The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

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.]

★★★☆☆

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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

TV Review: Gilmore Girls, season 2

TV #6 of 2023:

Gilmore Girls, season 2

Another strong outing of this multigenerational family drama, with more cracks evident between ‘best friends’ Lorelai and her daughter Rory as the latter navigates her junior year of high school. The storytelling all-around feels more competent than in the debut run, and I appreciate the early course-correction of writing out Mr. Max Medina, who never fit well with the overall Gilmore vibe. The writers have figured out the same thing about Dean, of course, but they take the more nuanced approach this season of turning that into a slow-motion tragedy. Before, Rory’s first boyfriend was generally inoffensive / bland, but here he’s regularly if subtly positioned as a legitimately poor match for her. They don’t have the same interests, or passions, or hobbies, or friends. They talk past one another, fight over petty matters, and hurry to make up without delving into the issues underlying their strife. At a certain point, the audience is forced to ask: why is our young academic-minded heroine still in a relationship with this jock, beyond teenage hormones and a simple feeling that she should be?

And then there’s the Jess of it all. We don’t get to see Rory and Luke’s nephew as a couple here, but their mutual interest becomes increasingly obvious, and he’s a great thematic stand-in for all the important qualities that Dean is lacking. While he’s not an A-student either, he’s well-read and clever enough to keep up with the rapid-fire Stars Hollow banter, and his bad-boy attitude is a clear draw for a girl feeling stifled by her present circumstances. As Dean’s girlfriend pulls away, she’s not exactly choosing the new kid over him — although it makes perfect sense that Lorelai would see things that way and try desperately to interfere with his perceived bad influence. Instead Jess is more of the catalyst awakening Rory to her existing dissatisfaction, as well as just a fun character who brings out interesting new dimensions in his uncle and the rest of the town. The attraction eventually turns romantic, and viewers can keep tuning in to see that descend into its own brand of toxic dysfunctionality, but his role in this year’s story is primarily to serve as a wake-up call to the fact that you don’t have to settle for the first person to ever ask you out.

Lorelai’s on the show too, but she’s largely in reactive mode at this juncture, with her social life put somewhat on pause after the engagement falls through. She finishes business school, makes some bad decisions with her ex Christopher, quarrels with Luke over their respective parenting styles, and continues butting heads with her own folks, but it’s all rather subordinate to what’s going on with her daughter and reads as more of the background texture of the program for now. Richard quits his long-term job, exasperating Emily before he finds a stable new outlet for his energy. Paris gains further dimension as Rory’s best frenemy and editor of the school paper over her. Sookie gets engaged and then married. Lane develops an interest in drumming. Such B-plots mark the passage of time for the serialized narrative, but our main attention is rightly on Rory’s love life and the tensions brewing therein.

★★★★☆

Book Review: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

Book #26 of 2023:

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

The modern ‘zombie apocalypse’ genre was already in full swing in 2006 when this book made its rather curious debut, with the associated tropes well-known enough to be mined for comedy in films like Shaun of the Dead (2004) or the later Zombieland (2009). Anyone paying attention to the project’s pedigree likely would have expected such a light touch here too, since author Max Brooks is the son of famed humorist Mel Brooks and a former Saturday Night Live writer in his own right, whose previous publication, 2003’s The Zombie Survival Guide, seemed a low-effort and tongue-in-cheek way to cash in on the undead craze. Surprisingly, though, this follow-up strikes a tone both deadly earnest and terrifically insightful, cementing its status as a major touchstone for subsequent zombie fiction.

It’s not a traditional novel with a core protagonist and a sustained storyline, either, although I understand the poorly-received film adaptation tries to graft such a narrative into place. The text is instead presented as a sequence of interviews with various survivors of a recent global catastrophe, each of whom has a distinctive recollection and perspective on events. A minor plot arc traces the outbreak through to the logistics of its spread and eventual containment efforts, but most chapters are still pretty discrete from one another in terms of causality, cast, space, and time.

The title benefits from its expansive approach, underscored on audiobook by a fantastic assortment of narrators with the ensuing range of accents. We hop from country to country, seeing how cultural differences have manifested in an array of responses to the crisis, none of which have been especially successful. I’ve seen some contemporary reviews identifying this as a veiled critique of the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq and/or Hurricane Katrina, but nearly two decades on, it seems more timeless to me, grimly highlighting how the human elements of personal ambition, xenophobia, and slow-moving bureaucracy could enable any disaster to spiral out of control. The early sections are particularly bracing to read after witnessing the real-life COVID-19 pandemic similarly move faster than any of our imperfect quarantine attempts could manage to prevent.

There are moments of bravery, sacrifice, and fierce joy in these pages too, so it’s not a total downer. (And after all, the very premise does situate the ‘war’ as a problem of the immediate past, with humanity weakened and reduced but ultimately triumphant.) Certain scenes, along with the overall atmosphere, have proven indelible distillations of our species at its highest and its lowest both. It’s decidedly not for the faint-of-heart, but there’s a textured vividness to everything Brooks has the characters relate, his writing always refusing to turn and share that satirical wink that would allow us to take this less seriously or cheer on the carnage at a bloodless distance. Zombies can be a punchline elsewhere, but here they’re simply the terrible and relentless enemy that almost destroyed us all.

[Content warning for gun violence, suicide, cannibalism, gore, pedophilia, rape, ableism, racism, antisemitism, and homophobia including slurs.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty

Book #25 of 2023:

Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty (The Midsolar Murders #1)

I really dig the initial premise of this story, which is that the heroine somehow has the bad luck to repeatedly find herself at the scene of one murder after another. (She’s not a killer, to be clear, even though law enforcement agents have investigated her connections to plenty of these crimes. She’s more like that Douglas Adams character who can never convince anyone he’s perpetually stuck in the rain, with the bonus that she’s now pretty good at solving the cases around her on her own.) I’m even on-board with the subsequent sci-fi twist of this woman fleeing the planet to an alien space station where she hopes, as one of only three human residents, that she won’t inspire / discover any more deaths. And of course, the ultimate setup is that there turns out to be a matter on her new home that she’s uniquely qualified to look into, regardless.

The execution here quickly grows a bit wobbly, however. The number of viewpoint characters increases exponentially, and the action slows to a crawl as we tediously retread how everyone knows one another and see events play out that have already been described if not outright depicted from a different point of view. Nor do these repeats serve a clear function like establishing that prior testimony was biased / dishonest and thereby muddying a reader’s understanding of the official record. Instead, they mostly just run out the clock and sink what has briefly seemed the beginnings of a fun, zippy adventure.

The worldbuilding proves to be a bust, too. Author Mur Lafferty throws around a few interesting extraterrestrial concepts, but so much of what we’re told about various species in terms of their communication abilities, temperament, etc. isn’t consistently upheld. (One race naturally rumbles in a frequency too low for human ears, for instance, and has to make a conscious effort to talk so we can hear them. Except that the protagonist walks into the middle of a conversation among such beings on multiple occasions, overhearing words not meant for her.) Whether that’s an editing mistake or another flawed attempt to make us question the narrative, I can’t say. I can only report that this book loses my faith early on via such measures, and never manages to recapture it — a real letdown after the writer’s earlier, thankfully unrelated novel Six Wakes, which I genuinely enjoyed. I will not be returning for any Midsolar sequels.

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

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: The Dragonslayer’s Apprentice by David Calder

Book #24 of 2023:

The Dragonslayer’s Apprentice by David Calder

I remember checking out this book from the library on multiple occasions as a kid, but upon belatedly getting around to an adult reread, I’m disappointed to report that it seems an utterly unremarkable story. The setting is the most generic medieval fantasy land, with few distinguishing cultural flourishes or other worldbuilding elements. The characters are not particularly clever or funny, nor are they ever significantly challenged in a way that’s not immediately overcome. In the barest hint of a plot arc, the title figure turns out to be a runaway princess who doubts the royal family will approve of her new profession, which comes to a bit of a head right before the abrupt ending. She also faces a great deal of heavy-handed sexism throughout, usually in the form of someone being surprised by her gender and then astonished when she in fact proves quite capable at dispatching monsters.

The novel is presented from her boss’s point of view anyway, and most of the action consists of their small band traveling from one location to another and defeating the creature / villain of the day: first a giant kitten, then a literal dragon, next a pair of monstrous killer birds, and finally a woman claiming to be a witch. There’s some discussion of the varying levels of organizational competence in each successive township, but it’s too scattered to feel like it’s meant to build to any particular thesis.

The thing that’s stuck with me most over the years is the taciturn assistant dragonslayer Ron, whose gestures and brief utterances are interpreted at greater eloquence by the viewpoint protagonist, for instance mentally translating a nod as, “I’ve unpacked the equipment, checked it, sharpened everything, made repairs where necessary, oiled everything, laid it out in order and locked it up safely.” And that remains amusing, but it does suggest a certain comic tone a la Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett that isn’t really met in the rest of the text.

I was hoping I’d be able to herald this as a hidden gem unfairly doomed to obscurity by the vagaries of the reading public, but it’s simply nothing special even by the standards of children’s fiction from 1997. The girl-power message is appreciated, but you’d get all that and more from someone like Tamora Pierce. This one unfortunately brings very little else to the table.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Other Wind by Ursula K. Le Guin

Book #23 of 2023:

The Other Wind by Ursula K. Le Guin (Earthsea #6)

This final Earthsea volume is fine, but it hasn’t grabbed me like the series can at its best. We again find author Ursula K. Le Guin in course-correction mode, and if books 4 and 5 were primarily intended to rectify and add nuance to the role of women in her fictional seafaring civilization, this one takes aim at the unsettling implication from the third novel that the souls of all dead people are languishing in the great hereafter. Drawing together several threads and characters from across the saga, this text reveals more of the ancient connections between humans and dragons, before ultimately resolving that depressing situation with the afterlife. It seems like it should be a big cathartic moment, but it all feels a bit pat to me instead — either because the short stories in the previous title largely give the game away in advance or because Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials finale The Amber Spyglass, published one year earlier, weirdly poses a similar dilemma and solution.

Moreover, the majority of the plot here consists of folks traveling somewhere, trading legends with whoever they encounter, and then journeying on to start the process over. I know that the heavy focus on walking and talking is a criticism often launched at the fantasy genre as a whole, but typically there are action sequences and/or personal arcs to help break up and add color to the events. The protagonists in this book appear dourly focused on uncovering the remaining worldbuilding details and solving the big crises of the day, but few of them face any real individual challenges or stakes along the way. Le Guin can still rattle off a satisfying fairy tale, especially in the quieter domestic scenes, but I have to say that this last installment is my least favorite of its line.

This volume: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Volumes ranked: 2 > 4 > 5 > 1 > 3 > 6