a summary to work with.

[Content warning for gun violence, torture, and eugenics.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Never Flinch by Stephen King

Book #87 of 2025:

Never Flinch by Stephen King (Holly Gibney #4)

In the afterword to this new novel, author Stephen King acknowledges that it was difficult to write before saying that he’s “happy enough” with the final version. That’s largely how I feel as a reader, too. This is pretty far from the writer at his best, and in fact, a lot of it plays out as him repeating some of his previous work — not only the earlier Holly Gibney and Bill Hodges detective stories, but also shades of Insomnia with its extremist attack on a feminist rally. The most original element here is an alcoholic serial killer’s comparison of his two compulsions, a sharp characterization that’s presumably rooted in King’s own admitted struggles with addiction.

Structurally, the book is all over the place. We’re following two murderers whose paths eventually happen to cross, but that entanglement occurs so late in the text that their separate plots seem fairly coincidental. One is a religious zealot stalking a liberal activist, although her politics are so vaguely defined that it’s hard to understand the bigot’s anger at her as a specific target, while the other is embarking on a somewhat goofy mission to kill twelve random people in protest of a jury who convicted an innocent man. (He leaves names of the jurors in his victims’ hands, apparently to try guilting them into suicide.) The latter takes a ton of risks in his opportunistic murders, which fits with his nature as an addict but makes it frustrating that the various investigators aren’t able to capitalize on his missteps to easily track him down. They don’t even look into how he knew the identities of the anonymous jury, which should be an obvious first step!

Holly Gibney and her friends Jerome, Barbara, and Izzy are back as those protagonists, although the piece is basically standalone and probably works fine if you haven’t read their prior adventures. It’s also an entirely mundane crime thriller up until a stinger in the epilogue, which I continue to think is an odd approach for a series, alternating between the existence of the supernatural or not.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t complain about the treatment of gender in this tale. King is pro-choice and an outspoken Trump critic, but he’s also a 77-year-old with some rather regressive attitudes and knowledge gaps. Thus he has his political mouthpiece here repeatedly crow about how no men have ever had an abortion — ignoring the reality of transgender men, some of whom have indeed undergone that procedure — and his secondary villain turns out to have Dissociative Identity Disorder and a genderfluid presentation, sometimes manifesting and dressing as his late twin sister. It’s problematic to say the least, especially in a work with no other meaningful queer themes or characters, and it strikes me as the sort of unwelcome throwback a competent editor should have vetoed.

Still, King is compulsively readable as usual, and I’d say the title is his typical page-turner overall. But I’ve never loved Holly Gibney myself, and I’d personally be okay if he retired the heroine and her world at this point.

[Content warning for child pornography, racism, gun violence, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld, season 1

TV #27 of 2025:

Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld, season 1

“This is solid but unremarkable Star Wars for the most part, and although it isn’t the worst of the franchise, it never comes close to justifying its existence.” That’s what I said in my review of last year’s Tales of the Empire cartoon anthology, though it also could have applied to 2022’s Tales of the Jedi. And here, sure enough, we get more of the same. (In fact, these shows could all easily have been subsequent seasons of one common series; it’s not as though the separate names really demarcate different focuses for the stories within.)

This time we’ve again got two main arcs: a coda for Asajj Ventress, showing what the Sith woman did after renouncing her evil ways and returning back to life, and an origin story / High Noon riff for the bounty hunter gangster Cad Bane. The latter is slightly more interesting than the former, and neither is awful beyond the inherent poor comparison of being released in the middle of Andor’s incredible second season. Still, this is an eminently skippable celebration of a couple glup shittos through and through.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible by Marc Platt

Book #86 of 2025:

Doctor Who: Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible by Marc Platt (Virgin New Adventures #5)

The first four books in this sequel series to Classic Doctor Who formed a loose quartet, and this next one purportedly starts a new trilogy. It’s pretty standalone, however, and ultimately one of those stories that I think works better in theory than in actual practice. The basic premise is that the Seventh Doctor’s TARDIS collides with an experimental time-craft from ancient Gallifreyan history, an era shrouded in mystery even for him, and the resulting disaster strands all the passengers from both ships on a strange and desolate alien world. In fact, it’s a setting that somehow coexists alongside its own past and future, and so the characters keep bumping into their older or younger selves and doing things to change the timeline accordingly.

It’s mindbending but not particularly satisfying, especially on the heels of Timewyrm: Revelation, which offered a similar bizarre adventure for the Time Lord and his companion Ace. The most effective parts are probably the worldbuilding elements that author Marc Platt shades in around the edges and would later return to for his infamous novel Lungbarrow: we learn for instance that the hero’s people are grown in looms rather than born naturally, and we see the legendary Rassilon first coming to power accompanied by a figure called only the Other. That early look at Gallifrey is a treat for longtime fans, but it occupies too few of the pages here to justify the interminable main plot, which largely consists of the protagonists running around a decaying city ad-nauseum. So much more could have been done with such a promising sci-fi concept.

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Reservation Dogs, season 1

TV #26 of 2025:

Reservation Dogs, season 1

A fresh and very funny slice-of-life dramedy about a group of teenage friends in the Muscogee Nation of rural Oklahoma. This program feels like a revelation with its magical realist touches and nearly all Indigenous talent both on and off the screen, and the humor resultantly carries a ton of well-observed specificity even for a non-Native outsider like me.

The storytelling is a little looser than I would prefer, and I could see myself liking the show less in subsequent seasons if a stronger plot doesn’t ultimately develop. But eight half-hour episodes isn’t a ton of space for a series to establish itself within, and this one is clearly more interested in introducing us to the characters and their community than pushing anyone or anything forward just yet. (Without spoilers, the one exception in the finale seems like a development that will swiftly get walked back.)

Still, the kids are reeling from a recent loss, trying to raise money to leave for California in an ingenious variety of illegal but relatively harmless ways, and being hassled by a more serious gang of peers who view them as competition. That’s enough to scaffold this first year, at least.

[Content warning for drug abuse, racism, and suicide.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Nightshade by Michael Connelly

Book #85 of 2025:

Nightshade by Michael Connelly (Detective Stilwell #1)

This 2025 release is the start of a new series for author Michael Connelly, although there are a few subtle indications throughout that it’s set in the same continuity as his long-running Bosch and Lincoln Lawyer titles. I’d be shocked if there aren’t crossover sequels planned somewhere down the line, but for now at least, it’s a clean entry point with an original setting and cast of characters.

Our protagonist is the lead detective assigned to a remote island off the coast of California, accessible only by ferry or private boat. He has a degree of authority there, but the posting was meant to be a punishment for his past actions while working on the mainland, which also got him a few enemies and the disdain of his superior officers back home. (The details are still somewhat vague by the end of this debut volume, as is the rest of the guy’s backstory — we aren’t even given his first name yet for some reason.) For returning readers, there are shades of both Harry Bosch and Renée Ballard here, who’ve likewise each chafed against department bureaucracy in their drive to find justice for the victims of violent crime. Stilwell is particularly like the former in going rogue near the novel’s end, embarking on a one-man rescue mission and shooting an unarmed kidnapper rather than following appropriate police guidelines. Whether the hero resorting to that sort of behavior constitutes unacceptable copaganda or not, it definitely closes off a potential branch of the ongoing investigation prematurely, which is a frustrating choice that cuts against his general characterization as a brilliant investigator.

As usual for this writer, there are a number of open cases that play off one another or else wind up directly related, from the body of a woman found buried at sea to a robbery at the local yacht club to a lurid animal mutilation that seems intended to boost tourism. These may have a distinctive flavoring due to the surrounding environment, but none of them are especially twisty or mindblowing in their solutions, and I’m not sure they add up to a spectacular beginning for the main character. Despite the change in outward trappings, this is the solid workmanlike quality you can generally expect of Connelly, yet unfortunately not one of his better stories overall.

[Content warning for threat of rape, suicide, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

Book #84 of 2025:

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games #3)

The first two volumes in this trilogy shared a roughly similar structure: half a book of buildup to the latest deadly arena match, and then the heroine’s desperate bid for survival within it. This closing entry operates along the same general principles, except for the key difference that nominally, there are no more Hunger Games at this point. Instead, with open rebellion broken out and all of Panem at war, we get a dose of what it means for Katniss Everdeen to be a part of that revolutionary effort — and cynically used by its propaganda machine — followed by an abrupt pivot to her service as a frontline soldier infiltrating the Capitol. It’s not quite the familiar bloodsport from her time as a Tribute, but it reads as an intentional approximation of that, complete with devious traps from the enemy Gamemakers killing off her squadmates one by one.

The problem here, as with the Quarter Quell from the previous novel, is that that particular complication feels mandated by author Suzanne Collins or her editors, rather than representing a truly organic development in the story arc. It’s as though the publishing team thinks that any plot in this setting has to involve such immediate life-or-death stakes and the requisite twisted torture devices, and so duly guides things in that direction no matter what. That’s a baffling disservice to the writer’s own storytelling abilities, however, as invariably the worldbuilding, plots, and interpersonal drama are all more compelling earlier on, before the frantic peril portion of the tale.

Here, for instance, the novel’s primary strength lies in the main character’s steadily-dawning realization that the rebel forces who have recruited her for their cause may be no better than the very oppressors they’re opposing. That’s a devastating twist for the genre, and a sharp break from the saga’s pop culture predecessors like Harry Potter or Star Wars, which typically offer pretty stark battle lines of good versus evil. Our returning protagonist still has that moral clarity, of course, but it’s centered on individual people and their actions, not sheer tribalism. Thus she has room in her heart for sympathy towards relatively innocent Capitol residents like Cinna’s former assistants, and repugnance for her new allies who seem intent on using their tormentors’ wicked ways against them.

In the end, Katniss’s vision prevails, and we close with the suggestion that a kinder tomorrow for this dystopia is possible, rather than just swapping one brand of fascism for another in a continuing cycle of abuse. That’s a lovely idea, but it’s one that deserves to be explored at a greater length than can be achieved here. Between the battlefront heroics and the return of the cheesy YA love triangle, this volume unfortunately sags a bit on the way to its pastoral flash-forward conclusion — though at least it provides decent material for its superior film adaptations in the process.

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

This volume: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Volumes ranked: 1 > 2 > 3

Book Review: Woodworking by Emily St. James

Book #83 of 2025:

Woodworking by Emily St. James

I’ve been following this author’s work as a cultural critic for years, since well before she came out as transgender and changed her name to Emily St. James. That means I’ve already read several of her own personal accounts of her gender dysphoria, realization, and steps towards affirmation, and I see a lot of those same experiences reflected in this debut novel. I want to start my review there, because I think that is so beautiful and so brave, and I am sure there are readers out there who need to see a story like this to unlock something inside them — either the epiphany that they too might not be the gender everyone has always assumed they are or the simple empathetic understanding that trans folks are normal human beings who deserve to live in dignity like anybody else.

Unfortunately, valid as all that is, I don’t feel like it necessarily speaks to fine literature on its own. These protagonists are great mouthpieces for [one particular version of] what it means to be trans, which they really do express in the most eloquent of terms, but they’re not as compelling as breathing figures in this small-town midwestern drama. I’ve had a particularly hard time accepting the choices of the main heroine, a closeted high school teacher who latches onto one of her students as the only openly transgender person that she knows. Multiple individuals, whether they know her secret or not, point out how inappropriate that friendship is, and how unfair it is for her to keep dumping her adult problems on an underage teen. (You’re 35! Find community on the internet, not in a child half your age with her own share of issues!) But then those complaints just sort of sit on the surface of the text and are never satisfactorily resolved. It’s a similar situation with the queer characters and their ostensible allies who support the local right-wing political candidate running on a platform of hateful rhetoric and discriminatory policies like bathroom bills. There’s an inherent contradiction there that isn’t explored to any significant degree.

So much of this reads like Trans 101 — which again, I realize will likely be helpful in some circles! I would probably be more enthusiastic about it myself had it come out a decade ago, when the publishing landscape was truly a desert for such narratives. But in the wake of Cemetery Boys, or Detransition, Baby, or Light from Uncommon Stars, or the works of Andrew Joseph White, and so on, that dig deeply into this #ownvoices territory while simultaneously crafting a storyline that goes well beyond it, a title like this one ends up feeling somewhat rudimentary. It’s also strange, in a book with ultimately close to a dozen named trans women, that there’s no real presence of any transgender men at all. I get that St. James is writing from her own perspective as someone unpacking being assigned male at birth and the subsequent pressures of masculine socialization, but it’s another indication of the limitations of that approach, in my opinion.

I am not trans. If you are, and my critiques seem off-base, I do recommend seeking out other reviewers who might have more in common with the writer and/or yourself to see what they have to say! But I’m personally categorizing this as largely a throat-clearing exercise that hopefully presages more complex fiction from Emily St. James somewhere down the line.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, transphobia including misgendering and deadnaming, abortion, and suicide.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Black Mirror, season 7

TV #25 of 2025:

Black Mirror, season 7

Another strong collection of the sci-fi anthology series, somehow still chugging along after all this time. (The first season came out all the way back in 2011!) As usual, some episodes are better than others, but 7×3 Hotel Reverie is the only one that doesn’t work for me at all this year. Individual ratings and mini-reviews below:

Common People: A wicked premise, executed to perfection. I think this show sometimes gets an unfair reputation for being overly cynical / scaremongering about emerging technology, but this one certainly fits that bill. A comatose woman receives an experimental medical treatment to replace her damaged brain tissue with a synthetic version, but the company that maintains it soon begins raising the access fees, downgrading her quality of care when she and her cash-strapped husband can’t keep up, and even having her subconsciously work product-placement ads into her daily conversations. A cruel but effective allegory for genuine problems in our own capitalist healthcare system. ★★★★☆

Bête Noire: A fun little paranoid thriller about a former classmate somehow antagonizing the protagonist in her workplace in ways no one else can detect, with a deliriously ludicrous reveal that elevates the proceedings to a whole other level for the endgame. That structure reminds me a bit of last season‘s Joan Is Awful, but this one forges its own path to a simply wild conclusion. ★★★★☆

Hotel Reverie: This one starts off alright, with the heroine entering a virtual recreation of an old Hollywood movie, but there are too many logistical issues that are never addressed. (The production team is just going to release whatever they’re capturing of her weird choices throughout? That’s supposed to be an entertaining film?) An unexpected love story carries some potential, but then the romantic interest has her mind wiped and the plot moves on with a shrug. The final scene in this one is profoundly unearned and unsatisfying, too. ★★☆☆☆

Plaything: Both cute and dystopian as the critics would allege, but a tad too predictable in my opinion. Peter Capaldi is having a blast with the material as a sort of anti-Doctor, telling his police interrogators how he came to be the guardian of what’s arguably a new digital lifeform, but the whole thing needs something beyond its would-be twist ending to really elevate the matter. At least we get a fun connection back to 2018’s feature-length Bandersnatch special. ★★★☆☆

Eulogy: This is the one I’d probably point to in this batch for the strongest argument that Black Mirror isn’t saying new tech can only ever be scary and bad. Here, it lets Paul Giamatti turn in a powerhouse emotional performance as an aging bachelor given a chance to revisit his old memories of a relationship that meant a lot to him but ended poorly. His growth over the course of the hour is inspiring, and while it’s sad that he can’t change what happened, that’s not worsened by the miracle device that’s letting him access the things he’d walled away. Rather, it’s the mechanism by which he’s finally able to confront and release those mental blocks and achieve a measure of grace. ★★★★☆

USS Callister: Into Infinity: This is the first straight-up sequel the program has attempted, reaching back to season 4‘s USS Callister, and presumably it won’t work as well for any viewers who missed that one or don’t remember it so clearly. It’s also not quite as tight a story the second time around, but the new focus mostly mitigates any issue of diminishing returns. Whereas the original episode concerned an entitled nerd who tortured digital copies of his coworkers as a petty tyrant with god-level permissions over their videogame surroundings, this one follows his victims in the aftermath as they attempt to survive the hostile setting on their own. Running low on credits, they’re forced to prey on the human players to scrounge up the necessary resources to stave off deletion, which eventually attracts the attentions of their own real selves, who want to stop them from ruining the gameplay experience. In a way it’s as much a capitalist critique as the first installment this season, and a worthy bookend to round out the year. ★★★★☆

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

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

Book #82 of 2025:

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

Unintentionally a great companion piece to the movie Sinners (2025), another historical vampire story centered on a marginalized racial group to come out in recent months. This one is less concerned with vampirism as a metaphor for whiteness as a predatory force, but it still takes seriously the atrocities that European settlers and their descendants visited upon the native populations. Part of the backstory concerns the real-life 1870 Marias Massacre in which 200 peaceful Blackfeet were murdered under a writ of safe passage, and author Stephen Graham Jones, a member of that tribe himself, weaves his narrative with rich #ownvoices cultural details even as he explores the sort of revenge that a Pikuni might have been able to enact if he were blessed / cursed with certain vampiric powers.

Structurally, this novel reminds me of The Vampire Lestat in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, in that it’s largely the memoir of a person who gets turned into a vampire but then left on his own to scrabble for answers about what that means, rather than taken under the wing of a knowledgeable older sire as the genre often goes. Our protagonist has no real context for the thing that he’s become or the new abilities that he manifests, but it’s a change that will forever alienate him from the rest of his people. I love the invented mythology too, in which the bloodsuckers gradually take on the physical characteristics of their prey. Primarily targeting white victims for a few seasons makes the hero look like he belongs to that race as well, while in one memorable sequence, he neutralizes another of his new species — who do not appear to be mortal in any significant sense — by capturing him and feeding him only fish blood until he has lost his intelligence / memories and transformed into a wholly aquatic creature himself.

There’s a lot to appreciate here, although I do like the two nested plotlines considerably better than the framing device that begins and ends our tale. The deepest level is narrated by the actual vampire relating his actions in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, which is presented as part of a journal kept by a Lutheran preacher who hears his confession in 1912 and records it alongside his own subsequent commentary. We start and conclude, however, with the modern academic who finds that document a hundred years later, and I don’t feel as though her sections of the book are nearly as interesting or necessary as the others. Still, that leaves the bulk of this text as a fantastically angry and deeply original slice of horror.

[Content warning for racism, rape, genocide, suicide, gun violence, violence against children, and gore.]

★★★★☆