The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Dragon by Steven Brust

Book #159 of 2024:

Dragon by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #8)

This 1998 title is a bit of an odd installment in the Vlad Taltos fantasy series. It’s not the first volume to take place earlier in the protagonist’s career, back when he was a low-level boss for the Jhereg criminal organization, but it’s unusual for enlisting him in a war as the central conflict of the book, rather than presenting him with a tricky assassination contract or any murky political intrigues surrounding a dangerous business rival. Vlad winds up joining the army basically as a favor for his friend Morrolan, and while he’s nominally there to conduct opportunistic sabotage on the enemy forces, he still trains and fights with a regular unit in the heat of battle. It’s a poor fit for the antihero’s skills and general self-interest that the plot never really manages to sell as plausible, much like when the second Gentleman Bastard novel sent its plucky con artist off to join a pirate crew for some reason.

Author Steven Brust juggles a few different timelines here, and the whole enterprise mostly comes together in the end with a few developments that either explain previously-unclear backstory elements or will matter more in subsequent sequels. I wouldn’t say that fans should skip it — and I’ll readily acknowledge it may play better for readers who are more into military sci-fi as a genre — but in my opinion the work can safely be approached as a weird diversion from the main Taltos storyline, functioning primarily to paper over those pesky continuity gaps.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Ghost Station by S. A. Barnes

Book #158 of 2024:

Ghost Station by S. A. Barnes

An atmospheric example of space horror, but sadly not as effective as author S. A. Barnes’s earlier novel Dead Silence (unconnected except for occupying the same narrow genre). The premise here is fine: a psychologist joins a small crew on a corporate excursion to a distant uninhabited planet, since they’ve recently lost a member to suicide and psychotic breaks are a known danger in their line of work. Of course, that protagonist is carrying her own particular traumas and isn’t as well-composed as she presents herself professionally, which is one of my major frustrations with the piece. She really shouldn’t be there in the first place — she starts cracking well before anyone else — and she steadily ignores the many indications that start piling up that something isn’t right with her and the other characters. They’re hallucinating and sleep-walking and bleeding too easily, and there are signs that the previous mission to the site abandoned it in a hurry with some unsettling tableaus left behind. For most of the book it’s an open question whether everyone is just plain delusional or being influenced by an external force, but the heroine keeps making bad choices about what to share or not with her colleagues.

Another element holding me back from loving the story is that it never seems to find a second gear or go anywhere specific. While the initial worldbuilding feels distinctive, the unfolding plot is largely a sequence of increasing paranoia and eventual violence, which resembles too many other such tales without much of its own identity save for the fragility of the lead. I’m also underwhelmed by the ultimate resolution to the central mystery, which theoretically could have helped to redeem the work if it had turned out stronger. In the end this is a competent enough sci-fi thriller to rate at three-out-of-five stars, but nowhere near the twisty creepfest of Dead Silence.

[Content warning for body horror and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Plum Duff by Victoria Goddard

Book #157 of 2024:

Plum Duff by Victoria Goddard (Greenwing & Dart #6)

This series had been steadily improving, but this sixth volume — the latest so far, barring a few spinoff short stories I haven’t read yet — feels like a step backwards for me. It is big on atmospheric winter comfort and overall cozy fantasy vibes, which is certainly author Victoria Goddard’s forte, but there aren’t enough stakes in any of the proceedings. That same writer’s The Hands of the Emperor remains one of my all-time favorite books, so my complaint isn’t precisely that nothing especially dramatic happens in this title or that the plot is too slow, both of which could be fairly lodged against that longer tome as well: it’s that we aren’t provided answers to the major questions that are posed, and there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly driving the characters at this point. It’s a noteworthy departure from the murder mystery that shapes the previous installment or the jailbreak in the one preceding that, to pick two relevant examples. And speaking of those earlier releases, we still don’t know the location of Mrs. Dart (a matter raised in the latter) or Hope’s given name (from the former), which are outstanding items this story completely neglects to address. It doesn’t even satisfy its own riddles — a mystical fox warns the protagonist early on to beware the false hunter, the false lover, and the false friend, and yet only the first of those incidents comes to pass before the end.

I do generally like the residents of Ragnor Bella and enjoy spending time with them. I loved Jemis finally putting together the clues behind Mrs. Etaris’s true identity here, not to mention getting official permission to court the person he wants to. But the novel mostly consists of that hero being told things or else just thinking hard and then intuiting them, and its entire penultimate chapter involves his friends and family sitting around a hearthfire giving solstice presents to one another. Sadly, I need a little more bite out of my fiction than that.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Finlay Donovan Jumps the Gun by Elle Cosimano

Book #156 of 2024:

Finlay Donovan Jumps the Gun by Elle Cosimano (Finlay Donovan #3)

I think this is where I get off the Finlay Donovan train, unfortunately. This third volume feels like a significant step down for the series, which has never quite managed to grab me despite the fun overall premise of a broke writer / divorced mom getting confused for a hired killer and increasingly mixed up with organized crime. The books still haven’t found a new gear for that ongoing storyline, and the complications from the original case are growing rather threadbare and tedious at this point. The cliffhanger going into this novel concerned the identity of an actual rival hitman, and since our heroine believes he’s a cop, she enrolls at a “citizen’s police academy” to spend time snooping around some of the likely culprits, hoping to find a clue.

The resulting plot has multiple scenes where people blab their secrets with minimal prompting and without checking first to make sure they won’t be overheard, along with other such convenient developments that don’t rely on particularly smart or agentive choices from the protagonist (whom every male character in the vicinity continues to drool over). It’s not as entertaining anymore, especially with the love triangle resolved and the kids out of the picture for most of this book, and I’m less convinced that author Elle Cosimano has a larger plan in place for some of the serialized elements that remain open at the end. With that in mind, I’m content to give the remaining sequels a pass.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: ‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King

Book #155 of 2024:

‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King

Author Stephen King has said that he wanted his second published novel to be a modern American version of Dracula, and almost half a century on, I think it’s fair to say that he succeeded in that aim. The parallels are there if you seek them out — sometimes even commented upon by the characters themselves — and yet the work stands alone as far more than a simple pastiche of its influences. While it may start from the premise of an ancient vampire arriving in a quiet New England village, much as Bram Stoker’s count descended upon similar environs in Britain, the story that spins out from there is quintessential King.

Both volumes likewise hold off on deploying the word “vampire” right away (though each is probably impossible to approach today in complete ignorance of that element). Instead, we get to meet the various inhabitants of the Lot, largely through the eyes of newcomer Ben Mears, who’s come back to the place where he lived as a boy and now strikes up a tender romance with a local woman while working on his next book. But all is not well for this Maine community: a child goes missing, darkness seems to be tangibly encroaching, and another new arrival has moved into the nearby abandoned house with a sordid history of violence. Readers also know from the flash-forward in the prologue that something happens to empty Jerusalem’s Lot of all its residents, although the exact nature of that disappearance remains a mystery at the beginning.

The atmosphere is one of creeping horror (and, thematically, the death of a small town), even before we officially learn that a supernatural being is haunting the area and preying on victims. Unlike Dracula, who killed without remorse but only targeted a select few people for conversion, Kurt Barlow spreads his influence like an infection, siring revenants who in turn feed on others, leading to an exponential rate of attrition. By the time our protagonist has gathered a few key allies to take him on, they are vastly outnumbered by the growing evil in their midst.

King would return to this notion of a settlement ripping itself apart in future titles, like The Tommyknockers or Needful Things, but in my view, he’s never carried it off better than here, where the large cast is drawn in Dickensian detail before the terror engulfs them one-by-one. They aren’t all the nicest of townsfolk — nor does it appear as though the unnatural predator has done anything to corrupt them into sin — and yet they don’t deserve their fate, which frequently stings in its incredible injustice. Most of my critiques, in fact, concern how callously the text introduces monstrous behaviors like rape and child abuse as everyday facts of life by ordinary citizens, and not as momentous occasions that merit pausing to address. It strikes me a rare missed opportunity before the flood overtakes the guilty and innocent alike.

But back to the vampires. Borrowing another trick from Stoker, the writer wisely presents sunset as the regular moment of dread, rather than dawn as a beacon of hope. So often in fiction of this sort, the heroes are trying to survive a night of attacks until sunrise, when rays of light will defeat the enemy for good. Here, daytime feels like a rapidly shrinking window, in which not enough can ever be accomplished before the villain will rise again at full power. That’s the main image that sticks with me on this reread, aside from Father Callahan slipping through the pages of the tale to wash up in the borderlands outside The Dark Tower.

[Content warning for suicide, domestic violence, pedophilia, alcohol abuse, violence against animals, death of a dog, racism, homophobia including slurs, gun violence, and gore.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Farscape, season 2

TV #43 of 2024:

Farscape, season 2

An excellent escalation of an already-strong beginning the year before. While the passage of time and their shared experiences together have sanded down the edges and rendered Moya’s crew into more of a cohesive and friendly unit — with the possible exception of Rygel, who remains a bit of a self-interested outsider — they are still a prickly bunch, far more snappish at one another (and, it must be said, horny) than your typical sci-fi heroes. That’s enough to anchor the episodic early stage of this second season, especially with a renewed focus on psychedelic ‘mindfrell’ stories that drive one or more characters temporarily crazy, but it really pays off when the larger serialized plot with Scorpius resumes.

That enemy wasn’t particularly impressive when he was introduced late in the previous run, and it’s telling how the voiceover in the opening credits retains Crichton’s original line that he’s “being hunted by an insane military commander” despite the specific hunter having been changed from Crais to Scorpy. Yet although the two opponents may seem interchangeable at first — with the former now as more of a reluctant and mistrusted recurring ally — the half-Scarran comes into his own as an antagonist with the reveal that he’s left a neural clone of himself embedded in John’s brain. Now even when the two aren’t meeting face-to-face, the cruel figure makes his presence known via hallucinations that can sometimes help the Earth astronaut escape a difficult situation but mostly taunt and interfere with him, all while trying to uncover the wormhole data he has locked away. It’s sort of like Baltar’s visions of Number Six on Battlestar Galactica, only far crueler and plaguing the nominal hero of the tale.

The storyline builds to a nicely downbeat ending, and though I suspect some of its darkness will be walked back in the rest of the show to come, it’s certainly a powerful way to close out the arc at hand, dealing our protagonists a heavy blow and cementing Scorpius as one of the all-time great genre villains.

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

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor

Book #154 of 2024:

The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor (Welcome to Night Vale #3)

This is not a very Night Vale-centric novel. I mean that both in the literal sense — it’s an origin story for the titular character, most of which isn’t even set on the same continent as that strange desert community — and in terms of the project’s genre. The Welcome to Night Vale podcast and previous book releases have all been examples of slipstream horror comedy, and there’s precious little of that atmosphere here, aside from a few interstitial chapters and the ultimate conclusion, all set closer to the present day. There aren’t even many overtly fantastical elements to the tale until its final quarter or so, let alone any of the established series cast or their associated oddities (though the normative queerness at least remains).

Instead, we are treated to a bildungsroman of the protagonist as a thoroughly non-supernatural individual, growing up and becoming involved in the family smuggling business across the Mediterranean. She experiences betrayals, some of which sting more than others, and sacrifices a fair bit of her morality in pursuit of an elaborate Count of Monte Cristo-style revenge scheme that proves ever-elusive. In the end, she transforms into the quasi-familiar figure whom podcast listeners already know, and finally reveals why she’s been haunting Night Vale in recent years. But personally, I think this would have been a stronger plot if it had stayed separate throughout, rather than belatedly veering back to awkwardly intersect with the franchise.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: 73 Yards by Scott Handcock

Book #153 of 2024:

Doctor Who: 73 Yards by Scott Handcock

One of the better episodes from the latest season of Doctor Who unsurprisingly produces an excellent novelization in the hands of author Scott Handcock, who also serves as script editor for the TV series. This book channels the unsettling folk horror of the original television piece, while simultaneously deepening its characterization of the Fifteenth Doctor’s companion Ruby Sunday, who spends most of the adventure on her own after the Time Lord vanishes near the start. As viewers already know, she actually lives out the remainder of her life stranded on Earth without him, before some sci-fi paradox ex machina manages to reset everything and avert the whole plot in the first place.

That’s not necessarily the most satisfying ending, either here or on the screen, but the route to get there is an interesting one, from the creepy figure who stays perpetually the titular distance away from the protagonist and drives anyone who talks to her mad (and upset with Ruby, for some reason) to the evolution that the heroine undergoes over the years as she makes peace with her situation and even learns how to wield it for the greater good. As a character, the teenage orphan is terrified of being abandoned by more of the people whom she loves, and having her experience that fear made literal remains a sharp idea from the Russell T. Davies script that the other writer is adapting.

The story still raises more questions than it answers, so readers hoping to get further explanations on the page will likely leave disappointed. But there is plenty of added material to enjoy, including scenes with recurring franchise players like Ace and Osgood who weren’t in the televised version, and the character study of Ruby is all the stronger for the interiority into her thoughts that a novel is able to provide. Overall, it’s a fun way to revisit the title.

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Waiting by Michael Connelly

Book #152 of 2024:

The Waiting by Michael Connelly (Ballard and Bosch #5)

As usual for author Michael Connelly’s stories about now-retired LAPD cop Harry Bosch and his extended network of supporting characters, this latest title juggles several subplots, mostly in the form of active police investigations. Since the protagonist here is Renée Ballard, that means cold cases: one of them the notorious real-life ‘Black Dahlia’ murder of 1947, and another involving a fictional serial rapist from the early 2000s. The heroine must also contend with the personal robbery of her badge and gun — which she decides to handle quietly outside of the law and department policy, so as to not risk ramifications to her career — and the resulting mass shooting threat that it winds up impacting, not to mention the arrival of Harry’s daughter Maddie as a junior officer newly volunteering to help the division investigate older crimes.

That’s a lot for a single novel to tackle, and while each individual thread is reasonably interesting, they don’t impact one another very much, nor do most of them resolve in an especially satisfying manner. The 75-year-old case reads a bit like wish fulfillment, with conclusive evidence identifying the killer emerging after his death, and the other matter springs a culprit on us in the final pages of the book without any significant closure (reveals of how he noticed the cops were onto him, if/why he stopped his attacks two decades ago, resolution with his classmates who were interviewed earlier in the plot, etc.). The whole volume is from Renée’s perspective with Harry as a fairly minimal presence this time around, and although it’s as solid a procedural crime thriller as ever, it’s far from the franchise at its best.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Stories to Keep You Alive Despite Vampires by Ben Acker

Book #151 of 2024:

Stories to Keep You Alive Despite Vampires by Ben Acker

I picked up this short story collection on the strength of author Ben Acker’s writing for the Thrilling Adventure Hour podcast / stage show series, and I can confirm there’s a similar cleverness propelling many of its loosely interconnected entries and imaginative turns of phrase. (One character, for instance, guns down the associate who double-crossed him “at the Jazz Mill, where they still talk about how it was the bullets he didn’t shoot.”)

On the other hand, I’m not quite convinced that the work as a whole is well-calibrated for its apparent audience. This is junior horror for the Goosebumps or Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark crowd, with decapitations but no gore, hitchhiking ghosts and summer-camp murderers who are merely spooky figures to run away from, and so on. And that’s a perfectly valid genre to explore, but a lot of the twists in this volume are so meta and so referential to specific outside tropes that I just don’t think they’d land for anyone who doesn’t bring that context to the read, while being largely too tame to satisfy those of us who do. The result feels like it’s often struggling to find a distinctive voice for itself, and if you’ll forgive the vampire metaphor, I can’t imagine it really sinking its teeth into any reader’s imagination for long.

★★★☆☆