The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: After the Forest by Kell Woods

Book #162 of 2024:

After the Forest by Kell Woods

I like the idea of following up with Hansel and Gretel (sorry, “Hans” and “Greta”) as young adults, haunted by the trauma of what they experienced as children, but this fantasy novel spends a bit too long getting to the point, which then winds up focusing around a romance that never really interests me. It’s also an unfortunate example of a story whose characters aren’t as aware as the readers of what the genre is; although the heroine survived a witch’s attentions and still uses the spellbook she took from her to bake delicious gingerbread, she has a hard time drawing the fairly obvious conclusion that the mysterious strangers with animal pelts who have come to town right when an unnaturally-behaving bear and a pack of wolves are spotted nearby are in fact shapeshifters. (Hilariously, even after she learns the wolf-men’s secret, it takes her even longer to realize the similar truth about her werebear love interest.)

The ending of the book is better, especially for incorporating other fairy tales like Snow White and Rumpelstiltskin (as well as the quasi-mythical Countess Elizabeth Báthory as the ultimate villain), and I appreciate the protagonist’s arc of being tempted by the whispering tome towards darker and darker magic. But in the final analysis, that elusive special element that elevates a work from good to great just isn’t there for me in this one.

[Content warning for animal cruelty, ableism, rape, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Like this review?
–Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
–Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
–Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6288479-joe-kessler
–Or click here to browse through all my reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog

TV Review: ReBoot ReWind, season 1

TV #45 of 2024:

ReBoot ReWind, season 1

In honor of its 30th anniversary, this new eight-part documentary series is a neat look back at the 90s TV show ReBoot, which was the first cartoon to be made with entirely CGI graphics. Drawing on newly-restored footage and interviews with over 50 members of the old cast and crew, this deep-dive retrospective provides all sorts of fascinating inside information on that process, including the context for just how groundbreaking it was, which totally went over my head as a kid. The creators were basically inventing the technology from scratch, in the face of considerable skepticism from the industry that it could be done at such a scale with the available resources and time. Launching a year before Toy Story brought the new medium to the mainstream as the first all-CGI movie, ReBoot paved the way for much of the look and feel that’s commonplace in animation today.

For fans of the program or just anyone with an interest in how children’s television was made a few decades ago, it’s a fun watch. It’s also a pretty thorough overview, following the production team over the years and even talking about side ventures like the PlayStation game, the two motion simulator rides, and of course the tie-in toys and other merchandise.

It’s not wholly a rosy picture. There were squabbles with the networks and some working conditions that would likely raise an eyebrow from a 2024 perspective, like long hours of crunchtime before deadlines and a boys club office vibe that regularly held work meetings at the strip club down the block. But it’s also plain from everyone interviewed that the experience was a labor of love creating a product they’re still proud of, especially after the leap in storytelling quality midway through season 2.

The ending of the docuseries does feel somewhat truncated. The original showrunners all say they’d love to return to make more ReBoot someday if they ever got the intellectual property rights back from the current holder, but there’s no exploration of how they left the company / lost those rights in the first place, and no talk at all of the official webcomic continuation or the terrible half-live-action revival series ReBoot: The Guardian Code that aired in 2018 with none of their involvement (or the movie sequels that were announced and then canceled in the decade prior). Whether the interviewees realized it was more political to stay quiet about that or it just wasn’t a topic the documentarians thought relevant to include I’m not sure, but it adds a curiously unfinished note to the post-season 4 coverage of what otherwise seems like an exhaustive and definitive celebration of the franchise.

Regardless, I’ve enjoyed and would recommend this miniseries overall. You can find all 8 episodes at this YouTube playlist, here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmsFQF5CvPribGVmcSNRQGHmU33agz8BN

★★★★☆

Book Review: Out of Time by Chris Archer

Book #161 of 2024:

Out of Time by Chris Archer (Mindwarp #9)

A fun penultimate adventure for this middle-grade sci-fi series, and by this point, I’m positive that I never read this far into these books back in the 90s, so I’m excited to see how everything resolves. The six teenage heroes start this volume still stuck in the future dystopia, but they swiftly escape and embark on their mission to somehow rewrite history. The problem is they don’t really know how to do that, but they split into pairs to work on the various possibilities, which creates an energetic rush as the plot bounces around among them and allows for some spotlight uses of everyone’s special abilities.

One thread sends Ethan and Toni to the 1940s, where the girl’s brush with racism is handled pretty tactfully for the intended audience, with the text establishing rude glances and name-calling without actually putting her in danger of violent bigotry or spelling out exactly what she’s being called. Back in the present, Jack and Ashley wind up in a paranoid conspiracy thriller that fits well with the story’s roots, while Todd and Elena… okay, mostly just research at the library. But at least we finally learn what his power is, and get to see the rippling timequakes that happen from their friends changing things in the past.

It’s another quick read, especially with having to balance all those different developments, but it generally manages to juggle everything successfully, answer a few lingering questions, and set up the final installment rather nicely.

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Wolf and the Woodsman by Ava Reid

Book #160 of 2024:

The Wolf and the Woodsman by Ava Reid

I might have liked this novel better if I hadn’t first heard about it on a list of #ownvoices Jewish-inspired fantasy works, which definitely set me up for disappointed expectations. Debut author Ava Reid does draw on some folkloric elements from her religious heritage, but she writes the protagonist of the story as a young woman in her mother’s pagan tribe who never knew her father growing up and only starts learning about his cultural practices halfway through the piece. As a result, there’s no real Judaism here as an animating presence in the character’s life or community around her, which rather blunts the impact of that representation in my opinion. I’m also not a fan of the worldbuilding approach to thinly disguise such matters in genre fiction — it’s fine if inspiration comes from multiple sources and a specific allegorical parallel is less exact, but if you’re explicitly writing about rabbis and Queen Esther and such, please just use the word Jew as well, instead of making up new names for our people like “Yehuli.”

Even setting all that aside, this title is a struggle for me. It’s very YA in its heroine falling for the bad boy with the troubled heart, who never manages to interest me as either a companion or romantic partner for her. Their attraction feels pretty hormonal, with flushing cheeks and stolen glances over any meaningful connection of minds, and that cuts against the nominally high stakes of the various genocidal plots they’re facing. I actually increased my audiobook speed beyond its typical rate to finish reading this, because I was struggling so much to stay invested in the tale.

[Content warning for antisemitism, sexism, domestic abuse, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: The Umbrella Academy, season 2

TV #44 of 2024:

The Umbrella Academy, season 2

Categorically an improvement over the debut year of this comic book adaptation, which I rated at a frustrating 2-out-of-5 stars for all its elements that never really came together or lived up to their potential. The change for the better is felt immediately in the season 2 premiere, which works very quickly to reintroduce the main characters and establish each one’s fresh status quo, stranded back in time in the 1960s. (Initially scattered across multiple years, although they eventually all meet up again. But good luck to anyone trying to work out the new relative ages of these adopted siblings who previously all shared the same birthday.)

The writing and grasp of characterization is tighter, and the various predicaments the heroes find themselves in are pretty interesting — especially Allison, who goes from being one of the more underserved figures to the heart of the dawning Civil Rights movement. For the first time, everyone basically has a clear motivation driving their actions, which along with the rocking soundtrack does wonders to electrify the plot. There’s even another apocalypse on the horizon soon after the upcoming JFK assassination, which feels like an intentional effort on the writers’ part to mulligan the prior storyline in a more satisfying fashion.

Unfortunately, it all sort of falls apart midway through, and the back half of this run is substantially weaker (though still preferable to season 1, it must be said). If the scripts had been able to maintain the quality demonstrated right out of the gate, I likely would have awarded this batch 4 stars, but The Umbrella Academy — as both a show and a group of fictional people — instead succumbs to the kind of poor instincts that I so hated to see before. Vanya unleashes powers she can’t control or be reasoned with about, subplots pop up and go nowhere, character arcs like Luther’s angst are unceremoniously dropped, the time-travel stuff isn’t explained quite well enough to account for apparent plot holes, and the action turns into some generic CGI energy blasts at the end.

It’s fine! I’m intrigued by the ending and plan to finish out the rest of the series, which is only 16 episodes at this point. But now that I know the program has the possibility of such greatness in it, it’d sure be nice to see it reaching that consistently from here on out.

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

★★★☆☆

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.]

★★★☆☆

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.]

★★★★☆