The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

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.]

★★★☆☆

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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.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Poker Face, season 1

TV #24 of 2025:

Poker Face, season 1

I realize I am both late to this show and out-of-step with the critical consensus, but this first year hasn’t really blown me away. Theoretically, it’s a charming little modern Columbo riff — a “howcatchem” as opposed to the more common “whodunnit,” in which the audience generally knows the culprit behind each case from the start and gets to watch the investigating protagonist put together the pieces. Natasha Lyonne is fun as that lead character, the guest cast is stacked with big names who likewise seem to be enjoying themselves, and the cross-country cinematography is rather striking. Regardless, as the credits roll each episode, I find that I’m usually left more frustrated than entertained.

For starters, I hate the gimmick that Charlie is a “human lie detector” who can infallibly detect falsehoods in others. She’s a smart (if pleasantly off-kilter) person who could easily be doing a plain amateur detective shtick instead, and her superhuman talent makes things way too easy for her. It’s also just an element that’s hard to suspend my disbelief over! It reminds me of that woman in showrunner Rian Johnson’s movie Knives Out who vomits every time she even thinks about being untruthful, which was a premise that I loathed as well. Neither ability is a thing that anyone has in real life, which blocks me from investing in what follows as a realistically grounded story.

On top of that, there are plot holes and similar logistical issues that keep popping up and irritating me, although none I can get into without spoilers. But this is the problem with this genre: the prototypical villain is a genius who plans the almost-perfect crime, while their opponent is supposed to be clever enough to spot the one loose thread and rumble them. As a result, the writing needs to be on that same intelligence level to pull off the effect successfully, and too often here, it simply isn’t. Characters make wild logical leaps or forget about key details that should seal their fate, but nobody notices or takes advantage. It’s like watching children play chess.

There are some structural complexities I appreciate, with an episode typically presenting a scenario at length before rewinding to reveal how Charlie figures in (and ignoring how, like Jessica Fletcher on Murder She Wrote, she’s so frequently at the scene of a crime having befriended the victim in advance that she should be a person of interest for the police and probably in therapy for all the trauma). But even that wrinkle is of variable quality, with certain hours unnecessarily replaying entire scenes for us with no significant change. Overall it adds up to an assortment of elements that I like enough to continue watching, but never quite manages to overcome the associated flaws.

[Content warning for child sex abuse, domestic abuse, gun violence, suicide, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Saturday Night Live, season 50

TV #23 of 2025:

Saturday Night Live, season 50

Fifty seasons of a single TV show is rather a lot, and ideally I would have preferred to have the landmark status of that anniversary incorporated into more of the regular sketches and guest stars this year. Instead it seemed like it was generally business as usual at SNL, with the celebrations relegated to a few additional specials for the most part. Granted, there were some alumni like Dana Carvey and Mike Myers who made multiple appearances this season, but not appreciably more than we’ve gotten in the recent past, I would say.

Still, this was a fun run. Maya Rudolph returning as Kamala Harris during the presidential election was an easy layup for the show, and James Austin Johnson’s rambling Trump impression continues to impress. I also like the further twist on his formula seen in a few of the cold opens this year, where the character interrupts an unrelated scene to deliver his latest stand-up soliloquy to the captive audience. And on that same political front, Tim Kaine’s surprise appearance as himself was a great piece of self-aware / self-deprecating humor from the former VP candidate.

Music-wise, SNL delivered some hilarious original bangers too. I’m thinking specifically of “Sushi Glory Hole” and “My Best Friend’s House,” but the season also introduced — and then arguably ran into the ground — the recurring “Domingo” sketch, which I’m told went viral on the TikToks or something. Parental sex was also a surprising but funny theme, with both “Oedipal Arrangements” and “OnlySeniors” bringing the shock comedy to their episodes.

In casting news, it was goodbye to Punkie Johnson, Molly Kearney, and Chloe Troast, none of whom had been a particular favorite of mine, and hello to Ashley Padilla, Emil Wakim, and Jane Wickline, who I don’t feel strongly about just yet. So a bit of a wash there, I suppose.

In the final analysis I’m awarding this season a baseline three-star rating, because I don’t think it really stands out as a remarkable outing for the series, especially given the somewhat squandered potential of the anniversary year. But it remains reliably entertaining with occasional breakout moments that take it even further, and that’s ultimately enough for me.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Babylon 5, season 4

TV #22 of 2025:

Babylon 5, season 4

By far the weakest iteration of this 90s sci-fi series yet, although things turn around enough near the end (starting approximately when Sheridan is captured by his enemies and the standout episode “Intersections in Real Time”) that I’ll still rate it as three-out-of-five stars. Too much of this feels aimless, however. The Shadow War that’s been building practically since the show began is resolved after the first few episodes this year, only to be followed by a sort of epilogue wherein the always-inscrutable Vorlons become the new big bad, as they attempt to eradicate every species that’s ever had any contact with the Shadows. But that arc too wraps up pretty quickly, leaving us with merely the long-simmering political situation back on Earth. At least the mad Centauri emperor Cartagia is a fun diversion, especially in contrast to the interminable caste intrigues happening over on Minbar. It’s just a shame we don’t get to know humanity’s own corrupt ruler to that same degree.

My understanding is that this season was expected to be the last, and so certain storylines were either accelerated, reworked, or flat-out discarded to get to a meaningful conclusion. The eventual reprieve of renewal on a different network didn’t provide enough time for the writers to then overhaul their plans yet again, resulting in this run’s somewhat disjointed nature. It’s possible that some of the elements that don’t work as well here, like Garibaldi’s mysterious brainwashing, could have been handled better in the original five-year vision for the program. On the other hand, I do have to offer my thanks that a particular development that initially feints like it’s going to kill off my favorite character winds up killing my least favorite instead. I’ll take it!

Ahead of the actual final season on TNT, four TV movies were commissioned to get new audiences up to speed. I’ll be watching those in the approximate order in which they canonically take place, which means that up next is In the Beginning before I start season 5.

[Content warning for suicide, gun violence, gaslighting, and torture.]

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Sinners (2025)

Movie #5 of 2025:

Sinners (2025)

Just a phenomenal historical horror piece, and one that takes its sweet time establishing the setting and the characters before finally unveiling the vampiric threat. In fact, I found that initial stage of the film so engrossing that for the first few scenes with the supernatural villains, I resented their intrusion and wished we could simply continue to follow the human drama instead. That element is very well-observed, situating us in a poor Black community in Jim Crow-era Mississippi where twin brothers (both played by an excellent Michael B. Jordan, director Ryan Coogler’s long-time collaborator) have recently returned home to open a backwoods drinking and music hall. The men are joined by their more innocent younger cousin, who’s a budding bluesman, and all three have romantic interests and other entanglements that the bloodsuckers upend.

Much as I wanted to see where their stories would go without the vampires, that interruption is of course entirely the point. Coogler draws a not-especially-subtle parallel between the demonic foes and the ordinary racists of the movie, who likewise violently derail the intended plans of the sharecroppers and their ilk. It’s no coincidence that the unholy presence descending upon the juke joint is initially / primarily represented by white outsiders, before any of the local people of color are struck down and converted to their cause.

(On a deeper thematic level, the script also seems to be comparing the vamps to Hollywood and the rest of the largely-white entertainment industry, whose representatives chew through Black talent and offer worldly riches at the price of conformist restraints and leeching off the commoditization of their art. Coogler has experienced his share of commercial success lining the pockets of his white studio bosses, and made headlines for his deal governing the production of Sinners, in which all rights will revert solely to him after 25 years. In that context, it’s hard not to see the work as a metaphor for Black ownership and the forces opposing it writ large.)

Even setting all that aside, however, it’s an immersive dive into a specific cultural milieu, populated mainly by Black bodies and Black concerns. I love the scene in which a musical performance pierces the divide across past and future, showing glimpses of African tribal dances and modern entertainers coexisting alongside the 1930s ensemble. And while the genre may appear to lurch suddenly once the bloodshed starts, the plot from there on out remains a thrilling one with plenty of terror and heartache in store.

I could have done without a few early jump scares, and Jordan doesn’t really modulate his acting to differentiate his two roles to the extent I think he probably could, but those are relatively minor complaints. Overall this was a story I felt deeply drawn into and imagine I’ll still be thinking about for quite some time to come.

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

★★★★★

Movie Review: Thunderbolts* (2025)

Movie #4 of 2025:

Thunderbolts* (2025)

Very much the Marvel answer to DC’s Suicide Squad, starring a motley crew of operatives from the grayer side of the heroics business. In fact, some of these characters were villains in their original on-screen adventures, albeit roughly sympathetic ones. And as usual for the MCU at this stage, it’s not entirely clear which previous titles the studio expects the audience to have already seen / remembered going into this new release. It’s primarily a sequel to Black Widow (2021), with Florence Pugh’s Yelena rightly given the central focus, but you don’t especially need to be up to speed on her cohorts from the other properties, who are more there for the requisite banter and action sequences than asked to shoulder any significant personal arcs.

Still, it’s a fun shoot-em-up with a couple super soldiers but little else in the way of augmented powers. It’s also the rare superhero feature to openly deal with depression and similar mental health issues, which is a nice change for the genre (though I wish one key person’s shifting motivations were better defined than just general instability). Plotwise the movie does about what it’s expected to: someone foolishly tries to kill off the highly-skilled underlings they think have outlived their usefulness, then said protagonists survive and attempt to take their revenge, only to be sidetracked by a more serious threat that lets them finally be proper good guys. As a story, this interlude doesn’t feel like it will be remotely important for the future of the franchise, but it’s not such a bad time either. I’d give it three-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

[Content warning for gun violence and domestic abuse.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Something from the Nightside by Simon R. Green

Book #81 of 2025:

Something from the Nightside by Simon R. Green (Nightside #1)

[Note: this is an updated version of my review from 2017.]

The Nightside series was my introduction to the urban fantasy genre back in high school, and I still have a bit of a soft spot for it. This 2003 title wasn’t even the first one I think I read, but it’s a solid gateway into the setting, the premise, and a few of the key characters. As the protagonist will tell you ad nauseum, the Nightside is the dark underbelly of London, where it’s perpetually 3:00 AM and fantastical beings like gods and monsters rub shoulders under a giant full moon with anyone desperate enough to join them.

That narrating presence is John Taylor, a private eye with a supernatural gift to find anything, including fatal weaknesses or other secrets that have been magically hidden away. He’s a classic hardboiled detective, and author Simon R. Green nails that style of writing while marrying it to the weird and macabre details of this particular world. I used to describe these books to people as Welcome to Night Vale meets Sin City, and I’d say that remains pretty accurate.

Like many debuts or TV pilots, this volume struggles to both establish its regular ongoing elements and provide a compelling story with them in the moment. There’s a lot of telling and not showing, and the plot is largely just a movement from one set piece to the next. Nevertheless, certain recurring figures make an impression already, with the writer skillfully building up their legends as they clash against other equally mythical forces. We’re also introduced to the initial major arc of the saga in a way that doesn’t dominate the immediate proceedings, learning that the hero fled the Nightside once before, has powerful enemies who want him dead, is the child of an inhuman mother and the subject of apocalyptic prophecies, and may someday be responsible for the destruction of all life on Earth. (That last bit comes in one of the novel’s coolest sequences, when the narrator temporarily stumbles into the far future for a spell.)

Overall the work is probably trying to do too many things and cram in way too much exposition, which is why I’m giving it a three-star rating upon this reread. But I’m excited to continue on and discover whether the later releases improve at all, or if I simply happened to catch them at the right time when I was younger.

[Content warning for burrowing insects, underage nudity, gun violence, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: We Solve Murders by Richard Osman

Book #80 of 2025:

We Solve Murders by Richard Osman (We Solve Murders #1)

Mixed feelings on this one. I like the interpersonal dynamics of the private security officer, her father-in-law the retired detective, and their eccentric author friend, and it’s fun to watch them bounce around the globe dodging their enemies while trying to solve a mystery. On the other hand, that puzzle isn’t one I’ve found especially engaging, and I really don’t care for the scenes with the villain under a pseudonym and the corresponding implication that he’s one of the known characters in disguise, which seems very Dan Brown to me. The overall tone is like a Dave Barry or Carl Hiaasen comedy-thriller, but not nearly as funny / zany.

I will say, this 2024 title is the first novel I’ve read that uses ChatGPT as a plot point, as that shadowy figure utilizes it to rewrite all his messages in a particular style to evade detection. I also appreciate his scheme to employ social media influencers as unwitting mules for his money laundering and smuggling operations, by sending them to various locations for bogus brand deals. As a whole, though, the story doesn’t quite manage to escape my mid-range three-star tier. I’d maybe come back for the inevitable sequel(s?), but I haven’t been blown away by the series debut here.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

★★★☆☆