The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Dead Man’s Folly by Agatha Christie

Book #200 of 2022:

Dead Man’s Folly by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #28)

This is a fairly standard Agatha Christie mystery, notable mainly for stumping her retired Belgian detective for several weeks, during which time he retreats from the rural crime scene to sulk in frustration at home before an ultimately triumphant return to solve the case. The premise and the answers more or less work, although they each rely on some pretty unrealistic human behaviors. A fake murder is arranged for a party only for the attack to be carried out for real, and its planner feels that someone she knows but cannot now pinpoint was subtly influencing the details she designed for it. Later it turns out that a certain person has been living under multiple identities without detection, and the motive for the death(s) was to protect a secret that literally anyone in town could have plausibly guessed.

It’s always so hard to critically break down which elements succeed or fail in this sort of title without spoiling the whole thing, but for me, this one is effectively structured yet not quite satisfying in its eventual reveals. It doesn’t help that the protagonist shares his deductions with a random side character, rather than confronting the culprit in the traditional denouement, or that there’s no closure from news of an arrest or any other means of justice at the end. While I value these signs of the author’s willingness to experiment with form, they haven’t paid off as much as one might hope.

[Content warning for racism and eugenics.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Night-Bird’s Feather by Jenna Katerin Moran

Book #199 of 2022:

The Night-Bird’s Feather by Jenna Katerin Moran

[I read and reviewed this title at a Patreon donor’s request. Want to nominate your own books for me to read and review (or otherwise support my writing)? Sign up for a small monthly donation at https://patreon.com/lesserjoke today!]

I don’t love every part of this book — and in fact, I think the last 10% or so is probably its weakest, which is a disappointing note to leave on, especially for what’s likely to be my final read of the year. But overall, I like the work better than author Jenna Katerin Moran’s earlier novel Fable of the Swan, which I gave four-out-of-five stars, so I can hardly assign a lower rating here. (The two titles share a setting within the Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine RPG framework, but are generally unrelated.) She’s plainly grown as a writer over the decade between, resulting in a narrative that is both more complex and paradoxically easier to follow as a reader. While we are still dealing with fairly mind-bending concepts involving the magic of perception to rewrite / erase reality and transcendent attempts to access the hidden truth beyond the known universe, this is a gentler and more accessible easing-in to the notions at play.

It’s also more of a collection of interlocking stories than a novel per se, which may be why my disappointment over the ending isn’t reflecting onto the publication as a whole (and why I can accept “The Night-Bird’s Feather” as a name no worse than any other, despite its general irrelevance). The chapters are long, but each is somewhat of a self-contained fable, offering the rhythms of a fairy tale inflected with Slavic fantasy flavoring and the warp of Moran’s distinctive ethos and sense of humor. A girl beset by a witch has dreams in which she can seek advice from her far-distant descendents and the people who will know her when she’s grown — an even stranger experience from their perspective. When her opponent is ultimately defeated, the corpse of its presence is somehow left within her soul, to be later bartered away and thence revived. Elsewhere, a kindhearted and agoraphobic vampire helps her neighbor against the creature of chaos that’s forced its way into being her houseguest. A woman manifested from the ether builds a home inside the embodied landscape of someone else’s despair. And so on.

These heroines and the impossible tasks that they nevertheless perform are all cleverly written, and the bizarre rules of the worldbuilding yield plot developments and punchlines that categorically couldn’t work anywhere else. Am I entirely convinced that I understand what’s meant by phrases like “the power of the eyes that look upon” or “the daughter of the lord of Death’s dominion he”? Not really! But the vibes are fantastic, and the text is engaging despite its length and occasional abstract philosophizing. It’s been a great mental palate cleanser, if nothing else.

[Content warning for suicide, depression, and gore.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: His Dark Materials, season 3

TV #61 of 2022:

His Dark Materials, season 3

This adaptation has long struggled to capture and distill the complex themes of Philip Pullman’s classic fantasy trilogy, and this final season faces the additional hurdle of navigating the events of its most complicated volume, The Amber Spyglass. Theoretically, it’s a pretty faithful representation! The series doesn’t shy away from the inherent theological controversies, and it does in fact deliver a war on heaven and the main characters ultimately euthanizing the setting’s version of the Almighty. But it includes that latter moment so perfunctorily and with such a minimum of explanatory dialogue that I’m guessing it will be missed by most viewers who have not previously / recently read the book. Similarly, the earlier scene where Lyra comes face-to-face with her ‘Death’ plays out as a weird one-off party trick, and not the profound humanistic consideration of an alternate society where everyone grows up with those comforting harbingers, as it is on the page. It feels like a binary checklist approach to the material — okay, we’ve got mulefa; what’s next? — rather than a true attempt to tell the soul of the story.

The biggest misstep remains the portrayal of dæmons on this show. I feel moderately invested in the relationship between the protagonist and Pan, or the one between Mrs. Coulter and her monkey, but as a standard feature of the lived-in worldbuilding, these animal companions are still absent and silent far too often. As I noted back in my review of season one:

“Every human in Lyra’s world should have a dæmon by their side at all times, and they should be interacting with them regularly as our young heroine does. Yet in practice, these creatures are missing from most shots — with an offhand reference to staying hidden in pockets — and rarely provided any dialogue or particular characterization. As a result, several big moments related to dæmons and their mythos fall completely flat, since the audience has been given no compelling reason to truly care about them.”

This year additionally spends a bit too long on the excursion to the land of the dead without clear justification, which was already a weakness of the text but is exacerbated here. Unavoidable production delays have aged the cast a bit beyond my easy suspension of disbelief for where the plot ends too, and while it’s great to have James McAvoy on-hand and clashing with Ruth Wilson again after he sat out most of the previous run, their acting is not enough to save this program from itself. It’s all tedious in a way the novels never were, with only the closing minutes achieving a measure of that sublime Pullman grace.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

This season: ★★☆☆☆

Overall series: ★★☆☆☆

Seasons ranked: 2 > 3 > 1

Book Review: When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb

Book #198 of 2022:

When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb

My shorthand pitch for this debut novel would probably be something like “Good Omens meets The Golem and the Jinni“: a tale of the early twentieth century, richly steeped in #ownvoices Jewish elements, in which a friendly angel and demon who have spent eons companionably debating Talmud finally leave their nameless shtetl in the Pale of Settlement (modern-day Poland, the part of the Russian Empire where Jews were confined) for America. They’ve come to find a girl from their village who’s stopped writing home, and partly just because the demon — one of the mischievous shedim, not the more evil Christian variety — enjoys stirring up minor trouble. But the Ellis Island immigrant story that unfolds around them winds up changing both beings far more than they could ever imagine.

It’s also an #ownvoices queer title from author Sacha Lamb (they/them). Angels and demons in this conception are inherently somewhat genderfluid, with the shed generally thinking of himself as male but sometimes presenting differently, and his angelic counterpart being read as a young man by others but insisting on it/its pronouns for itself. These two protagonists quibble incessantly, but outside of the plot specifics, the main narrative arc of the work involves them coming to realize how much they need / mean to one another. Likewise, the third-most important character plainly has romantic feelings for her female best friend, although she figures that out for herself long after it’s evident to readers.

Along the way, these three companions track down their wayward neighbor, put vengeful dybbuks to rest, assist factory workers striking against unfair labor conditions, and engage in some quintessentially Jewish arguments and commentary about the differences between the Old World and the New. It’s a thoroughly delightful blend of classic Yiddish fabulism and contemporary YA fantasy, all about finding your identity and a community that will help you stick up for it, and while you don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy the result, I feel wonderfully seen throughout the book myself.

[Content warning for antisemitism, sexism, and gun violence.]

★★★★★

Book Review: The Hole by Hye-Young Pyun

Book #197 of 2022:

The Hole by Hye-Young Pyun

A bitter little novella about a Korean man who’s bedridden and initially only able to communicate by blinking, having been severely disabled by the car accident that also killed his wife. Lacking any other family to take him in, he’s looked after by his mother-in-law, who gradually gets revealed as a resentful tormenter punishing the protagonist for her daughter’s death and the unhappy marriage she feels the younger woman was trapped in beforehand. There’s a bit of Misery in the DNA of this plot, in which the villain gaslights her patient and actively stymies his recovery, but she’s additionally focused on embarrassing him and tearing away all competing avenues for support, as when she shamelessly undresses him and changes his catheter in front of his visiting colleagues.

It’s an unnerving and obviously ableist read, but I think it might have been more effective unfolding at greater length, or else with less throat-clearing early on before the horror really sets in. (The amount of setup likely would be fine in a full novel, but it’s too much proportionally here, taking up more space than what seems like the proper focus of the work.) I also don’t know that the title element, of the massive hole that the antagonist is digging in the hero’s garden while he watches helplessly from his window, is altogether interesting or necessary. But author Hye-Young Pyun definitely conveys the isolated terror of the central predicament well.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Dead Silence by S. A. Barnes

Book #196 of 2022:

Dead Silence by S. A. Barnes

A thrillingly creepy sci-fi horror novel in the same general vein as movies like Event Horizon, Alien, or Sunshine, where human/corporate greed may be the true enemy (for anyone who can survive the crazed assault of its previous victims). Out on the far vestiges of humanity’s reach into space, our protagonist and her crew are just finishing installing the last beacon in a communications network when it picks up a faint distress call from even further into the black. There they discover a luxury starliner that notoriously vanished soon after its launch decades ago, now adrift with seemingly all its passengers floating lifelessly inside. Boarding the vessel, the new arrivals find signs that these ill-fated voyagers may have turned violent and paranoid against one another, and they swiftly begin experiencing a succession of unsettling visions themselves.

The narrative is initially divided into two timelines: the past when the heroine and her team are exploring the wreck, and the present when she’s being interrogated by her disbelieving superiors back on earth over her fragmented recollection of events. Across both sides of the plot, we come to learn more about the character’s traumatic and guilt-ridden background, and why she’s not the most reliable narrator even before encountering the Aurora. This element is what elevates the book for me over similar genre mindtrips like Annihilation, which I often find frustrating due to their ambiguity over what’s real and what’s hallucinatory. By digging into the viewpoint figure, author S. A. Barnes grounds us in her lived perspective, and makes it easier to set aside the questions of whether she’s delusional, psychic, haunted, or what. All that matters is how she interprets what she’s seeing, and what she chooses to do next as a result.

I really enjoy the final sequence of this story too, which finds the woman reluctantly returning to the derelict ship as a guide for her former interrogators. Beyond the resurgence of scares at that point, it also escalates the tension for readers by removing the safety net of knowing she’ll escape alive and makes good use of her memory loss, as she can’t be certain whether everyone on-board was actually dead when she left before or not. Some of the ensuing twists are more surprising than others, but it’s overall a successfully spooky read.

[Content warning for gun violence, institutionalization, gaslighting, cannibalism, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Eight Nights of Flirting by Hannah Reynolds

Book #195 of 2022:

Eight Nights of Flirting by Hannah Reynolds

I was hoping this would be a cute little Hanukkah read, but it’s instead been a source of perpetual frustration and discomfort for me. The basic premise is that the narrator is desperate to get with the crush who’ll be visiting her grandparents’ house over winter break, but because she’s convinced she’s bad at flirting — whatever that means — she asks her hot jerk of a neighbor to give her some lessons on that first. Obviously, the two of them end up falling for one another instead, and the plot is full of those tired rom-com tropes about hurt feelings over miscommunication and mistaken ideas of the other person’s seriousness / interest level.

I suppose I knew to expect all that going in, while also assuming from the title that this would be a festive Jewish love story. And that’s true, to an extent. The main character is Jewish, as is her original purported romantic interest, and we get to see a lot of her big Jewish family celebrating the holiday together. But the guy she hangs out with for most of the book is Christian, and she spends quite a while educating him (and perhaps the imagined reader) on elements of Judaism 101. It feels more like a dry and unnecessary lesson than the rich #ownvoices immersion I’d ideally wanted from this novel.

My bigger issue concerns the ages of the ensemble. Our protagonist is a 16-year-old high school junior, whereas the young men opposite her are 18/19 and both in college. That’s not an age-gap that I’d say needs to be inherently off-limits in fictional romance, but it’s at a minimum problematic — literally raising relevant problems — in a way never addressed by the text. These people are at very different stages of their lives, and although the heroine balks when either of her beaus tries moving beyond kissing, the discussion is limited to what she wants / is comfortable with, not their respective maturity levels or the legality of the situation. No one bats an eye at her underage drinking with them, either. And given everyone’s wealth in this exclusive Nantucket enclave, it all reads a bit like an exercise in the excesses of the uber-privileged.

Add to that the obnoxious behavior of the fellow Shira ultimately picks — like repeatedly calling her by a nickname she’s told him she doesn’t like, a major red flag for ignoring of boundaries in general — and a long subplot about research into local whaling history that ends with the girl insisting her interpretation of certain scant facts must be correct, and the whole thing is just a mess. It apparently functions as a loose sequel to the author’s earlier YA piece The Summer of Lost Letters too, and while I haven’t read that one, I think it would have taken a great deal of returning good will to get me to enjoy this follow-up.

[Content warning for homophobia.]

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 4

TV #60 of 2022:

Classic Doctor Who, season 4

This is the most incomplete surviving season of Doctor Who, meaning it has the highest number of episodes currently missing from any modern archive: 33 gone, and only 10 available to be viewed. As with all of the absent material for Who, we do have audio recordings, stage directions, set photos, and a variety of different reconstruction efforts, so you can still make your way through all 43 installments from this 1966-1967 year as I just have (for my second time). But it’s not the same experience that contemporary audiences would have gotten, and it’s possible my critical impression would be stronger if I could have seen more of these stories in their original form.

It was certainly a transitional period for the show, most notably for introducing the concept that would later be called regeneration, a plot justification for recasting the central role of the alien time traveler known as the Doctor. That label isn’t used here, nor has the character’s species or planet even been identified yet. But William Hartnell is tidily replaced by Patrick Troughton — leaving us without any of the initial cast from 1963 — and most of the season plays out in repeated variations on the new Doctor’s typical base-under-siege premise against a revolving assortment of monsters, including the Cybermen in their excellent first and second appearances. We also get two companions departing (Ben and Polly) and two arriving (Jamie and Victoria, the latter just under the wire in the finale), as well as some behind-the-scenes creative changes.

I would not call this a great run overall, but it’s the first in my current rewatch where I’ve given every serial a rating of 3 stars or higher. That makes it the best one yet, I suppose.

Serials ranked from worst to best:

★★★☆☆
THE EVIL OF THE DALEKS (4×37 – 4×43)
THE SMUGGLERS (4×1 – 4×4)
THE FACELESS ONES (4×31 – 4×36)
THE HIGHLANDERS (4×15 4 x18)
THE UNDERWATER MENACE (4×19 – 4×22)
THE POWER OF THE DALEKS (4×9 – 4×14)
THE MACRA TERROR (4×27 – 4×30)

★★★★☆
THE TENTH PLANET (4×5 – 4×8)
THE MOONBASE (4×23 – 4×26)

Overall rating for the season: ★★★☆☆

Book Review: Desert Star by Michael Connelly

Book #194 of 2022:

Desert Star by Michael Connelly (Ballard and Bosch #4)

Author Michael Connelly’s latest Harry Bosch story — his 38th book in this broad continuity of LA cops, lawyers, and reporters, if my math is right — finds the detective once again ensconced in the department where he spent most of his career… sort of. His unofficial partner of recent years, Renée Ballard, is now the commander of a new squad tasked with looking into cold cases, for which she’s been authorized to recruit volunteer civilian help. It’s a decent justification for bringing Harry back into the fold, and their evolving dynamic (as well as the older man’s habit of going outside official protocols in his investigations) is interestingly strained now that she’s his immediate supervising officer.

As usual for these novels, there are two significant crimes that the protagonists are investigating: the rape and murder of a girl whose brother grew up to be a local politician, and the execution of an entire family of four, presumably by the father’s business partner who then vanished. Each is gruesome for the violence against children, but the plot balances them well so that neither one’s darkness ever overtakes the narrative. And the tale that unfolds has some solid twists, especially in the former matter, as well as a great red herring that I’ll admit had me fooled. I could have done without the coworker claiming to get psychic impressions from the evidence, but at least the two viewpoint characters clearly both view her with the same disdain and impatience as I do. Please get this person out of the LAPD before she compromises your credibility with future jurors!

This title overall feels less immediately relevant for our times than its last two predecessors, but that may just be down to 2022 being a more ‘normal’ year than 2020 for all of us. I would still say it’s one of the better entries in its series, in general.

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

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson

Book #193 of 2022:

The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson (Wax and Wayne #4 / Mistborn #7)

[Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.]

Despite retaining its fantasy wild west trappings, the remainder of “Mistborn Era 2” has never lived up to the sheer entertainment value of The Alloy of Law for me, and this final volume again seems largely perfunctory as it moves pieces of the broader Cosmere saga into place. Although I continue to admire the expansive scope of author Brandon Sanderson’s imagination, the crossovers between his various sub-series are simply not working for me in practice. Here, for instance, we get characters from outside works like Elantris and The Emperor’s Soul making an appearance, albeit under codenames that I’m relying on a fan wiki to confirm. But they don’t really act like they did in their previous books, and while time has passed and they’ve clearly gone through important experiences that led them to join the world-hopping Ghostbloods organization, we don’t get to see any of that. With such a disconnect, their presence feels more like a Marvel post-credits reveal or a kid playing with interchangeable action figures than a compelling and coherent story in the moment.

Our lead protagonists fare a little better, at least. Waxillium is dour as ever, but the six-year time jump resets my patience with him to some degree, while providing Steris and Marasi both an increase in competence and confidence that I’ve found refreshing. Wayne, as always, is the funniest element around as well as the beating emotional core of this narrative, and the extended climax that features him prominently is just outstanding: a thrilling action sequence, a great coda on his overall personal arc, and a signature Sandersonian demonstration of inventive magical system exploits. I truly love it, almost enough to bump up my rating by another star. But there’s just too much beforehand that’s a bit of an empty slog, and lacking in those fun worldbuilding and plot twists that this writer can pull off at his best.

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

This title: ★★★☆☆

Overall Wax and Wayne series: ★★★☆☆

Volumes ranked: 1 > 4 > 2 > 3