The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King

Book #121 of 2024:

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King

One of Stephen King’s regular preoccupations as a horror author seems to be the idea of a person getting stuck in confined circumstances just off the track from their ordinary life. This 1999 novel, in which a nine-year-old girl winds up separated from her family on a hike through the woods of New England, joins some of his other titles like Cujo, Misery, or Gerald’s Game in positing such a premise, where safety is narrowly out of reach and the protagonist is rather bewildered at how simple it was to slip away from there. One poor choice, bit of bad luck, or inattentive moment, and they’ve fallen into that peril, perhaps never to recover.

This is a wilderness survival tale. The lost child has to fend for herself against all manner of natural threats as she searches to make her way back to civilization, from stinging insects and hunger to injuries that can’t be treated and her own worries and emotional regulation. These matters escalate as the story progresses, with a primary plot arc of the young heroine’s increasing desperation, terror, and exhaustion. I was a lot younger when I read it last, already sympathizing with her dire plight, but it definitely hits even harder now that I’m a parent and can more easily see myself in that frantic and helpless position in the narrative as well.

Trisha has a portable radio that she uses to listen to baseball games to help distract her and lend her courage, which leads to her imagining that her favorite Red Sox player is there with her to offer advice. As she grows feverish and delirious, she finds it more and more difficult to separate the fantasy from reality in her mind, whilst also becoming convinced that there’s some supernatural presence stalking after her. And really, who’s to say that there isn’t, out there alone in the dark?

The book doesn’t commit one way or another to the truth of what she senses, which strikes me as the correct note here. You could read it as a real primordial force that she’s stirred to waking, or as a metaphor like Tom Gordon himself that her tired subconscious is throwing out to interpret and guide her through the more earthly danger. She’s easy to cheer for under either interpretation — soberly mature about her situation while still acting her age, and resourceful without ever crossing over into cloyingly plucky. Having such an engaging main character is of critical importance, since we spend so many pages in her head without anyone else to bounce off of. But King handles that with aplomb, keeping us rooted to the fourth-grader’s side all throughout her long ordeal.

[Content warning for racism, ableism, gun violence, mention of child sexual abuse, 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

Book Review: Doctor Who: Caged by Una McCormack

Book #120 of 2024:

Doctor Who: Caged by Una McCormack

A solid Doctor Who adventure, mostly notable for the entirely non-humanoid cast outside of the Fifteenth Doctor and his companion Ruby Sunday. That’s the sort of approach I love to see from the wider canon of this franchise, taking advantage of the freedom from visual budget constraints to go wild with the creator’s imagination. Why shouldn’t our Time Lord hero encounter hulking many-limbed intelligent beings and smaller furry ones that look like guinea pigs? It’s also nice to see an alien abduction story without a human element in the relevant power dynamic: one species covertly studying another and ultimately getting called out for it and forced to recognize their research subjects as people too.

But all that aside, this novel never rises past the general level of competence to something special for me. The protagonists feel like a generic TARDIS team rather than anything informed by the season 1 writing or Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson’s performances therein, to the point where I’m honestly not sure whether author Una McCormack was able to watch those episodes before filing this book with the BBC. There aren’t any significant additions to the series continuity or insights into the major characters here, nor any particularly dire straits or brilliant solutions executed by the Doctor. No clever plotting or distinctive narrative voice. It’s just straightforward Doctor Who — which isn’t the worst way to spend a few hours, especially with Bonnie Langford narrating the audiobook, but isn’t really much worth highlighting in the end.

Oh… and this is a truly minor detail, but I don’t understand what exactly the title is supposed to refer to, either.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Orphan Black: Echoes, season 1

TV #36 of 2024:

Orphan Black: Echoes, season 1

So far a pretty underwhelming sequel series. In fact, I’d say there are two wholly separate strands of criticism that can be launched at this new show: it is both a generic dull techno-conspiracy thriller with plot holes aplenty, and it is a poor fit for the particular franchise that it finds itself attached to.

Plotwise, the original Orphan Black was rarely anything special either, but it was enlivened tremendously by Tatiana Maslany’s chameleonic performance playing all the different clones, especially once the writers started leaning into those scenes of her acting opposite herself and/or impersonating her other roles (Cosima pretending to be Alison, Sarah pretending to be Rachel, etc). But the story around the characters was never very strong, and Echoes is sunk without a similar talent to anchor it. Reportedly Maslany was going to appear in a single episode this season before scheduling conflicts prevented even that, but I’m baffled at the idea of returning to this IP without any set of clone ‘sestras’ at its heart.

Instead our star Krysten Ritter plays only two people, one of whom is limited to a few flashbacks, and neither the acting nor the directing renders the pair too distinctive from one another (or from previous Ritter roles like Jessica Jones, for that matter). While her Lucy is part of a new line of clones, they’re staggered in age and so are performed by separate actresses throughout. Ritter and Amanda Fix, the younger actress playing a teen variant of her, are fine together, but they don’t offer nearly that same frisson of seeing one skilled actor embody totally different individuals from scene to scene. They’re never tasked with impersonating each other either, which removes another key element of enjoyment from the Orphan Black repertoire.

So presenting this as a follow-up to the old 2013-2017 program is a strange decision. Technically, yes: one of the main characters in Echoes is a now-adult Kira Manning, navigating life and scientific ethics 50 years after all the drama with her off-screen mom and aunts. Felix and Delphine each make cameo appearances (in some unintentionally hilarious old-age makeup) to further link the two series. But why would anyone feel this was an interesting continuation without any Maslany-like wizardry to distract us from the threadbare scripts?

And the plot here is dire. The villain’s plan is nebulous, the conspiracy aspect is nonsensical, the feminist themes aren’t developed in much depth, and no one’s motivations are particularly well-grounded beyond the protagonists trying to learn the truth behind their origins (which we know from the start anyway because, again, this is Orphan Black). One person fakes their own death midway through the year in order to be a hidden asset later on, and then just… isn’t seen or mentioned again for the remaining episodes. Lucy’s boyfriend gets stuck in the unenviable position of being a perpetual wet blanket, which is both a reasonable reaction to his partner having to take him and his kid on the run to avoid hired killers and not one that’s especially fun to watch on repeat. At least Kira’s arc with her wife provides a complex queer romance akin to Cosima/Delphine, which is meaningfully rare on the TV landscape but not enough on its own to salvage the rest of the narrative.

Nothing really gets resolved, and the whole thing ends on a frustrating violent murder and a sudden cliffhanger, presumably to help gin up interest in the network renewing the enterprise. At this point, though, I think they should just cut their losses and cancel it.

[Content warning for gaslighting, drug abuse, gun violence, suicide, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: While the Light Lasts and Other Stories by Agatha Christie

Book #119 of 2024:

While the Light Lasts and Other Stories by Agatha Christie

Unless I’m mistaken, I have now reached the end of my long journey through author Agatha Christie’s considerable body of novels and short story collections. In fact, this particular anthology was actually published in 1997, substantially after her 1976 death, but as it includes many earlier tales that hadn’t been previously collected, I wanted to make sure that I checked it out.

(Weirdly, due to the vagaries of this sort of project, it also features two titles that I’ve read multiple times before: “Christmas Adventure” — also known as “The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding” and “The Theft of the Royal Ruby” — from 1939’s The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories and 1960’s The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding and a Selection of Entrées, and “The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest” — also known as “The Mystery of the Spanish Chest” — from the same Regatta Mystery book and 1961’s Double Sin and Other Stories. Their inclusion here is pretty baffling, given that the main selling point of the remaining entries was presumably that they hadn’t been already republished anywhere after their initial magazine printings. Although maybe the repeated couple were added to shoehorn in Hercule Poirot, who would otherwise be absent from these proceedings.)

Still, the new material is fun. “Manx Gold” is notable for being the serialized prose component accompanying an actual 1930 treasure hunt arranged by the tourism board of the Isle of Man, such that the characters are shown solving the clues without giving away their solutions for any real-life participants. And both the espionage thriller “The Actress” and the tender romance “The Lonely God” constitute great examples of how effective this writer could be even when operating outside of her more famous whodunit / detective genre.

On balance across all its contents, I think I have to rate this collection as an average 3-out-of-5 stars, but I’m glad to have read it and that someone thought to gather those stories that might otherwise have fallen through the cracks of publishing history. Overall, it’s a fine belated sendoff to Dame Agatha.

[Content warning for gun violence, suicide, and incest.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Brat by Gabriel Smith

Book #118 of 2024:

Brat by Gabriel Smith

I suspect this isn’t what Charli XCX meant by brat summer, but the narrator of this 2024 Gen Z gothic horror novel — who shares a name, age, and occupation with its debut author Gabriel Smith — is certainly going through an experience. His father has just died, his mother is in a care home with dementia, and their house where he’s staying seems to be deteriorating further anytime he looks away. He’s meanwhile shedding huge strips of his skin (with new undamaged layers underneath) and having unsettling dreams and blackouts, helped along by his heavy drinking and drug use and obvious ongoing mental health crisis. An odd manuscript found in the study changes every time he returns to it, as does an old videotape left in the VCR, their details growing steadily more autobiographical to his own life.

This is a weird book! Pleasantly so for the most part, and funny as hell, since Smith has created a great unlikeable and unreliable protagonist to deliver the tale, but it’s ultimately one of those stories that’s ambiguous as to how much is actually happening for real, which isn’t my favorite narrative mode. The plot also ends rather abruptly without significant resolution, and the characters are all pretty unpleasant people. I don’t mind the belligerent and depressed act from the hero, who reminds me of the lead from My Year of Rest and Relaxation in his steadfast refusal to fulfill his various responsibilities, but I sure get tired of him, his brother, and his sister-in-law repeatedly calling one another gay or the ableist r-slur. I would read something else from this writer in the future, especially if I knew that it had abandoned that sort of sophomoric insult, but I’m just not able to muster up a full-throated recommendation of this one.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Shape-Shifter by Chris Archer

Book #117 of 2024:

Shape-Shifter by Chris Archer (Mindwarp #5)

A fun twist for this middle-grade 90s sci-fi series. For four books now, we’ve been hearing backstory about how Todd Aldridge mysteriously vanished on his thirteenth birthday, and watching as a succession of his classmates have both gained access to special powers and quickly had to fend off alien assassins as they turned that age themselves. For this fifth installment, the new protagonist turns out to be the missing boy himself: first for a few prequel chapters set before his disappearance, and then after he wakes up in the hospital nine months later, with no memory of where he’s been for all that time.

Given the formula established in the previous volumes, it’s natural to assume that this latest story will follow a familiar route, with the hero developing awesome abilities and fighting off an eerie shapeshifting foe (while also presumably getting to the bottom of his amnesia). Instead, the last quarter of the text reveals that that setup is ultimately a red herring, because the narrator we’ve been following is in fact one of the deadly predators himself, overlaid with the abducted kid’s personality to be the perfect sleeper agent to lure in the others. It’s a great plot beat, and one I don’t mind spoiling for discussion purposes, since a) this novel came out 1998, and b) the title and the back of the book largely give it away already.

Once “Todd” solves the mystery of his blackouts — those moments when his true self comes to the surface in murderous fashion — the ending is a wild rush of his human identity battling back the treacherous impulses of his subconscious and shifting his physical form from situation to situation to try and save his friends from being captured by his ostensible allies. It’s a funhouse mirror of the way these stories usually go, as he’s still using a bizarre and recently-discovered skillset in order to solve the problem in front of him, but the change of pace is everything that Mindwarp needed to breathe new life into its basic premise.

[Content warning for body horror.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Mirrored Heavens by Rebecca Roanhorse

Book #116 of 2024:

Mirrored Heavens by Rebecca Roanhorse (Between Earth and Sky #3)

A satisfyingly epic conclusion to this queer and Mesoamerican-flavored fantasy trilogy. As expected, it doesn’t quite hit the heights of the first volume, while cementing the middle book as a fairly forgettable bridge towards this more eventful finale. But everything wraps up nicely here, with some Game of Thrones-style intrigues, slaughters, and betrayals.

My critiques from earlier in the series remain. The sweeping romance between Xiala and Serapio isn’t especially convincing, since they only ever knew each other for a month and have subsequently spent a much longer time (and a rather substantial portion of these novels) apart. And the action is somewhat scattered across the nations of this world, though events do thankfully converge as the ending draws near.

But mostly this is a whirlwind of plot that delivers upon several long-running story arcs, puts characters through a sequence of emotional wringers, and shows off more of the delightful pre-Columbian-inspired worldbuilding. Minor quibbles aside, I’ve loved getting to revisit this setting and see its drama of reborn gods, dark magics, politics, and war all the way through to its bloody end.

[Content warning for genocide, torture, and gore.]

This volume: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Volumes ranked: 1 > 3 > 2

Book Review: Taltos by Steven Brust

Book #115 of 2024:

Taltos by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #4)

We’ve once again jumped around in the timeline for this fourth Vlad Taltos installment, though as usual, the context clues make it pretty easy to place the adventure in its proper spot within the protagonist’s personal lifespan. In this case, it’s his earliest outing yet, providing a chronological series order thus far of 4-2-1-3. For Vlad, the main action of this tale concerns how he first met a few major allies whom returning readers will already know, together with a sequence of flashbacks from near the start of his shady career, as he was promoted from enforcer to hitman for his fantasy criminal organization. (Curiously, it’s also the only volume of the seventeen that have been published to date not named for one of the Great House animals like Jhereg, Phoenix, or Dragon.)

So yes, this title explains how the human assassin Vladimir Taltos came to move in the same circles as the Dragaeran nobles Morrolan, Aliera, and Sethra Lavode (and in the process acquired Spellbreaker, his magic-negating golden chain). In some ways, it’s a just-so story: the antihero’s association with such powerful individuals was always an odd feature of the previous novels, so this prequel sets out to retroactively justify it. The venture more or less works, although it’s probably most interesting for dropping certain hints about Sethra that won’t pay off until book #7, Orca.

Yet it’s not the strongest plot in its own right; in both the present and the past, Vlad is a surprisingly passive character who displays little of the ingenuity or initiative we typically see of him. At least he’s as sardonic as ever, repeatedly asking, “How can you tell?” in response to everyone in the fabled Paths of the Dead — long story — remarking that he’s a living being unlike them. In the end he escapes with his new friends as he must to set up the sequels, but all told it’s not an especially memorable excursion.

[Content warning for torture and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: James by Percival Everett

Book #114 of 2024:

James by Percival Everett

Mark Twain’s 1885 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an admittedly flawed work: progressively antiracist for its time, with its young white southern protagonist helping a Black man escape from slavery and generally coming to believe in the abolitionist cause more broadly, but with a tendency to position Jim and his fellow enslaved characters as foolish and childlike (to say nothing of its controversial heavy use of the n-word to describe them). In other words, it’s a prime candidate for an informed retelling, presenting the story as it might have appeared from the perspective of Huck’s traveling companion, were he given the dignified adult interiority that his original creator denied him.

This new book, unfortunately, misses the mark in that regard. In my opinion, author Percival Everett veers too far in the opposite direction, crafting a hero so learned and erudite — and only pretending otherwise when around white folks like Finn — that the enterprise hits a satirical tone that winds up undermining the rest of it. The plot swings wildly from comedic bits of code-switching farce to genuine horrors of the era like gun violence, corporal punishment, and rape, whilst also deviating rather heavily from the source text by the end. (It’s one thing to cast Huck as an unreliable narrator and correct minor details that he apparently got wrong. It’s quite another to swap in an extended arc where James kills multiple enslavers in a quest to rescue his lost wife and children.)

The most intriguing tweak to the Twain canon is the notion that “Jim” might have secretly been Huck’s biological father, but this element is thrown in so offhandedly and so late in the matter that it ultimately doesn’t register very much or affect the wider tale. A version of this title that had centered that change, and/or offered a more grounded lead character throughout, could have really been something special. As is, the project is fine, but hardly one that feels like it needed to be a take on Huckleberry Finn at all.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Seinfeld, season 8

TV #35 of 2024:

Seinfeld, season 8

The penultimate year of this 90s sitcom is the first one without the involvement of co-creator Larry David, and the difference is rather immediately felt. Structurally, the show stops using a clip of Jerry’s standup act to launch each episode — reportedly the actor-producer was now too busy to keep writing that part of the material — in lieu of a short scene as a cold open that may or may not impact the remainder of the plot. But the general tone feels altered, too: more cartoonishly zany and absurdist, with wild swings of character personalities to chase a joke. It’s more of an escalation of that existing strain than anything brand-new, as the days are long past when this was truly a “show about nothing” that could spend a grounded 20 minutes on little but the characters waiting around and talking. But it’s noticeably accelerated here, somewhat like the later seasons of The Office.

On a basic level, the series is still pretty funny from week to week (though broader and perhaps a touch more mean-spirited, not to mention borderline transphobic in Jerry’s reaction to a girlfriend with “man hands”). There are a few minor serialized story arcs, like George being appointed to a charity foundation or Elaine getting promoted to run her company, but these all run for only a few episodes apiece before seeming to exhaust the concept and petering out. Overall the comedy is basically as competent as ever at this stage, but that’s nowhere near the strength of this program in its prime.

★★★☆☆