The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: A Door in the Dark by Scott Reintgen

Book #85 of 2024:

A Door in the Dark by Scott Reintgen (Waxways #1)

This YA fantasy novel grows on me as it goes along, but the first quarter or so of the text could really have been tightened up. That’s how long it takes for the story to spring its basic premise, introduced in the opening pages before the lengthy flashback: a transportation spell has gone wrong, stranding a half-dozen student wizards in the uninhabited lands far from the safety of home. One of the teens is dead upon arrival, and the rest soon realize that something is hunting them as they make their slow way back towards civilization on foot, carefully rationing their dwindling magic. It’s a genre twist on a wilderness survival plot, sort of like The Scholomance meets The Hunger Games (with perhaps a hint of Red Rising, given the protagonist’s status as a scholarship kid secretly resentful of her privileged upper-class peers).

The bulk of the ensuing tale is great, with additional slasher movie vibes as the remaining group members get steadily picked off by the creature stalking after them. I enjoy the distinctive candle-based magical system, as well as the complicated romance that develops. And the ending does eventually reconnect with everything established about the characters’ city and school early on, setting up the next installment in the trilogy quite nicely. At the same time, however, the narrative plays coy around some of the heroine’s specific motivations for far too long, leading her to feel a bit ungrounded outside of the immediate crisis until rather late in the book. I’ll stop there before I stray into spoilers, but generally speaking I’d give this title 3.5 stars rounded up, with high hopes that a more straightforward sequel will be even better.

[Content warning for drug abuse, torture, amputation, body horror, and gore.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Happy Place by Emily Henry

Book #84 of 2024:

Happy Place by Emily Henry

I don’t read a ton of romance novels, but author Emily Henry’s Book Lovers was such a pleasant surprise for me that I decided to check out this next title of hers as well. Unfortunately, I haven’t liked it nearly as much in either its premise or its execution, both of which rely on a frustratingly high degree of miscommunication — a trope that I don’t have very much patience for in general, and especially not in stories about seemingly well-adjusted adults with grown-up responsibilities.

Our 30-year-old protagonist here, for example, broke up with her long-distance fiancé six months ago and still hasn’t gotten around to informing her supposed best friends, who were in the same tight-knit social circle with the two of them back in college. When one invites her to visit the family vacation home where they’ve made fond memories in the past, she thinks it’ll be a good opportunity to finally break the news, only to be surprised when she gets there that her ex has flown in too. So that’s already multiple counts of people not talking to one another: the heroine and the guy each keeping their breakup a secret from everyone else, and him not telling her he’d be coming after getting pressured into it by their hostess. (He protests that he called and left her a voicemail, which she didn’t get because she blocked his number. But he didn’t confirm she’d received the message before booking airfare for a super awkward reunion? He didn’t try reaching out by email or social media or any other method??)

To not ruin the weeklong getaway for the others, the former couple pretend to still be an item, though it’s obvious from their chemistry that they’re not really over one another anyway. It doesn’t help that, per genre conventions, they’re stuck in close quarters and sharing a single bed, either. They’re also only obliquely discussing the reasons behind their separation in whispered private asides, which means that readers are kept in the dark about any specifics until relatively late in the text. Eventually we learn that, sure enough, it all stems from a series of misunderstandings and assumptions they never questioned about each other and their respective priorities. Oh — and minor spoiler alert, but it turns out the love interest was included in these plans because the organizer found out about the split and is trying to Parent Trap the lovers back together again, so she’s been patronizingly lying the whole time too. Sigh.

Different elements are handled better. I do like the six main characters for the most part, and the non-romantic side of the plot is a fairly nuanced exploration of the sadness and anxiety that can stem from the natural progression of time and the post-collegiate feeling of moving on in life from the folks who used to be your closest peers. But this is primarily a love story with a predictable ending, all predicated on none of the participants actually voicing what’s upsetting them, and that’s just not my cup of tea overall.

[Content warning for alcohol abuse.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Day Tripper by James Goodhand

Book #83 of 2024:

The Day Tripper by James Goodhand

An interesting time-travel premise bogged down by an unlikable protagonist and a few unresolved logistical issues. Following a traumatic head injury, our hero begins bouncing around his personal timeline, waking up each morning at some new point in his future — never earlier than when he was hit in 1995, but anywhere between then and 2023 or so. The most compelling element here is initially how bleak those later days are, and how that history apparently cannot be changed. He finds for example that his older self is a homeless drug addict, estranged from all his family and friends, and that he’s served time in prison for his role in the death of the woman he’s dating back in the present.

Eventually, he’s scared straight Scrooge-style and learns that he can make changes after all, leading him to seek help for his problems and ultimately win a happily-ever-after with the girl of his dreams. (Weirdly, A Christmas Carol isn’t mentioned explicitly in the text, while It’s a Wonderful Life is brought up at several points — yet of those two classic Yuletide stories about time-travel, the former is surely far closer to paralleling Alex’s situation.) I don’t quite buy his growth, however, and I’m somewhat bothered over the people whose fates he disrupts through his actions, like the man his love interest would have originally gone on to marry before he rewrites their reality. Because he never once comes clean with her — or anybody else — about his circumstances and the knowledge he’s gained about the future, there’s a predatory calculation to his moves that I don’t believe is intentional but goes utterly unaddressed. As a result, she reads less like a person with her own agency and interiority in this novel and more like a video game challenge he’s taking multiple attempts to solve.

It’s also not clear how the other character who’s in a similar predicament experiences or feels about the altered timeline, nor why he, who’s been at it for much longer, was wrongly convinced that change was impossible. And since neither of their ‘day tripper’ conditions is ever cured, it strikes me as strange that the two men are always leaping into a stable status quo where their memory gaps and erratic behaviors are inevitably noticed and called out. (If Alex spends the rest of his life hopping disjointedly from day to day, how can he possibly build anything like the happy home and new career we see at the end, especially without letting anyone in on the big secret?) Such implications nag at me, but this book isn’t really interested in exploring them.

Overall, I think the work succeeds at what it sets out to do, which is why I’ll rate it as highly as three stars out of five. Although all that darkness in the initial course of events is striking, a stronger plot might have left it immovable and forced the doomed protagonist to come to terms with the consequences that his poor choices have wrought. Instead, it seems just a bit too easy for him to figure out how to avoid that fate altogether.

[Content warning for alcohol abuse including drunk-driving, self-harm, suicide, domestic abuse, homophobic violence, and underage sexual assault.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Jhereg by Steven Brust

Book #82 of 2024:

Jhereg by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #1)

Pretty decent for an authorial debut, though it’s heavier on infodumping exposition than it needs to be, especially with the protagonist repeatedly learning something that he probably should have already known as a denizen of this particular fantasy world. (On the other hand, the genre was admittedly in a different place back in 1983, and this facet isn’t egregiously worse than in many titles of that era.) I think at this point it’s at least the fifth novel in its series chronologically, as author Steven Brust has weaved his way up and down the timeline while writing, but for this reread, I’m opting to go strictly by original publication order. This book initially introduced contemporary readers to the assassin Vlad Taltos and the wider setting of the Dragaeran Empire, and so it’s the spot where I’m diving back in.

It’s a bit of a bumpy journey, and not just because I read these books haphazardly several decades ago and don’t remember them too clearly. This initial volume has a lot that it’s trying to accomplish in terms of character, worldbuilding, and plot, and it’s that middle category that the writer seems most interested in conveying. Briefly: we’re in a land ruled by a people who are basically standard Tolkien elf types, living for thousands of years and possessing a variety of useful magical skills. Humans are here too — okay, confusingly both species call themselves human, but I mean recognizable Homo sapiens — which we’re told is because another sort of being now-vanished but who enslaved the Dragaerans in the ancient past brought some of us over from Earth as control subjects for their experiments. In the present day, the two races live in relative peace, though the ‘Easterner’ Vlad is a racial minority within the empire. He’s also a member of House Jhereg, one of seventeen noble clans and the one that’s specifically structured around organized crime like the real-life Mafia. The Jhereg run illicit gambling dens, thieving rings, protection rackets, and more, and it’s an open question as to how much of their flagrant illegality is officially condoned by the authorities.

Our hero, as mentioned, is a killer for hire, though his guild has firm rules about acceptable cases and conduct. He’s also a practitioner of both sorcery (psychic-based Dragaeran magic, like telepathic communication and teleportation) and witchcraft (a more loosely-defined set of Easterner abilities), the latter of which has gained him a jhereg familiar — the lowercase variant referring to the small but ferocious flying reptile, not the imperial House named after the creature. Vlad can send Loiosh on errands or call on his aid in a fight, but mostly he’s there for private sardonic banter. Further complicating all this lore is the issue of death itself, which is obviously the protagonist’s stock-in-trade. It turns out that a) people can reincarnate, even across species lines, and can sometimes learn to access memories of their former lives, and b) corpses can be magically resurrected if the spells are performed quickly enough, though there are specialized weapons to destroy the victim’s soul utterly and thereby prevent that. Hiring someone in Vlad’s line of work to use one of those costs extra, of course.

It’s a lot to squeeze into what’s overall a fairly slim book, which results in the characters and the immediate storyline alike feeling a bit shortchanged. Vlad is already friends with a surprising number of highly skilled individuals, and while the prequels would explore the origins of those relationships at greater length, it feels a bit easy here for him to be able to call on all the specialists he requires at a moment’s thought. The mechanics of the prose are awkward too — I suppose I don’t mind a fantasy saga using colloquial nouns like “guys” and “stuff,” but it’s somewhat jarring in the midst of the more imaginative concepts, as is the point in the planning-a-heist stage when the assassin says something tropey like “Here’s the plan…” right before a scene break that’s plainly intended to keep readers in the dark for longer.

But generally, this is fun. Fantasy noir is a promising combination, and if the plot is rather basic this first time out — somebody’s stolen a fortune from the Jhereg operating funds, leading the (anti)hero’s superiors to tap him for the retrieval and eventual complications — it’s still an effective showcase for all of Brust’s ideas. My hope is that the subsequent volumes don’t feel the need to explain quite so much, giving more room for the story and cast to breathe (and that the author pulls back from some of the sexism and racial essentialism that’s regrettably on display in this debut). But reading Vlad matter-of-factly describe where his weapons are hidden around his body and then watching him suddenly have to put them to use when an approaching waiter pulls a blade first? Yeah, that’s the good stuff.

[Content warning for torture and sexual assault.]

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Movie #14 of 2024:

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Prequels are tricky creatures, by design working towards an ending that the audience already knows. The ones that work best tend to focus not on lining up the logistics of the original piece, but rather a) telling compelling new stories that happen to occur earlier and b) tracing internal character evolutions rather than mechanical plot movements. In other words: the 2014 film Mad Max: Fury Road already told us that Imperator Furiosa came from an egalitarian community in a verdant oasis far from Immortan Joe’s Citadel, and that she feigned loyalty to the warlord until finding the right opportunity to return there. Seeing that same information play out on screen over several hours needs to bring something more to the equation, much as the shows Better Call Saul or Andor have done to elevate their own source material.

The effort here is moderately successful. With Alyla Browne and Anya Taylor-Joy stepping into Charlize Theron’s former role as the child / younger adult Furiosa, we watch as she’s captured by slavers, briefly rescued by her mom, caught again, and traded from one captor to another, subsequently coming of age whilst gaining the skills she’ll need to thrive in the post-apocalyptic setting of the Mad Max wasteland. Around her, those two villains are clashing — the tyrannical Immortan she’ll later betray in Fury Road and newcomer Chris Hemsworth as Dementus, a bloodthirsty chaos agent who killed her mother and hoped to raid their homeland. Although our protagonist initially plans to simply flee for home, she gets caught up in the war against Dementus and an emotional connection with another of the Citadel lieutenants, rising in Joe’s ranks and esteem as her quest for vengeance overlaps her personal concerns with his own strategic ones.

The problem is that too much of this movie isn’t about the title character’s growth or journey at all. Although she’s on screen for most of its runtime, she is mostly there as a witness to the conflict between the two antagonists, leading to lengthy scenes where our only driving concern is her specific survival, which we know is assured due to the constraints of the prequel format. The surrounding action is relatively meaningless, as nothing about Furiosa as a person or her animating goals is contingent on which evil bloke happens to triumph in the present squabble. Even the aforementioned quasi-relationship that develops between the heroine and Praetorian Jack is shortchanged by the script, relying on a few mutually longing looks and a time jump — one of several in this disjointed narrative — to sketch out their dynamic.

All that’s left is the crowd-pleasing spectacle of the violence itself, which reasonably satisfies that requirement but never feels quite as focused as the tight plotting of Fury Road. In my recent review after rewatching that film, I praised how “the editing of these sequences is always crystal-clear as to what’s happening where and when.” By contrast, this follow-up periodically loses its grasp on such matters. The exact size and location of Dementus’s forces in particular is a real head-scratcher, swelling and shrinking and moving all around the map as the immediate scene requires.

Is it fun to revisit the setting of Fury Road? Undeniably. The new worldbuilding details aren’t as rich, but it’s a delight to see the gleefully suicidal War Boys and their chrome spray paint again, not to mention all the modded cars and campy name / outfit choices as everyone races back and forth across the desert. There’s even a little thrill in spotting a few returning minor characters and places like Gastown and the Bullet Farm that were only mentioned in dialogue before, even if this sometimes strays into that trap of purely existing to answer logistical questions that no one was really asking. Overall, I wouldn’t say this newest Mad Max title is mediocre…. but it’s certainly not going to be awaited in Valhalla, either.

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

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Discovery, season 5

TV #25 of 2024:

Star Trek: Discovery, season 5

In theory, the impulse to revisit the ancient race of alien progenitors from a memorable episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation is a fine one for the modern franchise to explore (if sort of an odd fit for Discovery, which began as a direct TOS prequel before rocketing off to be the chronologically latest Trek series, bypassing the TNG era entirely). But the execution here is comically inept and tedious, establishing that during the intervening years, a well-meaning group of scientists found the technology, hid it, and crafted an elaborate sequence of riddles so that only someone worthy enough to follow them all would be able to find the prize.

This turns the last year of Star Trek: Discovery into a Da Vinci Code-esque scavenger hunt leaping from one silly puzzle and bland maguffin to the next, racing against a pair of under-developed antagonists who can’t articulate a compelling motivation for their actions any better than our heroes can. (The mercenaries initially just want to sell the device to the highest bidder, while the Federation wants to seize it to prevent anyone else’s abuse. That the latter could obviously just vaporize one or more clues to ensure the thing stays hidden forever doesn’t occur to them.) Both sides also make wild assumptions about the tech that are somehow never questioned: that the same power that could “create” life — aka, seeding a genetic pattern to influence evolutionary progression over millennia — could likewise destroy it, and that in addition, this machine could therefore bring a person back from the dead.

You can justify a lot in science-fiction with the right technobabble spin, so I want to pause and underline just how ill-supported these ideas are by the surrounding narrative. There’s no explanation for these suppositions at all! One character simply announces an unhinged belief about the doohickey they’re all chasing, and everyone else nods solemnly and accepts it as a solid fact. (And that’s not even getting into my long-standing contention that the transporters in this setting could easily resurrect dead people from their stored molecular patterns, either. When one of the villains this season dies, the surviving partner’s goal becomes undoing that death via the progenitor tech, all while ignoring the overgrown fax machine on every spaceship that could literally print out another healthy copy in seconds.)

This is just not a very good storyline, and it’s even worse as a farewell to a long-running TV series. There’s practically no attempt here for Discovery’s characters to reflect on their past and the journeys they’ve taken since; even the episode which finds the main heroine hurtling through moments in the ship’s history doesn’t bother to bring back any former cast members she had a meaningful relationship with. (Ethan Peck, Anson Mount, and Michelle Yeoh are all filming their own Trek spinoff properties right now — you’re telling me none of them was available for a quick cameo reprisal on their parent show?) As a production, Discovery’s memory seems to reach back only to the start of season 3 when Michael and Book first met — though I guess we also get some random continuity nods in the finale, belatedly setting up the Short Treks episode “Calypso” and connecting the enigmatic Dr. Kovich to Star Trek: Enterprise for some reason. Generally, though, this hardly feels like it’s conversation with the show’s own roots, which is a disservice that robs an already-shaky plot of its maximum potential impact.

No one else on the program is served particularly well by these last scripts, either. Reno is forgotten (though given an irritating line of dialogue that’s a pun on Seven of Nine, a character she almost certainly wouldn’t have heard of before), Culber gets a weird half-arc about being possessed by a dead Trill that doesn’t ultimately lead anywhere interesting, Saru’s only there to get married, and background characters like Owosekun or Detmer receive no more development than they ever have, making it unintentionally hilarious when Tilly yells at the new guy for not getting to know the crew as individuals. One big complaint about Discovery has always been that it’s the Michael Burnham show more than a true ensemble, but even she faces no challenge greater than the latest nominal threat to the universe and patching up her relationship with her ex, following a breakup that the writing never remotely manages to sell as requiring any significant effort to resolve. She barely even knows the opponent in her big climactic final battle, and there’s no mention of her anxieties about leadership, or thorny relationships with the chain of command, or complicated family life, or Vulcan upbringing, or anything else that defined the character early on.

So no, it’s not great television. A few episodes work alright as generic sci-fi adventure fare, which is why I’ll rate this year as highly as two stars out of five. But it’s a remarkably poor ending, and so terribly far from Discovery at its best.

This season: ★★☆☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 1 > 3 > 4 > 2 > 5

Book Review: Home Is Where the Bodies Are by Jeneva Rose

Book #81 of 2024:

Home Is Where the Bodies Are by Jeneva Rose

In an afterword to this novel, author Jeneva Rose discusses how she set the action in her own small hometown, even revisiting her old childhood house for research, since she was using it as the home for the story’s fictional family as well. In a note on Goodreads, she also mentions how she drew on personal experience for the main character “dealing with a person suffering from addiction” and “for the guilt I endure in still having been unsuccessful in helping them to recover.”

Unsurprisingly, those true-life elements tend to be the strongest pieces of this work, although the heroine is so insufferable in her judgmental and patronizing attitude toward her drug addict sister that I feel like Rose must have either the keenest and humblest degree of self-awareness possible or else none of it whatsoever. The bigger problem, though, is the rest of the plot, which turns out to be a tired and predictable thriller with gaping logistical flaws and a rather inelegant structure.

The core premise doesn’t arrive until a quarter of the way into the text, but I suppose it’s decent once it does: the adult children of a recently-deceased woman are going through her belongings when they pop on one of her home videotapes, which seems to depict their parents panicking next to the dead body of the neighbor girl who went missing when the kids were younger. Events spiral out from there, with the three siblings digging into the case and flashbacks from the mom’s perspective illuminating what they haven’t discovered yet.

But it’s all so trite and ridiculous, especially compared to the more grounded emotions around the addiction storyline (or the somewhat similar recent Black Mirror episode “Loch Henry”). The mystery on the tape is something that the characters stumble across on a complete whim, and even after witnessing its bombshell contents and reeling over the implications, they exhibit no apparent urgency about reading the letters or opening the safety deposit box that was left to them in the will. If they had, of course, they would have learned the truth right away, which doesn’t really make sense for the mother to have left behind for them, given the (totally obvious) identity of the culprit that’s eventually revealed.

Her scenes are frustrating too, since at least in the present, the other viewpoint protagonists are in the dark and questing for answers alongside the reader. The chapters set in the past instead play coy with what certain people know when, which feels like an artificial sideshow for our benefit rather than a thread that ever organically impacts the primary narrative. A more focused version of this tale could have excised those sections entirely and been vastly improved. As is, this is now the second title from this writer (after the time-travel yawn The Girl I Was) that interested me with its summary but then underwhelmed and irritated me in its execution, so I think I’m just done with her books at this point.

[Content warning for suicide and gun violence.]

★★☆☆☆

Movie Review: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Movie #13 of 2024:

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

This remains the very best action movie I’ve ever seen, although one that’s remarkable for plenty of other reasons besides. It would be reductive to describe the film as one long car chase, since part of its strength rests in how the script elegantly factors in regular quiet character moments to break up the kinetic violence. But plotwise, it couldn’t be simpler: a warlord is sending out an armed convoy across a post-apocalyptic desert wasteland, unaware that his trusted driver Imperator Furiosa — a never-better Charlize Theron, down an arm via digital magic — has taken the opportunity to smuggle the villain’s harem of enslaved wives to freedom. When he learns of her deceit, he sends the rest of his forces roaring after her in their own spiked and armored diesel chariots.

Max is here too, the returning hero of a much earlier trio of movies (1979-1985) where he was played by Mel Gibson. Now thankfully recast as Tom Hardy, the drifter functions as our viewpoint into this particular dystopian society, but his previous adventures don’t impact events in the slightest, so audiences can safely skip them (as I did the first time I watched this). At best, franchise completionists will merely understand why that protagonist is so attached to his car at the start; otherwise the piece is surprisingly light on any callbacks or continuity implications.

On its own terms, however, it’s incredibly effective, with phenomenal worldbuilding introduced via the prop, set, and costume design as well as the distinctive dialogue. “Witness me!” “I live, I die, I live again!” “You will ride eternal, shiny and chrome.” Such expressions suggest a vaster culture than we actually get to see, which in my opinion is the sweet spot for a two-hour motion picture like this, providing just enough detail for our imaginations to fill in the rest.

The characters are terrific too, further fleshing out the feminist angle of the story with the women — along with Max and another eventual male ally — banding together in egalitarian community-building and hope for the future as an alternative to the tyrannical patriarchy that they’re fleeing. Refreshingly, our two leads Max and Furiosa develop a shared trust but not a romance, and even the secondary relationship that leans more in that direction is ultimately more about deprogramming a radicalized young man through affirmation of his humanity than making him fall in love. It’s the rare Hollywood blockbuster that features no kissing or apparent desire for it; even the cruel Immortan Joe seems driven less by lust than by the entitled belief that his brides and their unborn children represent nothing but his property.

But the primary selling point is of course the grand spectacle of the racing vehicles, the gunfire, the explosions, and the people leaping / being knocked from one car to another at breakneck speeds, all in a gorgeously-saturated color palette and to the tones of a killer pulse-pounding soundtrack. The thrills are superb, and the editing of these sequences is always crystal-clear as to what’s happening where and when — despite sometimes dropping multiple frames at a time to make things play out even faster. It’s immensely watchable and deeply cool, with the 120-minute runtime simply flying by without so much as a hint of bloat.

I saw this movie at least twice in theaters back in 2015, and the experience is still burned into my brain almost a decade later. While I have high hopes for the new Furiosa prequel as well, it’s hard to imagine how it could ever top this. What a lovely day, indeed.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★★

Book Review: Stargazy Pie by Victoria Goddard

Book #80 of 2024:

Stargazy Pie by Victoria Goddard (Greenwing & Dart #1)

Two-out-of-five stars, which is the lowest I’ve rated any of the dozen or so books that I’ve read by author Victoria Goddard thus far. I’m heartened that this 2016 novel is one of her earlier works, because it means I know firsthand that her talents improve after this, but I’m honestly not sure I would have finished this title if it was the first one I had picked up. As is, my primary enjoyment has been in spotting the worldbuilding references to the writer’s broader Nine Worlds setting: particularly the outlaw poet Fitzroy Angursell and his banned epic Aurora, along with the general depiction of life in the wake of the cataclysmic Fall of Astandalas.

The immediate plot here concerns the protagonist returning to his provincial hometown after leaving college in disgrace, reconnecting with a few old friends, and investigating an odd but seemingly inconsequential mystery — the titular seafood dish, which someone has left sitting by the fountain in the town square — that winds up uncovering cult activity and an even larger criminal conspiracy. The characters are fine, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the sub-series launched by this volume grows stronger in subsequent installments. But the story is delivered rather poorly, with important developments happening by chance, oblique connections that readers don’t have enough context to follow, and other passages heavy with exposition that the recipients plainly ought to have already known.

The tale is structured like a Regency-pastiche whodunnit (with some fantasy genre flourishes on the side), but the heroes don’t really assemble clues in a reasonable or interesting way. Instead they blunder about, make intuitive leaps, and get caught up in a sequence of unrelated machinations. And yet it doesn’t quite land as a comedy of errors, either! It’s altogether strange, and although the narrator’s personal backstory is fairly compelling once we learn all the relevant details, the narrative around him is a remarkably poor showing for it.

[Content warning for drug and alcohol abuse and sexual assault.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: You Like It Darker by Stephen King

Book #79 of 2024:

You Like It Darker by Stephen King

A new collection of short fiction from horror master Stephen King, five entries of which are brand-new for this volume and seven of which have previously appeared elsewhere. (Personally, for instance, I’d already read “The Turbulence Expert” in the King-edited anthology Flight or Fright and “Laurie” as a free extra included at the end of his novella Elevation, both published in 2018.)

If I were grading these stories individually, I don’t think I’d give any a rating lower than three-out-of-five stars, which I will round up to four for the book as a whole given how much I’ve enjoyed a few items in particular. The closing title “The Answer Man” is one of those, spinning a timeless question of how much guaranteed foreknowledge a person might actually want to learn. It also has a curious backstory that’s worth highlighting: the author reportedly put the first several pages away in a drawer and then forgot about them for another 45 years, giving this tale an even longer creative gestation than the gap between King penning the iconic opening line of what would become his Dark Tower series in 1970 and finishing its seventh and final novel in 2004. In some ways, this new story represents a collaboration between the writer’s younger and older selves, which is fitting for a plot that likewise tracks a single individual over the course of his lifetime.

Two of my other favorites here are “Rattlesnakes,” which is an unexpected Cujo sequel (and minor crossover with Duma Key), and the novella Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream, which is a classic case of King devising a wicked premise and then chasing it to discover where it leads. An ordinary man has an unsettling nightmare about where a dead body is buried, so vivid in its details that he’s able to seek out the place that he saw upon waking, despite having never been there before. When he finds the corpse right where he dreamed it, he attempts to report it anonymously to the police — but they’re able to trace the call and can’t be convinced that he’s not the murderer himself, as they obviously don’t believe his wild claim of how he came by his information. What follows is a mounting pile of circumstantial evidence and an unhinged detective closing in around the protagonist, while he scrambles to prove what can’t possibly be proven.

Overall, this is vintage King — a mix of genres that delivers the intended chills, and a welcome sign that the 76-year-old Mainer has no intention of slowing down quite yet. Some of the contents may be stronger than others, but I imagine any ‘Constant Reader’ of the man will like this work just fine.

[Content warning for gun violence, suicide, rape, domestic abuse, gaslighting, death of children, body horror, and gore.]

★★★★☆