The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

Book #22 of 2025:

The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

One of the more distinctive fantasy novels I’ve ever read, and apparently loosely based on the life / legend of the Buddha’s son Rāhula (literally Fetter, the name of the protagonist here, so named because he represented a worldly connection the mystic knew he would have to sever in order to someday attain enlightenment). I’m not especially familiar with the traditional tale, but it’s evident on the page what sort of trauma complex that would give a child, even before considering how his mother in turn tried to raise him as a weapon against his father.

The setting is modern-adjacent, verging on urban fantasy, with demons and magical powers existing alongside email forwards, TV broadcasts, dating apps, and the like in a fictional region inspired by South Asia (and particularly author Vajra Chandrasekera’s native Sri Lanka). There the hero comes of age and tries to chart his own path away from his dueling parental influences, eventually falling in with both a group of would-be revolutionaries and an effort to study the strange phenomenon of doors that only seem to exist on one side of a wall and cannot be opened by any known means. All the while, he does his best to hide his own inherited abilities like flight and the occasional eerie prophetic vision.

The story logic often feels dreamlike to me, with no clear sense of what’s driving the characters or provoking certain events around them. That’s intensified near the end of the volume, during Fetter’s listless time in a dystopian internment camp, but it’s present throughout the text to such a degree that it seems intentional — perhaps to some readers’ distaste. In that vein I personally don’t find the conclusion to be entirely satisfying, although again I think that’s probably the writer’s intent.

Mostly I will remember this title for its worldbuilding and its thematic grappling with issues of colonialism, genocidal displacement, and religious extremism. I love the idea that the cult leader can rewrite reality to change the past on a whim, which functions as a brilliant metaphor for colonial impacts on indigenous culture and suppression of historical accounts that differ from the official record. The execution is spottier, or maybe just more ideal for someone with the relevant background context that Chandrasekera is drawing upon, but in general, it’s made quite an impression.

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

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Omnibus by Robin Furth, Peter David, Richard Isanove, Sean Phillips, Luke Ross, Michael Lark, Laurence Campbell, and Alex Maleev

Book #21 of 2025:

Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Omnibus by Robin Furth, Peter David, Richard Isanove, Sean Phillips, Luke Ross, Michael Lark, Laurence Campbell, and Alex Maleev

This bound edition contains volumes 31-60 of Marvel’s comic book adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, originally published from 2010 through 2013 under the subheadings of The Journey Begins, The Little Sisters of Eluria, The Battle of Tull, The Way Station, The Man in Black, Sheemie’s Tale, Evil Ground, and So Fell Lord Perth. Roughly half of these issues depict events from the novel The Gunslinger, while The Little Sisters of Eluria adapts that prequel short story and the rest provide connective tissue to both the previous releases and the wider Tower saga.

I mentioned in my review of the first omnibus that although it would likely prove appealing to fans for fleshing out more of the canonical backstory, the main plot struck me as a weaker substitute for the proper experience of reading the actual King books. I feel the opposite about this sequel, in part because The Gunslinger itself is such a strange and flawed title to begin with. It’s a volume that coasts by on character and mood more than concrete answers, and so it benefits tremendously from the addition of illustrations and further lore details on these comic pages. There’s a clearer sense throughout of the far-future dystopia that is Roland’s parallel reality, along with the ultimate goal that’s driving him. His relationship with the boy Jake from our world, already one of the better parts of the source material, is likewise strengthened by giving their conversations space to unfold as they make their way across the eerie landscape, steadily pursuing the hero’s foe.

Struggling readers are often encouraged to power through the first Dark Tower book before deciding whether to quit the series or not; I could also now suggest that they try checking out this comic treatment as another option instead.

[Content warning for sexual assault, gun violence, and gore.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Farscape, season 3

TV #7 of 2025:

Farscape, season 3

Cast shakeups are hard. Some TV series take such overhauls in their stride, like Doctor Who‘s revolving door of companions and regenerations, while others can weather the occasional new arrival or departure by leaning into the mission at the core of the premise and how the ensemble pursuing it is bigger than any single participant. On paper, it feels like Farscape should be an example of the latter category — its band of protagonists on the living ship Moya has never been a cohesive crew like that aboard a Star Trek vessel, after all, just a gang of misfits trying vaguely to escape the attentions of their enemies. There’s an inherent malleability there, which is why Chiana was able to fit in without issue when she arrived in a random season 1 episode and surprisingly stuck around.

Theoretically, then, the program should be able to accommodate that sort of disruption. You can imagine the team operating as a Ship of Theseus situation, swapping out members as it goes along, rather like the last few iterations of the sitcom Community. In practice this third season, however, it doesn’t quite work for me, perhaps because there’s too much turnover in too short a period. Jothee and Stark joined up late in the previous year, when it looked like Aeryn was on her way out. (I’m attempting to avoid spoilers here about the specific circumstances involved.) Then all three remained, Jool got written in, Zhaan and Jothee left, Crais returned, and so on. And that’s merely the contingent of major characters on Moya / Talyn, not even considering how the villain Scorpius has been upgraded to the main cast and consequently given more screentime, whether as his actual self or as the lingering neural clone hallucinations within Crichton’s mind. There’s not enough time for the scripts to ever settle down into their new rhythms before being offset by yet another revamp.

Most notably of all the changes this year, Crichton winds up “twinned” into two identical copies at one point, which seems like a typical sci-fi episodic plot until both men survive the initial encounter. There are then simply two Crichtons hanging around with everybody else in perpetuity, which works out to one leaving and the other staying behind when the group splits into two halves for a while. It’s another development that I can understand in concept — the series bounces back and forth between the two smaller units week by week, and Ben Browder as the show’s star gets to be in both of them — but doesn’t land as well as I think it could. I loved the alternating split cast thing when Fringe did it across its universes, but here it again just doesn’t have enough room in the season to really get going and establish itself. The Talyn segments are significantly stronger by virtue of including John’s love interest and primary friendly-ish foil (and by building to an eventual tragedy) too, whereas the Moya ones tend to languish with underdeveloped personal conflicts until the two storylines reunite.

None of this is exactly bad, but I’m nitpicking because it all feels like a messy step down from a series I’d been enjoying considerably more beforehand. I do love the increased presence of Scorpy, and as far as subplots go, both Aeryn’s evolving feelings for John and Crais’s redemption arc prove pretty satisfying by the end. But this is ultimately too chaotic a year to develop its better elements into their strongest possible versions.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Pull to Open: 1962-1963: The Inside Story of How the BBC Created and Launched Doctor Who by Paul Hayes

Book #20 of 2025:

Pull to Open: 1962-1963: The Inside Story of How the BBC Created and Launched Doctor Who by Paul Hayes

A probably definitive overview of the creation of what would eventually become the BBC’s flagship science-fiction program Doctor Who, well before it had secured that reputation by longevity and popular acclaim. Although author Paul Hayes has conducted no new interviews for this work (published for the sixtieth anniversary of the series in 2023, when many of the principal figures would admittedly be unavailable), he’s exhaustively combed through the historical record, from old production memos and contemporaneous news articles to later memoirs and interview responses, all to produce this fairly cohesive account of the two years in the title.

It’s a somewhat arbitrary timespan. The idea for Doctor Who grew steadily over many creative sessions with various contributors, but the earliest concrete seeds appear to date to 1963. By setting his purview to cover the previous year as well, Hayes is able to share more of the background industry landscape of the era, as well as a few preliminary reports the studio had produced exploring the concept of sci-fi on television in general, which may or may not have been incorporated by the team later working on Who. In many areas like this, there’s no smoking gun of clear evidence regarding some specific piece of involvement; with human memory being fallible and many papers of the time not preserved, sometimes even the producers themselves disagree about who was responsible for what.

On the opposite end of the book’s designated period, the show famously premiered on November 23rd, 1963, with a slight delay due to overrun coverage of the recent JFK assassination. The writer again fudges a little to extend his window through the following month as well, presumably to include more details about the Daleks, those popular villains which were introduced in the second serial to air. But he stops long before any notion of regeneration or other changes to the cast or story format had been developed, leaving a curiously staid impression of a media property that by now is best known for its capacity to update and reinvent itself on a regular basis.

Regardless, it’s an interesting look at the topic of how certain elements gradually took shape — and false starts were discarded — as the first scripts were written, and a nice reminder of how many now-iconic pieces of the franchise like the TARDIS arrival sound were there from basically the beginning. We also get treated to lessons on outside British history and culture and mini-biographies of some of the key players both on and off the screen, although this of course necessitates going back even further than 1962. All things considered I wouldn’t classify this as any sort of must-read for fans, but it’s certainly been informative.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Sex Education, season 3

TV #6 of 2025:

Sex Education, season 3

I do love when a season of television has a distinct, contained storyline bracketing it. In conversation with someone else who’s seen the program, you could succinctly refer to this year of Sex Education as the one where Hope takes over Moordale, in a way that you couldn’t really do for either of the previous two seasons. (The Netflix art / marketing department, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to have gotten the message. The poster obviously should have been a group shot of the students looking alternately sullen or resolute in their new school uniforms, with a tagline like “Change is coming. So are they.” Not whatever this bizarre botany textbook page is, with no significant connection to either the series or this specific run of it.)

Because yes, there’s a new head teacher on campus, and the increasingly restrictive policies that she introduces form the major thrust of season 3 before finally reaching a climax near the end. Various subplots weave in and out of that, and the whole thing is pretty delightful with the show’s usual grasp of character, offbeat humor, and charming candor about all facets of human sexuality. That also comes with the typical interpersonal drama, but most of the former petty antagonists like Adam and his dad have been sanded down and presented more sympathetically over time to where we can easily root for them at this point. Otis, our original leading man, is considerably nicer now than he had been last year too, not to mention further reduced to just one figure among the growing ensemble. All great writing choices, in my opinion.

The series still veers down some strange alleys from time to time — I don’t think Eric’s actions in Nigeria are remotely well-justified by what we know about him — and I do miss the days of Otis and Maeve’s initial sex clinic, which led to more cohesive episodic plots. But overall, this is a welcome step back in the right direction.

[Content warning for sexual assault, post-traumatic stress, domestic abuse, racism, sexism, transphobia, scatalogical humor, childbirth, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Did You Hear About Kitty Karr? by Crystal Smith Paul

Book #19 of 2025:

Did You Hear About Kitty Karr? by Crystal Smith Paul

I’m convinced there’s a stronger story buried somewhere in this authorial debut — the tale of a Black woman whose biracial daughter passes as white to eventually become a big Hollywood film star — but unfortunately, the version presented on the page isn’t especially effective. The novel has a tendency to tell when it should show, and the split timeline does more harm than good, as the sections set in the present day are far less compelling than those set in the Jim Crow past. The modern characters seem pretty thinly-developed by comparison, and their half of the plot doesn’t have any pressing stakes or reasons for readers to stay invested. (The three sisters don’t know why their elderly neighbor left them her estate in her will, but since they’re all millionaire celebrities anyway, it’s hard to feel interested in the mystery or summon much concern over what might happen after that. The relationships are shallow too, particularly those theoretically crucial ones between the girls and the late Kitty Karr, which we don’t even get to see in flashbacks.)

The earlier sequences carry more potential, though it’s ultimately squandered as well. Racial passing is a big complicated topic, and the book is at its best in interrogating that action and the cost it winds up placing on families divided by the color line — including the subsequent decision of white-passing women to have children or not, as there’s no guarantee that traits like darker skin which skipped one generation won’t reappear in the next. But the writing isn’t up to the task of fleshing out the historical setting, or of plotting the work in a sensible manner. We start in 2017 soon after Kitty’s death, before jumping to the 1930s and the early life of a maid who has a child by rape from her employers’ son. That girl grows up looking white, but it isn’t until a third of the way through the text that she moves west and changes her name to Kitty, a reveal that’s easy to predict yet simultaneously unclear if it’s supposed to be or not. As written, there’s nothing overtly connecting the two bifurcated strands until that point. A similar apparent twist occurs at the three-quarter mark to finally justify the time spent in the twenty-first century, which doesn’t offer nearly enough remaining space to properly unpack it and deal with the implications.

I had hoped that this title would resemble the works of Taylor Jenkins Reid, whose fictional creations generally manage to sing with realism and get me to care about their personal problems despite all their wealth and fame. Author Crystal Smith Paul approaches that level of immersion at certain moments with the older heroine and her mother, but the overall effect is considerably less impressive.

[Content warning for disordered eating, alcohol abuse including drunk driving, domestic abuse, and racism including slurs.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Doomsday by John Peel

Book #18 of 2025:

Doomsday by John Peel (2099 #1)

A neat teen sci-fi thriller that I can just vaguely remember reading in my youth. Since the series was written in 1999 and set a century later, I thought it would be entertaining to revisit now that we’re a quarter of the way there, to see where author John Peel was maybe on the right track.

And for the most part, I think he did a pretty good job! Way before the advent of smartphones, he was predicting news drones, an always-online media landscape accessible by wearable tech, and the use of holographic telepresence to virtually attend work, school, vacation destinations, and social gatherings. (In some ways, it’s a scaled-down version of Pixel’s futuristic homeworld in the same writer’s Diadem novels.) The only element that really rings false to me is the visual aspect of the computer programs that the various hackers deploy; they’re built to look and act like literal dragons and dogs and worms and so on, which is such an unnecessary design step that the whole thing feels a bit silly. But Peel totally nails the vulnerabilities of a global digital ecosystem to such creations — wiping out bank records, causing planes to malfunction and drop out of the sky, and so on — even if he doesn’t know to use modern terminology like the Internet of Things to describe them.

But anyway, we obviously shouldn’t judge a fictional work like this on its predictive power, when that was never supposed to be the point of it. Luckily it’s a solid story too, and a great launch to the wider premise, following four individuals as a catastrophic virus gets unleashed upon the world amid an Orphan Black-like cloning conspiracy. There’s Tristan, a 14-year-old who discovers he’s adopted and has no apparent genetic relatives anywhere in the available databases. There’s Devon, the kid who shares his appearance and DNA but is also the sociopath who created the doomsday weapon at the behest of his mysterious handlers. There’s Shimoda, a police inspector trying to find the culprit, and there’s Genia, a streetwise girl two years older than the boys who gets caught up in the conflict while running an advanced virtual pickpocketing scheme.

The plot is a little disjointed and aimless at first, but as events lead those characters to cross paths, it locks in and becomes considerably stronger. And even early on, the throwaway worldbuilding details are worth the price of admission alone. (Who knew that Leonardo DiCaprio would direct the beloved 2032 masterpiece I, Clinton? There’s still time for this one to come true!) Overall it’s a quick fun read that has me excited to continue rediscovering the remaining volumes ahead.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Book #17 of 2025:

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

A simply excellent piece of science-fiction. I enjoyed the majority of this novel immensely, only to be blown away all over again by how the ending elevated it further. That’s an easy five stars, in my opinion.

The story takes its time in revealing the full stakes of the situation, but the basics are gripping right from the start: a protagonist waking up alone and confused in a strange sterile environment. He’s initially completely amnesiac, but his memory returns over the course of the tale, and it isn’t long before we learn he’s the last survivor of a desperate space mission trying to combat a global crisis involving the exponential waning of heat and light from the sun. The flashbacks continue sporadically as he remembers more and more, though the only big mystery hanging over the past is one that our hero doesn’t seem especially concerned with in the present — how exactly he, a junior high science teacher, became one of the small elite crew of international astronauts to earn a spot on the ship. Mostly those passages detailing the project’s origins are another excuse for author Andy Weir to show off his background research, walking us through the various problems and their ingenious solutions in an entertaining Michael Crichton fashion as the eventual launch window approaches.

If you’ve read this writer’s debut book The Martian (or seen the largely faithful movie adaptation), the basic rhythms of the plot here will be familiar: one man, far from earth, scrambling to apply his scientific know-how to survive under extraordinary conditions. The larger goal to save all life back home adds considerable weight to the equation, as does a certain first contact scenario that ultimately develops. It’s overall a sentimental hopepunk ode to the human spirit and the power of our species to triumph over adversity, and I’ve loved it to pieces. “Goodbye, friend Rocky” indeed.

[Content warning for discussion of gun violence, drug overdose, and suicide.]

★★★★★

Book Review: The Last Song of Penelope by Claire North

Book #16 of 2025:

The Last Song of Penelope by Claire North (The Songs of Penelope #3)

Easily the best installment of its trilogy, and not only for finally dealing with the most exciting sequence of the plot, when the wayward king Odysseus returns home to Ithaca and defeats the perfidious rivals for his wife’s hand. It also features what I’d call the finest writing, as delivered to us by Athena, the latest Greek goddess to take up the mantle of storyteller. She manages to be both blunt and wry in that role, purporting to relate the true events that the myths have embellished whilst still acknowledging her own motive in interfering with the mortal drama to guarantee that the bards of the future will remember her name.

The combination makes for a great narrator, with some surprisingly radical politics. “No poets sing the songs of slaves,” muses the deity at one point. “It would be extraordinarily dangerous to give voices to the less-than-people of this world, lest it turn out they were people after all.” Elsewhere: “Such thoughts should raise uncomfortable questions about the value of kings and queens. (Very few monarchs have these thoughts, and thus do their dynasties die.)” And of course: “For though they were not sung, it was the mothers, the daughters and the wives who kept the world turning, the fires lit, the lights burning.”

Yes, this is another feminist reclamation project, retelling the traditional story through the lens of the participants whose identities would presumably have been marginalized in one way or another by poets like Homer. Women, children, and slaves have more of a voice here, and the novel specifically focuses on the lived experiences of Penelope, effectively widowed and holding her husband’s reign together in his absence for twenty long years, merely for him to then show up and shatter her careful equilibrium. I love the detail that she and her returning lover barely know one another anymore, and that each in fact considers having the other one executed to simplify the question of power. Although the heroine ultimately accepts him back and assists him in dispatching their household’s enemies, it’s a far cry from the patient and loyal helpmeet that she’s usually presented as. She also speaks up for the handmaidens that he murders, bitterly noting how they served the island kingdom honorably in quiet ways while he as its supposed ruler was nowhere to be found.

As with the first two volumes, this book is stronger the closer it sticks to the inherited structure of The Odyssey, and somewhat weaker when author Claire North invents brand-new material to fill in the resulting gaps. That epic poem ends with a perfunctory abbreviated battle, for instance, and revisiting it at greater length here, after the main action has already concluded, does tend to drag on a bit. I likewise have ultimate mixed feelings about the inclusion of the new character Kenemon in this series as a sympathetic presence among the suitors — his not-quite-romance with Penelope has generally been well-rendered, but there’s a sense as she ushers him away before the slaughter in this title of the writer pulling her punches, rather than leaning into the tragedy that he’s heretofore represented. Such qualms hold me back from my highest critical rating, but overall, I do really enjoy what North has crafted here and how it stands in conversation with its forerunner texts.

[Content warning for rape and gore.]

This volume: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Volumes ranked: 3 > 1 > 2

TV Review: Marvel’s The Punisher, season 2

TV #5 of 2025:

Marvel’s The Punisher, season 2

This was the last piece of Netflix’s old Defendersverse (2015 – 2019) that I hadn’t seen before, both because I hadn’t felt very invested in the first season of the show and because at the time, the parent company seemed to be drawing a hard line and saying that no characters or plots from that canceled Marvel Television corner would ever connect with the wider MCU going forward. Of course, things in the media landscape change, and Daredevil and his nemesis Kingpin have now subsequently appeared in several Disney titles each (Spider-Man: No Way Home, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, and Echo for the former; Hawkeye and Echo for the latter), as well as the upcoming series Daredevil: Born Again. With Jon Bernthal’s Frank Castle also due to make an appearance there, I figured I should finally get around to catching up on his latest adventures, though I doubt they’ll be especially relevant.

This season hasn’t blown me away, but it’s similar to the first in being sporadically effective, both in its gunfire-heavy action sequences and its central acting / character work. Bernthal is still magnetically soulful in a role that could seem pretty thin on paper, and he’s more than matched by the charismatic Ben Barnes as his treacherous returning enemy Billy Russo. I also like the basic idea we start with here, which is that the antihero called the Punisher is in a relatively stable place with his own affairs for once before getting involved as a Good Samaritan in somebody else’s problems. The skilled drifter stepping up to offer unexpected assistance is a classic trope for a reason, and it offers a nice change of pace from all Frank’s personal drama, at least initially.

As the story plays out, however, the unfinished business with Russo does get woven back in, and both sides of the bifurcated narrative wind up faltering. While Castle’s bond with the young hustler he helps is sweet — and refreshingly positioned as parental, rather than romantic — the stakes of her storyline don’t make much sense, with her powerful enemies amassing quite a body count all to stop her from sharing a photograph of two men chastely kissing. Meanwhile Billy escapes from captivity with no memory of who injured him, embarks on a new life of crime, and falls into a bizarrely under-developed romance with his therapist. Madani, Curtis, and Mahoney are all around again too, alternately chastising and abetting the increasingly bloodied protagonist as he proceeds to mow a path through the various villains and their henchmen.

There’s potential in a lot of these elements, but like Russo’s promised disfigurement being reduced to a few cosmetic scars on Barnes’s familiar handsome face, it usually falters in the end. The program never really decides how to feel about Frank’s brutal morality, for instance — at one point he’s in crisis because he thinks he killed a few innocents while shooting through a wall, but then he soon gets absolved of that when it turns out the victims were murdered ahead of time and merely staged in his line of fire. The writers aren’t interested in examining how he obviously still could have caused such casualties with his indiscriminate violence, let alone whether the people he actually intends to kill deserve the extrajudicial execution, and so the audience gets to enjoy the spectacle with an easy conscience. By the last scene of the finale, it seems like we’re supposed to be so firmly on his side that we’ll even cheer him gunning down a group of young minority gang members, in a frankly terrible closing image of the guy that belies any possible character growth.

But he was always better as a foil for heroes with a different code to run up against than as a lead in his own right, so I can’t fault the impulse to bring him back for the new Daredevil project on Disney+. And I’m amazed we got as many episodes of the Frank Castle show as we did, Bernthal’s great performance and the expected shoot-’em-up thrills notwithstanding.

[Content warning for sexual assault, racism, pedophilia, suicide, torture, and gore.]

This season: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 1 > 2