The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Alien Terror by Chris Archer

Book #40 of 2024:

Alien Terror by Chris Archer (Mindwarp #1)

Another old middle-grade reread for me. As a series launcher, this title has potential, although it remains mostly setup for the future at this point. When wimpy kid Ethan turns 13, he gains super-strength and expert fighting skills during times of stress, but is cryptically warned that he should hide his newfound abilities before they bring on unwanted attention. Sure enough, a shapeshifting enemy is soon stalking him and reveals that the hero’s father was an extraterrestrial, though that’s all we really get for now besides a minor arc about standing up to a bully but pulling back from the urge to kill him once he’s at his victim’s mercy.

This book came out in 1997, and it’s fun to spot both the references like Marvel comics and Mortal Kombat that are supposed to establish the protagonist’s nerdiness and the clear but unmentioned plot influences of popular genre works of the era like The X-Files and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The storyline cribs from those a mistrust of authority and hints of a wider conspiracy, although that angle would have to wait for the sequels to develop any real specifics.

I dig the visual aspect of the boy’s eyes turning jet-black when his powers activate, the light body horror of the other changes he’s feeling inside, and the creepy implication that his adopted parents know more about his situation than they’re letting on to him. As I sometimes mentioned in my Animorphs reviews, books for this age range often traffic in metaphors for puberty and feelings of teenage alienation, and that element doesn’t get much more literal than this. It’s a solid start for a concept that I remember going in some interesting directions later on.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Book of Nightmares by John Peel

Book #39 of 2024:

Book of Nightmares by John Peel (Diadem #6)

This was the last of the original six Diadem books published by Scholastic from 1997 to 1998, after which the middle-grade fantasy series would lie dormant for almost a decade until getting revived under another publisher. Presumably that’s also why it’s the first volume to end without a cliffhanger lining up the next adventure, just our three exhausted heroes finally sleeping and starting to heal from their latest wounds.

The reason they’re so tired is that this story takes them on an endurance trek across the planet Zarathan, where the villain revealed at the end of the previous novel has fled with a kidnapped Pixel in tow and Score and Helaine in swift pursuit. It’s a cursed world where nightmares pulled from their subconscious fears come to life and anyone who falls asleep will reportedly never wake up again. That’s a particular danger for Pixel, who hasn’t exactly been briefed on the deadly circumstances by his devious captor.

It’s a fine premise and the atmosphere is spooky enough, but in practice, this title largely amounts to a sequence of episodic combat encounters, none of which seem as revealing as they could have been about the character currently under attack. The best part is that Score and Helaine are on their own for most of the book, which definitely draws them closer together, even if neither is ready to admit their feelings on the subject quite yet. But the overall plot is pretty threadbare, and when the team ultimately reunite and confront the antagonist, she’s dispatched fairly easily, without time for any of the last-minute revelations about her backstory and motivations (or Pixel’s breakthrough regarding the true nature of their surroundings) to register as especially important. If the saga had ended here for good, I can’t say that it would have been at a narrative high point or feeling of significant resolution.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Among the Bros: A Fraternity Crime Story by Max Marshall

Book #38 of 2024:

Among the Bros: A Fraternity Crime Story by Max Marshall

One part ethnographic history of the modern American college fraternity scene; one part true-crime reporting of a million-dollar benzodiazepine ring that operated within that ecosystem at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. To lay out my biases, I was active in a fraternal organization myself not too long before the events detailed in this book, although my experiences couldn’t have been further removed from the extravagant abuses that author Max Marshall relates. (As one of the 3% of frat members he notes don’t consume any alcohol, I witnessed plenty of underage drinking around me, but never any hazing or harder drug use.) My quiet university as a whole wasn’t exactly known as a big party school, either.

But I was aware of such extremes in the broader ‘Greek’ subculture, and was interested to see them described so analytically, especially in an early passage when the writer traces the impact of popular movies like Animal House and Old School on perceptions and expectations of fraternity life. Certainly the ‘bros’ he describes in this book seem to have taken the excesses of such works as aspirational, along with the cash-fueled blowouts depicted in The Wolf of Wall Street. It’s an element that merits widespread scrutiny from our cultural commentators, as does the racism, misogyny, and rape culture that’s often endemic in such spaces (though is treated only passingly here).

But most of this text is given over to the dealers and their illicit products, which they would buy off foreign suppliers on the dark web in powder form, press into pills themselves, and then market to their classmates as a way to curb anxiety and enhance the effects of alcohol and other drugs. If Marshall’s sources are to be believed, the blackouts that accompanied such usage were generally not intended as date-rape aids, but rather seen as a benefit for the buyers themselves, freeing them from the burden of having to remember any specific debaucheries in the cold light of morning.

The author’s insider view and years of dedicated research are appreciated, but his account at times veers into sensationalizing the glamor of the young men’s lifestyle — they hung out with rappers like Waka Flocka Flame! — and minimizing the real-world harm perpetrated by their actions. He also quotes heavily from text conversations and the comments section of websites like Total Frat Move, which seems more like an excuse to share scandalous off-color humor than providing any necessary support for his points. The fratty tone extends throughout his own writing in this book too, such as his repeated use of the acronym GDI (G** D*** Independent) for an unaffiliated student, in lieu of a more neutral alternative term.

Still, the title dwells on the case of one trafficker who wound up shot to death and another currently serving time in prison for his role at the top of the criminal enterprise, which ran in successively less lucrative layers like any multi-level marketing / pyramid scheme out there. That it took so long for the mostly rich, white, male offenders to be brought to justice speaks to the absurd degree of privilege in their community, but this work at least attempts to grapple with that and show how consequences did reach a few of the perpetrators, eventually.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: West Heart Kill by Dann McDorman

Book #37 of 2024:

West Heart Kill by Dann McDorman

I always feel a little bad about giving a book my lowest rating, but this pretentious postmodern whodunnit irked me for most of the way through and then ended even worse than it began. The basic premise is pretty standard for the genre: a detective is visiting a remote country club when a murder occurs, and his subsequent investigations turn up plenty of lies and infidelities and other red herrings on the way to a culprit. But this action is related to us in the most obfuscating fashion, via overwrought sentences like, “You can perceive the contours of the plot ahead, anticipate its false clues and blind alleys, the ways in which this writer will try to conceal the truth in plain sight, like a purloined letter on a mantelpiece.” When the text abandons this pedantic second-person style, it’s to enter the first-person plural of members of the lodge — “We’d been watching her carefully from the moment she stepped into the great hall” — or just lengthy exposition dumps about famous real and fictional mysteries, some of which aren’t even correct in their details.

It’s not a great look overall; I’d call it perhaps a three-star story concept brought down a notch or so in execution. And then the last chapter drops all of this to be told in the form of a stageplay script, with dialogue for the reader to interrogate the surviving witnesses and act out the typical parlor-room denouement:

“READER: We also need to address the question of the detective. Who hired him and why was he here?

MEREDITH: He said he was hired by John.

READER: I have reason to believe that is not true. I’ll get to that in a moment.”

That’s the point where my sense of the novel’s quality dipped even further, and it hit an absolute nadir at the ultimate conclusion, which I have zero qualms about spoiling for you here.

The killer of the final victim? The author himself, apparently. It’s a meta twist that I guess is in line with the work thus far, but told in such an obnoxiously triumphant manner as to defy all reason (and without any particular motivation beyond a sheer tautology of narrative needs). The whole title feels so self-congratulatory about a cleverness that it doesn’t remotely possess, so yes, a one-star rating and this scathing review seems entirely justified.

★☆☆☆☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Discovery, season 4

TV #9 of 2024:

Star Trek: Discovery, season 4

While this latest season of Star Trek: Discovery may not be quite as bad as its dire second year, which burned through an astonishing degree of terrible impulses, it’s decidedly more creatively bereft. We’re still in the future timeline (where it appears the show will be staying for good), but that’s no longer positioned as an exciting new setting to explore as it was in season 3, just the basic status quo of the series at this point. So what is Discovery about, going forward? The writers have come up with three quasi-significant ideas for the plot this time that I’ll address in turn, and only one of them ultimately registers as particularly meaningful.

First: there’s a new galactic threat on the horizon! It’s another mystery for the crew to investigate, but one that’s so blandly devoid of any interesting details — a ‘dark matter anomaly’ that they mostly just call the DMA, messing with gravity and throwing space debris around. There appears to be an unknown intelligence behind the phenomenon, which is eventually designated by the Federation as Species 10-C in another superbly poor bit of branding. It’s a bare-bones approach to storytelling, with no personality to these developments that could make any of the endless technobabble conversations about them at all compelling. The scripts accordingly feel like an unpolished rough draft, or like the empty output of an AI chatbot. Even the show Enterprise, which plotted a similar arc around the secretive Xindi race in its later years, managed to flesh out the hunt for answers far more dramatically than this.

The second big idea this season is that our protagonist Michael Burnham, finally captaining her own Starfleet vessel, is now having to deal with political considerations in the form of a micromanaging Federation president. That’s at least a valid change of pace for the show, but it doesn’t ever lead anywhere or alter the things she was going to do anyway.

Lasty, the plot with the DMA winds up driving a wedge between Burnham and her partner Book, who’s been around for just long enough that the conflict has real weight and stakes to it. The couple are set at odds in such a way that it’s believable they’d each dig their heels in and insist they’re right, and having him as an antagonist of sorts gives the program some fresh material for a while, even if the larger villain manipulating him is pretty thinly-written and obnoxious. But it’s not a great sign that that love spat really is the best thing that Discovery can offer in this run.

A variety of episodic adventures and minor subplots fill out the rest of the year. One long-running cast member leaves rather abruptly, while another that had been previously written off comes back with similarly little justification. There’s no coherent direction behind such moves, and the resolution to the 10-C storyline plays out inertly as a bunch of people standing and talking in front of a massive green screen. It’s as underbaked as everything else, and I can only hope that the upcoming final season is approached with considerably more care and purpose, to send this series and its characters off properly.

I did like the Stacey Abrams cameo, though.

[Content warning for gun violence, genocide, and torture.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found by Frank Bruni

Book #36 of 2024:

The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found by Frank Bruni

A regrettably disjointed memoir. At its best, author Frank Bruni manages to convey a little of what it’s been like for him to go effectively blind in one eye overnight and learn he has a rare disorder that could take out the rest of his vision at any point. He talks about his own adjustment to life with that condition, as well as lessons he’s learned from sharing his story with people facing similar disabilities. Some key takeaways include the note that anyone we meet could be struggling with personal health challenges or other problems that merit our patience and the gentle reminder that although he may have been ahead of the curve for his Baby Boomer generation in experiencing a serious debilitation in his early 50s, everyone’s body does change and wear out in ways that they’ll need to come to terms with as they continue to age.

Unfortunately, that last element of the book often verges into woo-woo extolling of the power of positive thoughts, which feels like a strange conclusion for the writer to draw after observing how his doctor and the medical establishment / society at large failed to adequately help him. There are also frequent digressions about irrelevant topics like the man’s dog and an insidious degree of celebrity name-dropping, including a few prominent bigots like Mel Gibson whose offensive beliefs and behaviors go entirely unaddressed — an oddly amoral stance for a gay journalist who specifically mentions how homophobia has affected him over the years.

The work is short enough and I probably liked it more than I disliked it on balance, but it could have been considerably improved by hewing closer to a coherent topic and thinking through some of its implications a bit further.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Bride of the Blue Wind by Victoria Goddard

Book #35 of 2024:

The Bride of the Blue Wind by Victoria Goddard (The Sisters Avramapul #1)

Much as I’ve been enjoying author Victoria Goddard’s sprawling Nine Worlds fantasy saga, I’ve found this title to be a refreshingly distinctive change of pace for it. In lieu of her typical writing style, the novella is told in an exaggeratedly poetic fashion, well-befitting its desert fairy tale atmosphere of sorcery, caravans, and djinn. It’s the first story I’ve read in this setting that really drives home how the titular Nine Worlds are in fact radically different realms — an exciting prospect both in its own right and for when characters from those separate origins periodically travel beyond their local borders, a la crossovers in the MCU or Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere.

Like something out of the One Thousand and One Nights, the writer paints a picture for us of three daughters from a particular nomadic tribe who go off to seek their fortunes one-by-one as they come of age. The eldest sister studies to become a weaver of magical thread, the middle girl trains in armed and unarmed combat, and the beautiful youngest child is swept away to marry a god. Later on, when the first two receive word of the latter’s distress, they take leave of their respective vocations to reunite and set off to aid her.

It’s a loose Bluebeard retelling as well, so as Arzu and Pali are making their way towards her, Sardeet is exploring her new husband’s divine house and learning its strange rules. When she becomes pregnant, she also starts seeing visions of silently pleading women around the halls, whom she gradually realizes are the ghastly shades of his butchered former brides. Thus even before her sisters reach her, their sibling must find a way to wrest power for herself and her unborn baby to avoid sharing her predecessors’ fate.

I’ve seen some of this family’s future already — Pali and Sardeet Avramapul will someday go on to join the legendary Red Company, with many tales of their outlaw exploits before the Fall — but the three heroines are a delight to meet here as teens, precociously courageous and fiercely dedicated to one another and each obviously quite proud of her siblings’ differing gifts and ways of approaching a common problem. The book is on the shorter side and ends a bit abruptly, so I’ll renew my critique from Goddard’s Derring-Do for Beginners (which launched its own subseries within the wider canvas) that I think such installments should have been extended and presented as more complete entries for us, rather than doled out piecemeal like this. But overall, I continue to love these stories and how they interconnect.

[Content warning for sexual assault, childbirth, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: Wild Blue Yonder by Mark Morris

Book #34 of 2024:

Doctor Who: Wild Blue Yonder by Mark Morris

This is a stronger novel than Gary Russell’s adaptation of The Star Beast, but only because Wild Blue Yonder is the superior episode of Doctor Who. Author Mark Morris’s novelization of the Russell T. Davies script faithfully captures the familiar plot beats, yet there’s very little new material that he brings to the task in the way of character interiority or additional scenes, which would seem to be the main benefit of reproducing an existing TV story into the written medium. It’s also sadly the case that this particular show special is pretty heavily driven by its eerie visuals and talented performances, which do not translate well to the page at all.

It is still a fine tale: the Fourteenth Doctor and his friend Donna Noble, reunited and traveling together once again, encounter a derelict spaceship on the literal edge of the universe and eventually discover that it’s populated by two malevolent entities from the other side who have copied their appearances (when they’re not losing control of their bodies and warping grotesquely). The TARDIS has temporarily dematerialized, taking the hero’s handy sonic screwdriver device with it, leaving the pair of time-travelers stranded with only their wits to somehow outmaneuver their doppelgänger enemies as the ship’s corridors slowly transform around them.

It’s a great premise. Any hypothetical reader who hadn’t already watched these events play out on-screen would probably enjoy it, but for those of us who can draw the comparison, the tension and dramatic reveals whenever one of the protagonists isn’t sure if the other is an imposter just fundamentally work better when we can see the actors’ faces and can’t see inside anyone’s mind. The book also inherits without change the weakest part of the original version, the Doctor’s almost-disastrous mistaking of the false Donna for the real one near the end. In a storyline about reestablishing the characters’ old trust and partnership, that’s not necessarily a bad development, but it’s one that should have been addressed with emotional consequences and earned rapprochement, rather than simply shrugged off as it is here/there. That moment is likewise a missed opportunity for the Time Lord to notice something actually wrong with his putative companion’s behavior or comments — thereby demonstrating that he does truly know her — instead of apparently spotting at the last second that one of her arms is infinitesimally too long.

My contention remains that these 2023 Doctor Who novelizations were released too early, all within a week of their respective episodes airing on television. With greater time and distance, the writers could have dug more into the finished works and their critical audience reception, reflectively iterating and tweaking in a way that might have improved matters. Without that possibility for this title, the result is a bit of a not-thing itself: close enough to the genuine item at a glance, but only an inferior facsimile on closer inspection.

[Content warning for body horror and suicide.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Book of Earth by John Peel

Book #33 of 2024:

Book of Earth by John Peel (Diadem #5)

This is by far the best of the original six Diadem novels published by Scholastic from 1997 to 1998 (and perhaps of the entire series, which resumed many years later under Llewellyn). It picks up on the cliffhanger ending of the volume before, with Score falling prey to a magical attack via an amulet that he left back on Earth, injecting real stakes and a ticking-clock element into the narrative. Our three teen heroes now have to visit his homeland of New York City to find the item and cure him, and that’s a development that pays off in several key ways.

First: although each protagonist received a certain degree of backstory in book one, their fantastical adventures across the Diadem have generally been too propulsive to allow for much retrospection. But Score’s history with his abusive father and his hometown at large inherently generates a more nuanced and interesting plot for him than some generic episodic threat, in addition to showcasing how much he’s grown in his time away — a lesson that author John Peel would return to with subsequent homecomings for the other kids in books seven and nine. The setting also provides some nice culture-clash / fish-out-of-water antics for Pixel and particularly Helaine, whose medieval-like planet of course couldn’t prepare her for technologies like cell phones, helicopters, and guns. Her comedic distrust of such things feels straight out of a Doctor Who serial with the companion Leela, while Pixel’s more muted reaction to how basic everything seems from his advanced perspective renders him rather like the Star Trek crew in the movie with the whales.

The city is also a familiar environment for readers, which means Peel isn’t tasked with as much worldbuilding or descriptive exposition, and Earth’s status as a rim world entails that no one can manifest much magic for good or for ill. Suddenly our child sorcerers are cut off from the bulk of their powers, forcing them to rely more on their wits to defeat their latest enemies.

All of those strengths are more or less baked into the premise of this tale, but the execution is great, too. There are betrayals and other twists, including a redemption arc for Score’s dad that doesn’t ignore or forgive his earlier actions, and the hokey puzzles are thankfully at a minimum. The characters are continuing to develop nicely, and while the romantic attraction between Score and Helaine is still unacknowledged by either, their relationship grows a lot closer through their ordeal here, which includes a moment when they have to pretend to kiss in order to evade capture. What a gift for the shippers out there! And although the story closes on yet another cliffhanger, at least this time it’s a climactic result that has built up over the course of the preceding events, rather than coming out of nowhere at the last minute.

My biggest critique is how this novel handles a new character in a wheelchair, whose lifelong disability is framed as a punishment and a trap and is ultimately healed with magic, which didn’t bother me as a kid but in hindsight I would call more than a tad problematic. Nevertheless, for a middle-grade title from a quarter-century ago, it holds up pretty well overall. I think this volume is the main reason I look back on the whole series so fondly, and I only wish the rest of them could have matched it in quality.

★★★★★

Book Review: Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta by James Hannaham

Book #32 of 2024:

Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta by James Hannaham

After two decades, Carlotta Mercedes has been released on parole from the men’s prison where, under her original name and gender presentation, she was sentenced as an accomplice to her cousin’s armed robbery. (She claims she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but she’s not exactly the most honest reporter. In fact, she indulges in quite a lot of wishful thinking and self-delusion over the course of this novel, as though if she insists enough on something in her mind, it will turn out true. So it’s hard to necessarily take any of her protests of innocence at face-value.) Now freed, she reconnects with friends and relatives from her past — many of whom have complicated feelings about this reunion and/or her new identity — and wanders the streets of a New York City that has seemingly changed just as much as she has during her years away.

The ensuing plot is fairly minimal. I’ve seen other reviews compare this title to James Joyce’s Ulysses, which I haven’t read, but for me, the main point of comparison would be to A Confederacy of Dunces. As in that story, it’s the self-sabotaging protagonist who comes across most strongly, although the viewpoint and concerns of a Black trans ex-con are inherently more sympathetic and interesting than those of John Kennedy Toole’s entitled manchild.

The writing style will probably be the biggest issue for most readers. Author James Hannaham weaves back and forth between his heroine’s profanity-laden interior monologue in first-person African American English and a third-person narrative in a more standard dialect, generally with the former interrupting the latter in mid-sentence. To pick a rare non-vulgar example: “She returned his stare You apposed to axe what changed my mind, an I’m apposed to say you.” The capital letters help signal the code-switching in print, and the audiobook version that I listened to employed two separate narrators for the task, which helped even more (though at the cost of missing the quotation marks, so that I wasn’t always sure whether a particular line was Carlotta’s actual dialogue or just a reply she imagined giving to someone). Your tolerance for such an approach will likely impact your enjoyment of the overall volume, but it’s certainly a distinctive and imaginative one.

This is also a work that touches on some pretty heavy themes, from the main character being repeatedly raped by other inmates and prison guards, to thoughts of suicide and self-harm, to frequent instances of racism and transphobia and more. It’s blisteringly funny despite the darkness — or perhaps more precisely, to spite the darkness — and it’s clear that Carlotta’s hilarious inner voice has been cultivated in part as a coping mechanism to process all that trauma. But audiences who are sensitive to such material should go in forewarned that it may be a rough experience.

★★★★☆