The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

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.]

★★★★☆

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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.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Face the Fear by Chris Archer

Book #150 of 2024:

Face the Fear by Chris Archer (Mindwarp #8)

This installment of the 90s middle-grade Mindwarp series moves the larger story forward, but as the second volume in a row to take place entirely in the dystopian future, it doesn’t feel especially distinctive. There’s less worldbuilding on display too, with the majority of the plot concerning the superpowered teenage protagonists sneaking into the enemy’s base to plant a bomb, rescue their friends, and hijack the time machine to return to their present. Slaughtering the Omegas en masse feels like a pretty major escalation of the stakes, since the heroes had previously only killed them individually in desperate self-defense, but as with the morality in having Ashley use her mitosis to create sacrificial clones of herself, it doesn’t really get examined or debated much here. I can’t help but compare this unfavorably to similar developments in K. A. Applegate’s Animorphs, which would have given rise to plenty of angst, guilt, and dread over the lack of an easy answer.

(It’s also wild that both cases do have everyday American teens carry out what any reasonable observer would have to call acts of terrorism, and that this novel in particular seems to blithely endorse the strategy. For a title that came out in 1998, one wonders how a delay of only a few years to post-9/11 might have impacted that storyline.)

I’m disappointed by the poor follow-through, which extends to the overall goal that the kids are pursuing at this point. Are they trying to get home just to resume their regular lives, or is there something they can do back there to avert this timeline in advance? Why bother striking a blow for the resistance by taking out the facility, if the whole scenario is going to be undone and prevented later on? Or if it’s not, why are they fleeing rather than sticking around to continue the fight and overthrow the inhuman conquerors? These are fairly basic questions of motivation and logistics that sadly don’t get addressed at all, and while that was understandable back when the characters were in the dark and the genre was an X-Files conspiracy thriller, it’s less acceptable now that they appear to have all the relevant facts to make informed decisions.

In the end, two-out-of-three missions succeed, destroying the target and leaving the good guys reunited with their classmates but still stranded in 2118. With only two books remaining, I’m hoping author Chris Archer has a satisfying conclusion planned, as this antepenultimate adventure ultimately doesn’t do much besides deliver some solid action thrills and incrementally shift the status quo.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Life Impossible by Matt Haig

Book #149 of 2024:

The Life Impossible by Matt Haig

This is a novel that starts off on the wrong foot, bites off way more than it can chew, and ultimately fails to develop any of its ideas into anything distinctive for the genre. It’s by far the worst of the five titles I’ve now read from author Matt Haig, and a sharp disappointment after his moving bestseller The Midnight Library, winner of the 2020 Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction.

Let’s take the framing device first, because if the story had been told without that, I probably would have given it a two-star rating in the end: below average but not wholly awful. Instead, unfortunately, this is a one-star read through and through.

The work opens with a plaintive email from one of the protagonist’s former students, who is due to graduate college soon but is plainly at a low point in his mental health. He mentions several specific crises he’s been going through lately and says he doesn’t even know why he’s reaching out to her, except that she was kind to him once. He needs a lifeline, and alludes to some pretty intense feelings of isolation, depression, and suicidal ideation (a topic Haig knows well, having written the nonfiction The Comfort Book as a self-help guide of lessons learned in dealing with his own such issues).

The retired teacher’s response to all this is not to offer practical solutions or refer the young man to anyone else who might be able to help. Instead she replies in the form of a 300-page manuscript — aka the bulk of the actual text of the book — which she apparently took the time to write out after receiving his message. Even setting aside the contents of what she goes on to relate, that’s a bizarre and insultingly inappropriate reaction to the situation, and it sets me against the nominal heroine from the very beginning of her tale.

And then that tale is, frankly, absurd. She describes how she too was feeling down a few years ago, when an old acquaintance unexpectedly bequeathed her a house in Ibiza, Spain. Upon arriving there to inspect the property, she witnessed several inexplicable events and heard how — sigh — an ancient extraterrestrial intelligence lives underwater off the coast of the island, bestowing gifts on divers it deems worthy. Visiting the area herself grants her incredible psychic powers, unlocking the potential of her brain Limitless-style and allowing her to read minds as well as move objects telekinetically.

This is all fairly silly, especially once the villain of the piece is revealed as an evil rich developer who wants to destroy the environment for no particular reason. This Captain Planet bad guy has superhuman abilities of his own, although the main plot involves the old woman and her new friends merely trying to convince a local politician to join an upcoming protest demonstration against him.

Certain elements here could have worked, with a little finesse and proper expansion. But it’s all so abbreviated, and so generic-seeming, and so bogged-down in woo-woo mysticism about the hidden connectivity of the universe that it’s just impossible to ever take seriously as a premise. It’s certainly a terrible answer to give a vulnerable person looking for support, despite the story ending with another note back from him, saying that reading about her wild Spanish adventure was somehow enough to turn his whole outlook around. That makes one of us, at least.

[Content warning for death of a child.]

★☆☆☆☆

Book Review: Orca by Steven Brust

Book #148 of 2024:

Orca by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #7)

This 1996 fantasy novel finds its reformed antihero still in fugitive drifter mode, on the run from his former employers rather than working for them as an assassin-for-hire and district crime boss. It’s about a year after the events of book #6 Athyra, and Vladimir Taltos has arrived in a new city with his young friend Savn in tow, looking for a specialist to heal the boy’s injuries. The hedge-witch they find has trouble of her own: mysterious eviction notices from a company that only seems to exist on paper. The Easterner promises to look into it, unaware that he’s tugging on a thread that will soon prove connected to some very powerful people and moneyed interests.

It’s a fun plot that casts Vlad as a sort of noir detective, and is further distinguished from the other volumes in this sequence by the inclusion of a secondary narrator, Kiera the thief. She’s a previously minor character who takes center stage here, and provides a nice calculated counter-energy to the ex-hitman’s more impulsive blundering. Their chapters alternate throughout the text, mostly in the form of them updating one another on the latest developments in their parallel investigations. There’s a neat reveal at the end too, concerning a background detail that’s been hinted at since at least book #4 Taltos.

The story ultimately involves a collapsing ponzi scheme, widespread corruption, and a lecture on government monetary policy, although author Steven Brust’s politics thankfully aren’t quite as heavy-handed as they were back in book #3 Teckla. Generally speaking, this is a series that continues to improve as it goes along, and I do appreciate the writer committing to the serialized elements and taking risks to vary his usual formula, instead of just cranking out unchallenging episodic filler.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Pairing by by Casey McQuiston

Book #147 of 2024:

The Pairing by by Casey McQuiston

Four years ago, childhood-best-friends-turned-adult-sweethearts Kit (he/him) and Theo (they/she, as we eventually learn) broke up on the eve of a three-week romantic food and wine tour across Europe. With the voucher about to expire, Theo decides to finally go on the vacation solo, only to discover that Kit has had the same idea. The exes — who haven’t spoken to each other since they split — are now forced into close contact once again, which of course entails hiding how they’re both secretly still in love.

This is a story that I’ve liked almost entirely due to the characters, and not at all for the plot they’re caught up in. It’s easy to root for these kids to make a renewed relationship work, but maddening how much rom-com miscommunication plagues them. Their present situation seems like it could be resolved with one quick honest chat, and while the proximate cause of the breakup remains hidden from us for the first third of the text, it turns out to involve yet more unspoken misunderstandings. This is so frustrating for me as a reader! I tend to hate any big backstory secret that the protagonist(s) know and we don’t, and this has to rank as one of the worst. Even once the couple realize they were being foolish in the past, and even after they’ve admitted they’re still attracted to one another and begun hooking up, they’re somehow afraid to drop the L word and suggest reuniting for real.

The sex is also a bit much for my tastes, involving the two bisexuals first competing to see who can sleep with the most people on their trip and then ultimately (repeatedly) doing it together. I do admire the frank and judgment-free atmosphere that author Casey McQuiston establishes here, which feels accepting of all consensual proclivities and activities, but as with the sumptuous descriptions of what’s available to eat and drink at every new destination, it all blurs into a steady hedonistic jumble at some point. I buy the chemistry between these former lovers and find their mutual yearning to be reasonably compelling — give or take Theo’s weird nepo baby complex, refusing to accept their rich sister’s offer to invest in their failing dream business — but I just don’t need so many scenes of someone jumping someone else’s bones rather than talking openly about their feelings.

The best thing about this title is its treatment of Theo’s gender identity. They realized they were nonbinary sometime after dating Kit, and while that’s initially kept from us too, the clues are strong enough that my radar was pinging well before it gets officially brought up. I was actually worried this element would be played for drama at the novel’s climax, but instead it comes out around the midpoint and is greeted with total understanding and acceptance, which is lovely to see. Our male narrator switches seamlessly into using the new pronoun in his dialogue and internal reflections, and there’s no transphobia of any kind from him or anybody else. That’s the sort of queer-friendly / normative detail from an #ownvoices writer that makes me imagine this book will reach a certain audience, but at the end of the day, it has too much going against it to wholly win me over.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Archer’s Goon, season 1

TV #42 of 2024:

Archer’s Goon, season 1

I won’t lie and say that it’s great television, but for anyone who loves the 1984 Diana Wynne Jones children’s fantasy novel, this six-part 1992 adaptation is a neat way to revisit the story. If anything, it’s faithful to a fault: hardly adding any new material to what was already present on the page, and generally depicting every scene exactly as it was originally described. Thankfully, this is not a particularly effects-heavy plot, as the low budget tends to strain at those moments when more extravagance should be called for (Archer’s machinery, Torquil’s parade, and the business at the end with Venturus’s temple and spaceship, primarily).

No, the primary drawback here is the quality of the acting. I won’t critique Jamie de Courcey as Howard too much, as he was a child actor in his first credited role –although I’ll mention Angela Forry is significantly stronger as his little sister Awful — but his shrill delivery is matched by Morgan Jones as the Goon, who turns in an equally one-note performance. He’s basically loud and angry at all times, where his written counterpart is more low-key overall and regularly modulates between charming, sardonic, and glum as the tale unfolds. In fact, I’d say that his development from threatening first impression onward is one of the key strengths of the book, and it’s nowhere to be found on-screen. Some of the cast is better — it’s especially fun to see Annette Badland as Shine, years before she’d face off against Christopher Eccleston on Doctor Who — but with the two main characters so compromised, the work never really comes to life as it ideally would.

Still: the premise remains gold, dealing with a family of eccentric immortals secretly running an unnamed British town, and the episodic structure is nice for not overwhelming us with all of them at once. Though that’s another element borrowed from the original writer, it fits well with the pace of a TV season. We meet the Goon and learn that Howard’s father owes a regular payment of 2000 words to a man named Archer in episode one, then see the boss and his sister Dillian in episode two, their brother Torquil the next week, Shine and Hathaway the time after, and so on. The steady clip of each new sibling helps shape the mystery of just what’s going on as they each unleash their own form of chaos on the Sykes household, driving the series through to a reasonably-satisfying conclusion.

The whole show seems to be available only through a random YouTuber who uploaded their home recordings of the initial BBC broadcast, which means it’s on the verge of lost media, since it likely never will be released via any official channels. I’m glad someone out there preserved it long enough for me and any other fans to watch… but if you haven’t read the book before, I’d honestly say you should just do that instead.

[Content warning for gun violence and fatphobia.]

★★★☆☆