The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Dark Heir by C. S. Pacat

Book #44 of 2024:

Dark Heir by C. S. Pacat (Dark Rise #2)

I loved the twist at the end of the first Dark Rise novel, but felt like the majority of the book leading up to it was too slow-paced and generic for my tastes (shadowy riders chasing a young farmboy from his home into a wider world of danger, and so on). Luckily, this sequel dives right back into the action, with ramifications for that big revelation that considerably reshape the plot ahead. I still want more clarity / distinctiveness from the worldbuilding — it’s distracting to hear references to Italy and France alongside commonplace magic and worries that the ancient evil king is resurfacing — and the large cast of supporting characters with mostly modern English names like Elizabeth and Violet remains a bit unwieldy. But the core of the story surrounding the protagonist is incredibly sound.

It’s the tale of that hero Will recognizing and repudiating a certain capability for cruelty within himself, while scrambling to keep it a secret from his closest friends. It’s in the slow-burn romantic pull he feels towards his companion James, complicated by his concern that such a relationship could never truly be consensual given particular elements of their half-remembered previous lives. And it’s in his dedication to be better than his history, with a definite narrative tension in the question of whether the tragedy he’s caught up in will ever ultimately allow that.

Via flashback, we also learn more about Sarcean and Anharion — much stronger fantasy genre names, I must say — and their own doomed romance, and a new character in the present turns out to be a warrior of that same distant era resurrected to inhabit a fresh corpse. To author C. S. Pacat’s credit, all of this business of mind/body dissociation — distinct prior incarnations of souls that have left a legacy for their future selves, personalities from the past walking around in the forms of random dead folks now, and a magical ability some people can wield to temporarily possess their sworn servants — is never confusing or hard to follow, and given his/her genderqueer identity, there’s ample subtext for trans readings of such forces as well. Overall, it’s exactly the step forward for the series that I was hoping to find.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Forest Demands Its Due by Kosoko Jackson

Book #43 of 2024:

The Forest Demands Its Due by Kosoko Jackson

I was initially drawn in by the protagonist of this work, a troubled gay Black teen struggling to settle into his new Vermont boarding school when the forest just outside its grounds keeps whispering at him. Unfortunately, the novel that follows doesn’t really live up to that promise of YA dark academia fantasy, and instead shuffles along with unmotivated plot stakes and unclear worldbuilding rules to its magic. The PG romance plays a large role in the text, and yet the connection between the two boys feels like it’s based on nothing but instantaneous attraction (and I suppose being apparently the only queer kids in town). I kept waiting for the storyline to find its footing and truly show off the interesting hero at its core, but the whole enterprise stays stubbornly untethered from anything we could meaningfully invest in all the way through to the end.

I primarily put praise and criticism alike of a book on its author, but in this case I’m more inclined to blame the editor after a scene where the headmaster of the prestigious academy uses the word “infer” to mean imply: “I never said I couldn’t enter the forest, Douglas. I simply inferred that I couldn’t.” That sort of usage is widely regarded as a nonstandard / incorrect definition, but it’s common enough in casual speech and probably an easy mistake to make in writing. This particular character wouldn’t be the type we’d expect to say it, however, and a competent professional edit should have caught and revised that. It’s a small detail that didn’t affect my rating, but I do think it’s a handy example to encapsulate my overall frustrations with the title in microcosm.

[Content warning for homophobia, racism, bullying, gaslighting, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Aurelius (to be called) Magnus by Victoria Goddard

Book #42 of 2024:

Aurelius (to be called) Magnus by Victoria Goddard

From what I’ve read so far, the majority of author Victoria Goddard’s Nine Worlds saga takes place in and around the time of Artorin Damara, the hundredth and final Emperor of Astandalas. This prequel novella, by contrast, is set many centuries prior, and functions primarily as a character study of His Radiancy’s distant predecessor, the forty-ninth personage to hold that title. We find him here early in his reign, but already tired of constantly waging war to expand and preserve his empire’s borders.

The action of the piece is minimal and somewhat underwhelming, even for a cozy fantasy series like this. The protagonist arrives in his mother’s homeland and honors her old teacher by asking for his advice to secure a lasting peace, but the former general’s response basically amounts to a suggestion that he try meditating as though going into battle within himself. When he does, he experiences a sequence of prophetic visions and ultimately unlocks the intuitive understanding to wield magic that had hitherto eluded him. It’s a gift we know will radically reorient his station and that of his lineage to come, but it doesn’t amount to much of a conclusion for the story currently at hand. Although an interesting picture of the reluctant young warrior and his era of the setting, this book isn’t the most satisfying installment on its own.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Passenger to Frankfurt by Agatha Christie

Book #41 of 2024:

Passenger to Frankfurt by Agatha Christie

Author Agatha Christie’s 80th book, published on the occasion of her 80th birthday in 1970, is one of only four of her novels that have never been adapted for television or film. I’ve already read two of the others, Death Comes as the End and Destination Unknown, and found each to be a halfway-decent curiosity. This, in contrast, is an absolute trainwreck.

I’m rating it as highly as two stars solely for my enjoyment of the opening premise: a man waiting for a delayed flight is approached by a stranger in the airport lounge, who notes that they share a striking physical resemblance. She claims she’s being tracked by enemies who want to kill her, and asks if she can borrow his passport and coat and put a drug in his drink. He’ll pass out and be able to claim he was robbed, while she will cut her hair and escape under his credentials. He agrees out of sheer boredom (and because this was several decades pre-9/11, I suppose), and later attempts to track her down again to learn more.

It’s absurd, but charming, and not too far off in tone from the spy thrillers this writer had previously penned. Once the two travelers reconnect, however, everything goes swiftly down into a swirl of conspiratorial nonsense and minimal plot. The protagonist’s new friend and de facto love interest — the story ends with their getting married, despite containing no evidence of romance beforehand and numerous observations that she reminds him of his sister — introduces him to her comrades, who are attempting to stop some nebulous international threat. According to them, all the populist youth movements around the world are secretly run by neo-Nazis, who are planning to bring them together into a global Fourth Reich under a charismatic leader who might be Hitler’s son, born after the führer apparently faked his death in the war (by switching places with a patient at a specialized insane asylum for people who all think that they’re Adolf, of course).

Much of this is delivered to us as feverish exposition rather than relevant action beats or interesting character decisions, and it culminates in the good guys visiting a mad scientist who’s been working on an airborne toxin that will cause its victims to be more benevolent-minded (and therefore resistant to caring about all the silly things kids these days protest over, one presumes). A half-century on, it’s hard not to read Christie’s own reactionary politics into this, but I have to emphasize that it also just fundamentally does not make sense on a basic story level. After a promising start, this title is nothing but a pile-up of kooky ideas that have been poorly shaped into a rough approximation of narrative. The main characters often aren’t even around for what passes as key developments, and the whole business concludes without any particular resolution beyond the reveal of a surprise traitor in the group. It’s a real mess that’s in dire need of a Poirot or a Marple to help sort out the jumble.

[Content warning for gun violence and fatphobia.]

★★☆☆☆

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.

★★★☆☆

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.

★★★☆☆