The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie

Book #66 of 2023:

The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie

Early on, this novel carries some of the wistfully philosophical vibes of author Agatha Christie’s pseudonymous Mary Westmacott books, and although that tone is dropped as the story goes along, I think it still might have worked better if it had been published under a different byline. If you approach it as a Christie mystery, it’s a little unsatisfying: the major puzzle takes a while to come into focus, but essentially boils down to a group of people claiming that they can commit murder remotely via witchcraft / intense concentration. The protagonist is at first skeptical but then frightened and aghast, until the conclusion provides the fairly obvious mundane explanation and fingers the equally suspicious figure behind the scheme. There’s no detective work and only one real attempt at a red herring, which I personally haven’t found particularly convincing.

Now, the spooky atmosphere is nice, and I like the detail of the middleman who arranges payments for the assassinations insisting that his clients are merely placing friendly wagers that their intended victims will still be alive in a month’s time. But if you go into this one hunting for a culprit and a non-supernatural method of homicide, the ensuing plot starts looking rather thin.

[Content warning for racism.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Even Greater Mistakes by Charlie Jane Anders

Book #65 of 2023:

Even Greater Mistakes by Charlie Jane Anders

This short story collection feels less uneven than many of its ilk, but unfortunately, that’s because I’ve tended to respond to each entry with the same disappointed half-sigh. Most of them show an interesting spark, either of character, premise, or background worldbuilding! I especially love the ones that use the toolkit of sci-fi / fantasy to illuminate protagonists haunted by their past or their future, like the clairvoyant couple in “Six Months, Three Days” who fall passionately in love despite knowing how and when the relationship will end, or the woman in “Ghost Champagne” who’s been able to see the lurking apparition of her dead older self for her whole life, or the college sweethearts in “Power Couple” who agree to each take a turn being cryogenically frozen while their partner concentrates on pursuing graduate school. But these and the rest inevitably end abruptly as more of a sketch than a fully-realized vision, as though representing merely a proof-of-concept for some nonexistent larger tale. (Two of them literally are spinoffs of author Charlie Jane Anders’s published novels, and she introduces several others as having originally been intended as pieces of a greater whole as well.)

The most effective item is probably “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue,” in which the trans writer imagines a truly disturbing variety of dystopian conversion therapy, but even this seems ultimately truncated and incomplete as presented here. I suppose the lack of traditional resolution is an artistic choice, but it’s just not a style of short fiction that works well for me, and it’s regrettably on display throughout this text. While I value the creativity and commitment to queer representation across the stories, I’m simply lukewarm on the book overall.

[Content warning for body horror, gore, gun violence, and domestic abuse, and transphobia.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Pines by Blake Crouch

Book #64 of 2023:

Pines by Blake Crouch (Wayward Pines #1)

I picked up this 2012 novel on the strength of author Blake Crouch’s later sci-fi thrillers like Dark Matter and Recursion, but this earlier effort isn’t really in the same league. It’s long on vibes but short on story, and although I haven’t seen the TV adaptation, I am not at all surprised to learn that M. Night Shyamalan was one of its executive producers. This first book in the trilogy builds to the kind of big absurd twist that the director is famous for, and while readers may not predict all of the details in advance, there’s not a lot of other plot concerns to distract us until the inevitable dramatic reveal.

The protagonist is a federal agent recovering from an accident in a secluded small town, unable to contact his superiors or his family back home and increasingly convinced that literally everyone around him is in on the sinister conspiracy to keep him stranded there. And he’s clearly right about that — though it might have been a stronger work if he wasn’t, or if the text at least entertained the idea that he might be delusional and not just the victim of obvious collective gaslighting — which tends to puncture the tension of the piece throughout. There are a lot of unsettling happenings, but since we realize right away that nothing can be trusted, it all feels like idle wheel-spinning before the denouement no matter how injured and frantic the hero grows.

I won’t spoil the ending except to say that it arrives in a flurry of exposition and proves neither as original, plausible, nor explanatory as one might have hoped. I wonder if the narrative might have been better served by frontloading the concept as an open premise from the start, rather than adopting the Shyamalan model and hoping that audience gasps in the final sequence will make up for the somewhat tedious mysteries beforehand. If I pick up the sequel, it will largely be to explore that very question of whether a tale in this world could be more satisfying when it doesn’t have to strain to keep the readership in the dark for so long.

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

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Six Feet Under, season 4

TV #19 of 2023:

Six Feet Under, season 4

For most of this season, I expected I would give it the same three-star rating that I’ve assigned to its previous runs, reflecting a series that is deeply uneven: an engaging family drama with some individual scenes that are affecting and periodically profound meditations on death and grief, riddled with frustrating characters and inane plot developments. Six Feet Under sometimes manages to get into a groove where it feels like the storytelling is finally improving, only to immediately derail again before the impact of the better stuff even arrives. And that remains true here, but the balance between good and bad seems to be shifting as the program ages, and not in the maturing way one might hope. Or maybe I’m just losing my patience with it.

Let’s check in on our major players. David is brutally tortured by a random stranger in an episode that’s so tense as to be nearly unwatchable. Nate spends the year obsessing over a certain spoilery development from season 3, and ultimately has his vague raving suspicions validated in an out-of-nowhere soap opera-y twist in the finale. Claire has what seems to be a promising arc exploring her sexuality, only to abruptly decide that she’s straight after all, blow off her ex-girlfriend and the rest of their friends, and hook up with the mentor figure who’s been inappropriately interested in her since she was in high school. Ruth watches helplessly as her new husband shuts her out emotionally and falls deeper into a paranoid anxiety about climate change and natural disasters. And Rico cheats on his wife basically out of boredom and then deals with the inevitable consequences.

It’s definitely not a great sign that I realized Brenda of all people has actually transformed during all this into a generally-compelling protagonist. She’s long been my personal bugbear of the series, an implausible chaos agent who’s stuck around for no clear reason past plenty of obvious exit points from the narrative. But with all the absurdities and pettiness that Nate and the other Fishers are now throwing around, for once she seems like the reasonable one in the majority of her interactions. It’s a strange feeling!

There are only twelve episodes left in the show, so sure, I’ll push on to get to what I’ve heard is a pretty good series finale. But this penultimate batch has really taken the program to a laughable new low.

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

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher

Book #63 of 2023:

A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher

A fun little horror novella about a woman whose mom’s house is being haunted by the malevolent spirit of the protagonist’s abusive grandmother. It’s a quick read overall, but I think it stays a bit too long in the initial stage of the story where the characters are denying the genre around them and insisting that there’s a mundane explanation for the increasingly unsettling occurrences. There’s also a tonal shift near the end to extreme Lovecraftian weirdness, which is not exactly unsupported by the text but still lands a bit abruptly in its transition of the antagonistic presence from a ghost to the horde of a wizard’s otherworldly demon spawn. And despite such complications, the book feels relatively straightforward, with few relevant subplots or side concerns to help distinguish it from other similar(-ish) premises. I enjoyed the title, but would not necessarily recommend it as a must-read for anyone.

[Content warning for fatphobia, racism, cannibalism, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Voyager, season 7

TV #18 of 2023:

Star Trek: Voyager, season 7

I’ve never been too enamored of Star Trek’s extended Lost in Space riff, but this final season is such an improvement over the previous outings that I’m happy to bump my rating up to four-out-of-five stars. My earliest complaint about this series, taken from my review of season 1, was that “the premise is introduced so outlandishly via one of Star Trek’s all-powerful god-beings that there’s effectively no tension regarding the eventual resolution. We’ve encountered too many of those creatures by this point in the continuity, so when we’re presented with yet another challenge to Federation science and told a (space-)wizard did it, it feels like all we have to do is wait for a similar entity to eventually reveal itself. A situation created in a single episode at the snap of a finger can be undone just as easily, and while that doesn’t mean the Voyager team can or should do nothing in the meantime, it makes it harder for viewers to truly invest in their plight.” The storytelling has deepened over the course of these seven years, however, and I’m particularly impressed with how the finale makes that inevitable return home still feel challenging and meaningful for the crew to pull off.

Even before we get to that point, this farewell run serves its characters and its long-term plot quite well. The show has never been too heavy on its serialized elements, but episode 7×11 “Shattered” does a great job of illustrating the many little changes that have gradually accumulated for the cast and their situations via the clever sci-fi means of using time travel to revisit all those prior status quos. We also get movement on the personal arcs of people like Seven and the Doctor, as well as a new marriage and pregnancy on-board. (There’s one romance in the waning hours that seems to come out of nowhere, but as with a similarly brief development at the end of TNG, I think the writers were just throwing a concept at the wall to see how it would go.)

I doubt I’ll ever watch this program in its entirety again, but there are plenty of individual installments that I’d happily return to, especially from this late stage of its tenure. And while I haven’t always loved it as a whole, I am glad that I’ve now seen all 172 episodes, since that truly underscores what a long voyage — sorry — it’s been for these folks and makes that ultimate triumphant arrival back in the Alpha Quadrant seem pretty well-earned. I know I’ll smile whenever I see any of them put in an appearance somewhere else in the franchise as I continue to make my way forward through its series.

This season: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 7 > 4 > 5 > 3 > 6 > 1 > 2

Book Review: Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide by Rupert Holmes

Book #62 of 2023:

Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide by Rupert Holmes

Overall a fun bit of light depravity. I think the wish-fulfillment ending and the framing device of the book being a published guide to all the secrets of a purportedly clandestine institution weaken it a little, but it’s a fine piece of entertainment in general. The first half of the story follows three students at that school learning the curriculum of how to execute (pun intended) the perfect murder, after which they leave to pursue their separate hands-on “thesis projects.” Those euphemisms are a continual delight, as is the old-timey 1950s setting.

Still, it’s a very bifurcated narrative, and I’d say the front part is more engaging than the back. On-campus, there’s a looming danger from teachers promising to kill anyone who flunks the material and classmates honing their new skills by practicing on one another. It’s all a bit zany, but the plot feels more unpredictable as a result, as though reasonably anything could happen next. Post-graduation, the remaining action reads instead like an overlong heist sequence, which in fiction of this sort can generally proceed in one of only two different ways. (Either the elaborate plan goes awry and the criminal protagonists have to use their wits and talents to improvise a desperate escape, or else everything works exactly as intended and apparent setbacks are whisked away from the hoodwinked audience in the dramatic reveal that they were necessary parts of the plan all along.) It even gets a bit tedious watching the characters line up all the moving pieces of their big Rube Goldberg schemes, especially if you can’t silence the voice in your head observing that people in real life get away with murder all the time via much simpler means, and that all the extra complications are surely increasing the possibility of some critical component going wrong.

These issues have kept me at somewhat of a remove from the text, but it helps that the assassination targets are so odious and their killers so talented thanks to their unusual education. There’s a Count of Monte Cristo / Inigo Montoya vibe in the air when they finally confront their respective victims, and that’s enjoyable to see play out, other than the homophobic implications of staging one crime scene to look like the deceased was struck down by a nonexistent gay lover. But taking the novel as a whole, I fear this is one that I like more than I love.

Weird fact: author Rupert Holmes is the singer-songwriter behind the 1979 classic “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)”!

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Book #61 of 2023:

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

A lovely and heartfelt story about two Gen-X childhood friends who grow up and become collaborative partners in making world-famous video games together. I’m reminded strongly of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, as well as the novels Taylor Jenkins Reid has written about her own fictitious celebrities, like The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo or Daisy Jones & The Six. As with those titles, you don’t have to know or care about the specific subject-matter field of this one to fall deeply invested in the personal journey of its characters as they inadvertently hurt one another, drift apart, and reconnect repeatedly over the decades. It’s a toxic pattern but a clear source of strength and mutual creativity for the game designers, and author Gabrielle Zevin excels at depicting how these people are each trying their best and undergoing profound changes as they move separately through different life stages. And they are close without the relationship ever turning sexual, which is a refreshing choice for a book with a central hero and heroine.

I think the ending is a little weaker than the beginning or middle, but maybe that’s because there couldn’t really be any tidy resolution to such a messy plot — or because the writer didn’t want to push the narrative too far beyond our present-day. But I like the impression that Sam and Sadie’s future is still out there when we leave them behind, in a myriad of possible paths (quite befitting a book that name-drops Chrono Trigger, a game famous for its own multiple branching conclusions). Like the titular reference to Shakespeare’s Macbeth — another recurring fixation across the text — there are quotidian tragedies here existing alongside the sense that the next day, or the next level, or the next game, might finally bring on a change for the better.

The representation is nice as well, although I suppose it’s a double-edged sword with the realistic bigotry that’s likewise on display. Both protagonists are Jewish, and one is half-white and half-Asian with a physical disability that restricts his mobility. Each is also eventually revealed to be queer, and there’s a heartbreaking act of homophobic violence that severely impacts them midway through the novel, in addition to the background levels of racism and sexism that they regularly experience. One abusive mentor figure is astonishingly well-drawn and believable in his cruelty and industry gatekeeping — I was picturing him as the art teacher Olivier from the show Six Feet Under while reading, but he could be any number of men in the real world who take advantage of their female underlings in that fashion.

Bottom line, these folks suffer a lot, but they make great art out of their trauma and are captivating even when unfairly lashing out as a result. I haven’t been able to look away from either their high points or their lows.

[Content warning for gun violence, suicide, gore, car accident, death of a parent, drug abuse, antisemitism, ableism, amputation, domestic abuse, and sexual assault.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Man Made Monsters by Andrea L. Rogers

Book #60 of 2023:

Man Made Monsters by Andrea L. Rogers

This is such a nifty idea for a short story collection, with every entry following different members of the same extended Cherokee family yet moving steadily forward in time, ultimately spanning from 1839 to 2039. (There are a few callbacks and recurring characters across the text, but mostly each tale stands fine on its own.) It’s a horror and sci-fi project populated with plenty of pulpy monsters, from vampires to werewolves to zombies and more, while also centering author Andrea L. Rogers’s #ownvoices cultural perspective and the insidious terrors of racism, domestic abuse, and intergenerational trauma. Despite these heavy themes, it’s overall a quick read, and a shiver-inducing delight throughout.

Other reviews mention the gorgeousness of the accompanying illustrations and design choices in the printed book, but I was impressed even just listening to the digital audio version.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Abbott Elementary, season 2

TV #17 of 2023:

Abbott Elementary, season 2

Another fine year of this workplace mockumentary set at an underfunded, majority-Black public school in inner-city Philadelphia. The strengths of its humor and character specificity remain, and my biggest concern from before, that season one‘s core romantic tension was too similar to Jim and Pam from The Office except with coworkers who barely even know one another, is largely mitigated this time through. The will-they-won’t-they element is still a factor, but it’s more palatable now that Janine and Gregory have been working together for much longer, and the plot occasionally pushes them in directions that aren’t quite so aligned with their Scranton predecessors.

This season also fleshes out the worldbuilding via a local charter school rival and the running threat that its parent organization will take over Abbott, and the supporting cast is deeper now with recurring students, parents, and other faculty members outside of the core group. The main protagonist’s family life is explored too, via the late introduction of her mother and sister. I still wouldn’t call this an all-time classic sitcom run, but it’s a good indication that the series (and its creator/star Quinta Brunson) has plenty left to say and a motivation to improve year-over-year. All that plus a truly inspired obligatory Gritty cameo, as well.

★★★★☆