The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Sabriel by Garth Nix

Book #34 of 2023:

Sabriel by Garth Nix (The Old Kingdom #1)

A thoroughly excellent modern fantasy classic, published in 1995 but just as enjoyable now upon my umpteenth reread. (I can’t remember when I first encountered it, but I do recall thinking in amazement that it was like a written version of the Diablo games. And that assessment pretty much holds up.) I love the landscape that author Garth Nix has constructed for this novel: a snowy realm of magic and undead terror, located just beyond the border of a more ordinary-seeming nation roughly analogous to Edwardian England. His vision of the Old Kingdom feels so distinctive and intricately-designed, with its cultural practices of Charter Magic and its seven bells of necromancy, each of which wields a different power over the revenant spirits that hear it. Even the land of the afterlife itself is rigorously defined in its precise domains and the ways that a careful adept can delve there. Yet despite this massive level of worldbuilding detail, it’s all presented to us naturalistically as the story unfolds, yielding to few of those expository asides so common in the genre.

Sabriel herself is a great protagonist, the eighteen-year-old heir to her father’s role in putting down the dead, but raised away from any danger, where he would regularly visit and train her. As a result, she gets to be both competent at her family craft and a bit of a novice to whom things must be explained, letting readers learn the rules of the world alongside her. She’s brave and overwhelmed in equal measure, and the plot that kicks off when she goes searching for her missing guardian forms a terrific introduction to the series and its tone. That journey builds nicely in scope and stakes over the course of the book, and I especially appreciate how it returns full-circle to its initial setting by the end.

And have I mentioned Mogget, the powerful eldritch monstrosity bound by the heroine’s ancestor and presently taking the form of a sardonic but loyal housecat, begrudgingly dispensing wisdom with all the usual feline mannerisms? Truly one of the top fantasy sidekicks, and all the more so when he inevitably turns loose and becomes a deadly threat in his own right.

The one element that doesn’t entirely work for me is Touchstone, the other major character who joins the party about midway through the tale. He’s too important to events for the accidental way they stumble across him here, and I wish that that introduction could have been better motivated in the text and not such a randomly lucky coincidence. The romance that develops between him and Sabriel, while hardly the focus, is likewise rather under-developed in my opinion, coming across as frustratingly perfunctory and proximity-based rather than arising due to any genuine emotions via vulnerability, trust, or shared experiences.

Those problems strike me every time I revisit this title, but in the final analysis, I think they’re minor enough to let slide. Overall it’s fantastic, and while I’ve enjoyed the sequels that Nix has continued to write over the following years, none of them in my eyes have ever quite lived up to the original, which could have easily remained or been approached as a standalone adventure. Still, I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of them all again soon.

[Content warning for gun violence, child endangerment, slavery, and gore.]

★★★★★

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Book Review: Ordeal by Innocence by Agatha Christie

Book #33 of 2023:

Ordeal by Innocence by Agatha Christie

A rather silly beginning, in which we learn that the stranger who could have corroborated an accused murderer’s alibi was hit by a truck, developed a case of short-term amnesia, and promptly departed for a two-year polar expedition, thus missing the publicity about the trial and the call for him to come forward. By the time the witness and his memory both return, the prisoner has already died of pneumonia, but the poor man feels honor-bound to inform the surviving relatives of the deceased that he was innocent of killing his mother. Of course, this means that someone else in her inner circle likely murdered her instead, and over the rest of the book, they descend into mutual accusations and tense suspicion.

I do like these elements of the psychological thriller, but the effect is weakened by author Agatha Christie’s need to bind it up with her typical whodunnit plot. If the dead man were guilty after all and everyone’s relationships were soured for nothing, or if the ultimate truth never came out in the end, that would have been a bolder and more effective writing decision, in my opinion. But as presented, the reveal seems arbitrary and perfunctory, especially after the apparent culprit runs away, everyone else swiftly reconciles, and the novel closes on an abrupt marriage proposal between two characters who barely know one another but are now confessing their undying love. With such a disappointing start and finish, even the livelier middle can’t save this title from itself.

[Content warning for racism and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn

Book #32 of 2023:

Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn

A frustratingly three-star read. The premise is fine, but it’s one I’ve seen too many times before: an assassin’s employers for some reason decide they’ve become expendable, try unsuccessfully to kill them off, and then find themselves on the receiving end of the killer’s particular talents. That’s the basic gist of seemingly all the Jason Bourne movies, the back half of the show Killing Eve, and plenty of other stories as well, and the only distinctive thing this novel does with the concept is have its protagonists be a quartet of women in their sixties, looking to retire from the business after decades of black-ops work. Of course, they’re all still capable hitpeople, and the villains inevitably wind up being overconfident men whose sexism and ageism lead them to underestimate their opponents at their peril. The whole piece plays out exactly as expected, and while there’s a degree of catharsis in a skillfully-executed (pun intended) take-down, the heroines face no significant challenges or distinguishing plot twists throughout.

I’m also mildly disappointed in this book from a Jewish perspective. We’re repeatedly told that the clandestine organization was originally formed to extrajudicially hunt down Nazis after World War II… but then the major discussion that ensues is all about the stolen art of that regime and the importance of returning it to its former owners once recovered from a target, rather than, you know, the antisemitic slaughter of millions and other moral outrages we generally loathe Nazis for and might want revenge over. There’s one Jewish character, and in an afterword author Deanna Raybourn thanks her sensitivity readers for assisting with that portrayal, but her Judaism is only mentioned in a single scene in which she goes to a Catholic church to pray because she can’t find a temple nearby. This woman never discusses the Nazi element, even though she logically would have felt the personal dimension of that mission quite keenly over her 40 years of working for a firm built around delivering their just desserts.

Overall, the plot is competent enough that I’ll throw it my three-star median rating. But it shows a lot of neglected potential like that and a thorough lack of creativity in general that keeps me from embracing it fully.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: A Sliver of Darkness by C. J. Tudor

Book #31 of 2023:

A Sliver of Darkness by C. J. Tudor

This is a pretty consistently solid collection of horror (or horror-adjacent) short stories, many revolving around some type of dystopian apocalypse and its aftermath. Oftentimes I find such ensembles to vary dramatically in quality across their contents, but here I think I’d give each individual entry either a 3- or a 4-star rating, meaning that even when a particular title doesn’t entirely work for me, there’s usually some element or another that I feel is well-done or otherwise distinctive. My favorites include “End of the Liner,” about an authoritarian regime on a cruise ship following a global disaster, and “The Block,” which is sort of like the movie Attack the Block — young kids battling monsters in a low-income high-rise — only featuring ravenous zombie-like creatures instead of aliens.

Overall, though, I’m counting more 3s than 4s in my personal reactions, so the lower score for the book as a whole feels appropriate. (It doesn’t help that the stories I highlighted above are literally the first two in the volume, or that the closing piece “Butterfly Island” is probably the weakest, an ordering that adds a slight yet still disappointing downward trajectory to the text.) If there’s a common flaw throughout, it’s a tendency to end on one or more twists, typically in the form of a reveal that the current protagonist is somehow crueler than they’ve previously appeared. That’s fine in certain situations, and is even indicative of the genre to an extent, but it plays out to diminishing returns to read a variation on it again and again in quick succession.

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

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)

Movie #3 of 2023:

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)

It looks like I’m out of step with the critical consensus on this one, based on the early reviews, but whatever: I really liked the latest piece in Marvel’s increasingly complex cinematic universe! Maybe I’m just riding the high of being back in a movie theater for the first time in three-and-a-half-years, but I do think this was something special. I’d even say it’s the strongest of the three Ant-Man movies so far, although it sheds a lot of what previously defined that series: corporate espionage, Scott Lang’s criminal history / talents, and a variety of imaginative uses for the signature shrinking and growing technologies. That last element is still present to some extent, as is the wry banter that marks most MCU features, but it no longer feels as focal, which I suppose may have disappointed audience expectations. Instead, the tech mostly just powers the sequel’s premise: a return to the sub-microscopic “Quantum Realm” that Janet van Dyne was rescued from in 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp.

As it turns out, there are entire civilizations down there, and Janet was intimately involved with them during her decades away. Specifically, she has a past with the franchise’s new supervillain Kang, whom she inadvertently helped rise to power and then rallied against as a freedom fighter. It’s a bit of a retcon, but a fair one, and a device that drives the remainder of the plot. In fact, Janet is such a major player in events that I have to assume she’s the titular Wasp this time around; her daughter Hope by contrast is tied with original Ant-Man Hank Pym for least essential cast member by far. And the narrative is structured such that the three of them are together for most of the runtime, while leading man Scott is separated from them with his daughter Cassie (now aged up enough to be a trainee hero herself, and played by newcomer Kathryn Newton with charmingly earnest aplomb).

While the setting is infinitesimal, it feels pretty cosmic, with vibrant colors and weird lifeforms evoking its franchise sibling Guardians of the Galaxy and especially Star Wars. The story parallels aren’t exact, but you’ve got your evil empire and your landspeeders and your imposing creatures who turn out to be stalwart allies, all amid an overall space opera vibe. There’s even a Lando Calrissian figure, played in a delightful turn of obvious stunt-casting. Perhaps it’s not what the majority of movie-going critics wanted from a superhero flick, but it all worked well for me! And the movie definitely goes its own way within that genre framework too, with the alternately hilarious and creepy MODOK (and his surprising connection to a previous film) proving a particularly Marvel-esque addition.

Ultimately, not much about this film probably matters to the future of the series. It doesn’t largely affect the status quo for the main characters, and by virtue of its tiny scope, its adventure is a bizarre side outing that none of the other Avengers or their ensemble sidekicks are likely to ever hear about. We know Kang will return — the subtitle for the next Avengers movie has already been announced as The Kang Dynasty — but his whole deal is that there’s a multiverse of his variants out there causing havoc, one of which had already been introduced and explained all that on the Disney+ show Loki. So I don’t know that meeting the one in this film is strictly necessary for viewers.

But personally, I enjoy the sense that the Marvel heroes are all dealing with smaller crises on their own time, only crossing over to team up on the major occasions that really call for it. And it doesn’t get much smaller than this.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Afterward by E. K. Johnston

Book #30 of 2023:

The Afterward by E. K. Johnston

I like the idea of following up with a band of adventurers after they’ve completed their quest to save the world, and all the more so that our focus is on a pair of young women who became romantically entwined on that adventure but are now apart and dealing with their separate smaller crises. One, a thief, finds herself too recognizable to still carry off any big jobs in that profession, yet unfortunately neither qualified nor inclined to do much of anything else for work. The other, a knight-in-training, is honorbound to marry someone soon to pay off her debts — likely with the aim of producing heirs, even though she is not attracted to men. But they can’t seem to stay away from one another, no matter how much it hurts for each to see the beloved she can no longer be with.

That portion of the novel is fine. But it’s accompanied by a great many flashbacks to the backstory, few of which manage to deepen the characters or inform their present beyond what the initial premise already established. This section of the narrative is also significantly thinner, relying on reader familiarity with genre tropes to fill in the blanks with the appropriate archetypes. And I wish the later chapters wouldn’t throw another big magical threat into the plot, since the appeal for me until that point had been the lower stakes of the domestic drama. Although the publisher’s description of this title promises “a tale both sweepingly epic and intensely personal,” in my opinion the balance between those two elements is off, and the latter is by far the stronger.

[Content warning for gore and parental death.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Carter & Lovecraft by Jonathan L. Howard

Book #29 of 2023:

Carter & Lovecraft by Jonathan L. Howard (Carter & Lovecraft #1)

The vibes of this fantasy noir, in which a private investigator learns that H. P. Lovecraft actually experienced some of the cosmic horrors he wrote about and gets caught up in a plot with the writer’s descendant, are top-notch. As the titular ex-cop and bookstore-owner investigate, they encounter gibbering madness, magic accomplished via complex math, and all manner of gruesome deaths. The characters even acknowledge the old namesake’s racism, which is always appreciated.

But the villains act pretty incomprehensibly throughout — including intentionally tipping the protagonist off about their activities in the first place — and there are a lot of basic questions about the premise of the story that remain unanswered at the end. I know this 2015 title is the launch of a series, with a sequel that followed two years later, and this debut volume certainly ends on a promising twist for whatever’s next. Yet it’s overly long to be just a prologue, and not entirely satisfying in and of itself. It’s solid, but not in the same league as other modern works like Lovecraft Country or The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe that have likewise sought to grapple with the famous author’s complicated legacy.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Halloween Moon by Joseph Fink

Book #28 of 2023:

The Halloween Moon by Joseph Fink

Two-and-a-half stars rounded up, in recognition of the fact that I’m not in the target audience for this middle-grade horror/fantasy novel, despite how I often enjoy that genre regardless, or how much I love author Joseph Fink’s unrelated Welcome to Night Vale podcast and books. Younger readers might like the title better for its spooky thrills, but I’ve had difficulty understanding either the stakes of the predicament or the villains’ specific goals in enacting it. (Why, for instance, did they have to report an illegal art collection to the police in the prologue? Why would supernatural creatures even care about something like that, once they’ve retrieved the single piece they came for?) The ultimate moral of the tale also seems to be that it’s wrong to cling to childish passions, which isn’t a message I particularly agree with or think that kids need in their fiction. Among other unfortunate implications, it suggests that the thirteen-year-old protagonist’s parents are right in an early argument when they suddenly and unreasonably assert that she’s too old to go out trick-or-treating, a claim that I still find absurd.

I likewise could have done without these characters repeatedly citing as support for their position that she’s officially a woman now, since she’s recently had her bat mitzvah. While the #ownvoices Jewish element and realistic portrayal of tween antisemitism is generally one of the stronger points here, this section problematically reads to me as though modern Judaism at large is the severe institution forcing children to grow up and stop having fun — which might reflect Fink’s relationship with our shared religion, but could not be further from the truth in my experience. And if that wasn’t the intent behind the passage, there were much better ways this conflict could have been handled in the text.

Anyway. Monsters are putting the world to sleep so that they can rule in a perpetual Halloween, I guess, and the heroine and a few companions who’ve escaped the spell have to find a way to stop them. The ensuing action and adventure is adequate, but not especially distinctive. The bully-to-friend arc is nice, but there are plenty of uneven elements as well, like how the girl’s three-year-old sister is written more like a one-year-old and referred to as a baby throughout. (I happen to have both a one-year-old and a three-year-old at the moment. Those are very different behavioral patterns.) Overall I wouldn’t really recommend this to other adult readers.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Six Feet Under, season 1

TV #7 of 2023:

Six Feet Under, season 1

So far, I’m pretty ambivalent about this early aughts HBO drama about a family who own and run an independent funeral home. A lot of the personal arcs and relationships are interesting, especially given how the show starts (fittingly enough) with a loss that reconfigures the old dynamics and brings everyone into closer contact with one another. David’s struggle to decide if/how to come out to the others is particularly affecting, if occasionally dated, and actor Michael C. Hall regularly burns with such quiet intensity that it’s easy to see why he was cast as the lead on Dexter after this.

Not all of the plots are winners, though. Matriarch Ruth’s love triangle between two rather oafish contenders generally feels more silly than rooted in real emotion and dignity for the character, and the less said about Brenda — son Nate’s edgy manic pixie dream girl — or her even more troubled brother Billy, the better. The Chenowiths are both such awful, manipulative people, and if either of them has any redeeming qualities, they aren’t anywhere on display in this first season. It’s obnoxious just to watch them play their abusive, ambiguously-incestuous mind games on her boyfriend, and I can’t for a moment understand / invest in his attraction to her.

I’m torn on the series stylistically, as well. I think in theory, I like the idea of starting each episode with a different person dying, and then using an element of their situation as a framework for the hour ahead. But the tone often feels too lighthearted and overly indulgent on dramatic irony, especially considering how difficult some of these scenes can be to witness: a six-year-old who finds a loaded gun in the house, for instance, or a gay man getting lynched, or a three-week-old baby succumbing to SIDS. These agonizing fates don’t deserve to be implicitly placed in parallel with the guy whose buddy accidentally bumps a button while he’s cleaning the inside of a vat at the bread factory.

There are also a lot of unannounced daydream sequences, often revealed only after someone says or does something ridiculous, at which point the camera waits a second and cuts back to their blank face at the top of the exchange, which then proceeds to go in an alternate direction. Many of these flights of fancy involve conversations with some dead figure or another, typically the one who passed at the start of the episode, but this is another gimmick that hasn’t proven its worth yet to me. Perhaps because I’ve seen later programs like iZombie or Pushing Daisies use a similar motif more consistently and effectively, I’m struggling to see the necessity of its deployment here, when it tends to undercut the solemnity of the occasion without apparent benefit.

Overall I’m decidedly not loving this, but I’d say I like it enough to keep watching and see where the various stories go next. I’ve heard the finale heralded as one of TV’s best, so I’ve got that to look forward to in the distance, at least.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Exiles by Jane Harper

Book #27 of 2023:

Exiles by Jane Harper (Aaron Falk #3)

This is the third and apparently final novel to feature Australian detective Aaron Falk, but oddly, I think I would have liked it better if it had been a standalone story about somebody else. By bringing back a police protagonist who’s already solved murders for us twice, author Jane Harper makes it nearly impossible to engage with this new missing person case in the same way that he and the other characters do. For most of the book, everyone assumes that the absent woman abandoned her infant daughter in a stroller and left the festival area of her own volition, presumably to kill himself, but I immediately viewed it as a likely homicide instead, which in turn — without getting into spoilers — suggested a fairly obvious suspect and method that I then had to wait for forever to have confirmed.

Falk isn’t even really investigating this mystery, nor does he show many flashes of brilliance once he finally turns his full attention to it. While a subplot about a hit-and-run from years back does find his usual levels of doggedness and insight on display, he spends too much of the text simply enjoying his vacation in the country’s wine region, which lacks the visceral impact of the writer’s previous works set in and around the bleak desert outback. Our inspector hero hangs out with the friends he’s visiting and strikes up a flirtation with a local, but he’s not doing much actual inspecting, perhaps because the simplicity of the plot wouldn’t sustain anything substantial in that direction.

Again, I realize that a lot of these issues stem in part from my preconceived notions about the series and its genre. But even taken as a simple literary exploration of an extended family dealing with loss — like Harper’s excellent unrelated title The Lost Man, for instance — I feel like there’s a thinness here that renders the exercise satisfactory but hardly superlative. In the end it’s the weakest entry for a loose trilogy that’s unfortunately offered diminishing returns after a legitimately strong start.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, rape, and gaslighting.]

This volume: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Volumes ranked: 1 > 2 > 3