The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Such Sharp Teeth by Rachel Harrison

Book #170 of 2022:

Such Sharp Teeth by Rachel Harrison

This title is too straightforward for too long, telling the story of a woman getting bit by a werewolf with little to distinguish it from any other iteration of that plot. It’s all competent, but somewhat unremarkable, and as I read along, I kept impatiently thinking, “Yes, and?” while waiting for some further complicating detail. There’s a hint of what I was after around a third of the way through the text, when the protagonist discloses a childhood assault and starts considering all the rage deep inside her as something that might be universal to women and now possible to express in her wolf form. But I still don’t feel especially hooked on this narrative.

I think part of the problem for me as a reader is that this novel skews close to a few genres that I’m fundamentally less interested in: paranormal romance, romantic comedy, and Hallmark Channel Original Movies. Our heroine is a financially-secure career woman in the big city who has returned to her hometown to support her pregnant sister, where she soon sparks up a fling with the hunky friend who used to have a crush on her back in high school. There’s steamy PG-13 action and tedious drama caused by miscommunication, but as with the supernatural angle, it all seems very by-the-book — as though author Rachel Harrison were content to mash up those tropes without ever quite finding an original spin on any of them.

The end result is a work that I like just fine but do not love. More worldbuilding or other creativity on the fantasy/horror side, or more leaning into the inherent humor of the disparate elements combining, and this could have been a real winner. But as is, although I’m sure there are audiences who will enjoy it better, it gets only a three-star rating from me.

[Content warning for incest, body horror, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Long Division by Kiese Laymon

Book #169 of 2022:

Long Division by Kiese Laymon

This 2013 authorial debut has some interesting ideas and a distinctive voice for its protagonist(s), but it strikes me as overall too jumbled and underdeveloped to land with much impact. The plot, as I understand it: a young Black teen in the modern age, struggling with potential queer feelings for his school rival / friend and having recently gone viral for calling out the racism of a spelling bee-like competition that kept giving students of color words that would be uncomfortable or stereotypical for them to repeat, stumbles across a book called Long Division. In it he finds the story of a boy with his same name in 1985, who winds up time-traveling to 2013, where he meets a girl who turns out to be his future daughter. She has the same name as a neighbor who’s gone missing in the reader’s reality… as well as a copy of a book called Long Division about a kid with his name going viral on the internet and so on. Later they go back to 1964 to try to save his grandfather from being lynched by the KKK.

The narrative alternates back and forth between these two people who are each fictional to one another, with context clues generally helping to identify the switch, but not always right away. It’s all a bit chaotic and unclear, especially for so short a novel (276 pages in paperback), and none of the characters ever seem to react to the patently weird stuff happening around them with anything but matter-of-fact disinterest. There’s a lot of unchallenged antisemitism, fatphobia, and homophobia including slurs, along with bizarre throwaway details like one of the heroes meeting a talking cat or the fact that his counterpart once pleasured himself while thinking about his grandmother. The whole project is frankly a mess, and often feels like an attempt to be provocative without necessarily demonstrating the substance or discipline to channel the ensuing attention productively.

I know that author Kiese Laymon’s more recent memoir Heavy has attracted rave reviews, and perhaps I should have started there. He’s still speaking from a specific southern Black perspective in this earlier work, but those #ownvoices insights are somewhat lost in the delivery.

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

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Dracula by Bram Stoker

Book #168 of 2022:

Dracula by Bram Stoker

First published in 1897, this gothic horror novel remains an influential classic. Its characters like Van Helsing and the bloodsucking Count himself are now household names, and so many of our cultural ideas about vampires that subsequent stories have either reiterated or consciously pushed back against can trace their origins to here, if not further to the then-obscure myths that author Bram Stoker was drawing upon. Yet it’s a production all its own despite over a century of imitators and successors, with plenty of distinctive elements that are well worth revisiting. (A personal favorite of mine: the writer tends to set his most pulse-pounding adventure sequences in the daylight, with his mortal protagonists racing the setting sun to accomplish their current goal while their enemy is at his weakest, knowing that he will rise and be upon them as soon as darkness falls. So many later plots involving the undead, for whatever reason, place them as active adversaries in more of a survive-the-night mode instead.)

It’s a Victorian title through and through, which means it has some interesting philosophical reflections on society around all the action and the scares, but also that it’s unfortunately and sometimes hilariously dated in its impressions of science and of gender. There’s likewise no escaping how racist, antisemitic, and generally xenophobic this depiction of Dracula is, as a hook-nosed hairy foreigner eating babies and invading the Christian nation of England to prey on the purity of its white women. But overall it’s a fun throwback read, with the epistolary format allowing for a lively rotating cast to deliver the various segments of its narrative.

This year, I reread the novel by means of the ‘Dracula Daily‘ listserv, which sends out an email digest reproducing all the letters, newspaper articles, journal entries, and so on that make up this tale on the same date that they’re marked on the page. So since the entirety of Dracula unfolds between May 3rd and November 6th of one calendar year (plus a brief ‘seven years later’ epilogue sent out today), I’ve spent the past six months following along with these fictional events essentially as everything happened. I wouldn’t do this every year — I don’t like Stoker’s Dracula quite enough for an annual reread — but it was a neat way to stay in the moment alongside the heroes, not to mention encourage a closer reading and engage with a community on social media all consuming the text at the same pace. If you missed out on this year’s run, I highly recommend signing up for the next one, or even just parceling out the book that way sometime yourself.

[Content warning for ableism, rape, and gore.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, season 1

TV #52 of 2022:

Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, season 1

Despite carrying the novelist’s name prominently appended to the title, this is one of those curious adaptations that alters or completely jettisons nearly all of its source material, for better or for worse. The difference is immediately apparent, since in the original book our protagonist Louis is a white plantation owner who gets turned into one of the undead in 1791, whereas here, he’s a Black brothel boss in 1910. That’s a dramatic new angle of approach on the story, and it requires a correspondingly massive overhaul of events. The classic Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise movie captured the novel relatively faithfully, but this is a production more like the Hannibal TV show that takes only the broadest-stroke plot indicators from the page. Though it maintains the New Orleans setting, even filming on-location for verisimilitude, most scenes are made up whole-cloth by the scriptwriters, rather than actually reflecting anything penned by the late Anne Rice.

Two other notable departures mark this series debut. The first involves aging the child vampire Claudia from 5 to 14 — which makes her easier (and less gross) to portray over the decades as an adult stuck in that body, but inherently weakens the dysphoric conflict at her root. I’ll reiterate my old Twilight complaint here that if you’re an immortal who looks like a high-schooler, you could easily pass as a youthful grown-up instead just by updating your wardrobe and your demeanor in a way that the girl’s written counterpart couldn’t. No one is forcing you to live the societal role of a young teen forever, Edward/TV Claudia! She’s Black in this version as well, while her and Louis’s sire Lestat remains a white European, which adds an extra dimension to his abusive entitlement and their eventual rebellion against it. The second big change for the program is that those two men are explicitly presented as romantic partners throughout, with Lestat and Louis embracing, and kissing, and regularly talking about their passionate physical love for one another. They sleep together in the same coffin! Louis identifies himself as queer in the contemporary framing device! It’s a welcome update to the ambiguity and dubious subtext of prior iterations of their dynamic, as well as the legendarily litigious rage their author used to direct at any fanfiction that dared stray in that direction.

Ultimately, however, I am no better than lukewarm on this season overall. It’s a great star turn and acting showcase for Jacob Anderson after his memorable supporting appearances on Game of Thrones and Doctor Who, but the plot drags and never seems to come up with anything interesting to say beyond its initial divergences from canon. (And the representation is a meaningful addition to the franchise, but I mean… It’s 2022. These angsty French speakers aren’t even the only interracial gay vampire couple on television these days.) The modern interview scenes are particularly egregious, as they appear dramatically flat and essentially just repeat the exact same beats at every check-in until a final twist that lands with a thud for book readers and probably no impact at all for newcomers. And at the end of this run, we’ve covered maybe half of the first volume, in a series with rights to the entire dozen or more installments of Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. Although I haven’t minded the experiment for the most part, I think I’m content to let my AMC+ subscription lapse at this point and not bother following along any further.

[Content warning for racism, homophobia including slurs, rape, gore, suicide, and domestic abuse.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

Book #167 of 2022:

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin (Earthsea #1)

Author Ursula K. Le Guin’s first Earthsea novel — following two short stories in the setting she’d already published elsewhere — recounts the early life of its titular character, whom we are repeatedly told will someday be the most powerful enchanter alive. This is her Merlin figure, but she situates us in his childhood and not his years of glory, aiming to explore what sort of a person might grow up to become such a force of power. (The book was written in 1968, well before the magical school trope and YA fantasy in general had really taken shape in the English literary landscape.)

The protagonist’s bildungsroman is our viewpoint entry into this dark-skinned archipelago civilization, and the writer generally manages to convey its sparse yet distinctive details with a minimum of exposition. There’s a certain distance throughout the affair, however, as though we are reading from an ancient chronicle and not a personality-driven adventure story — more Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur than T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, to stretch the Arthuriana metaphor further.

Yet while it may be hard to particularly invest in the hero’s journey, Le Guin throws so many dazzling concepts at us that it’s easy to bask in her imagination and the seductively gentle tone of the narrative. A lot of her ideas about true names and shadow selves and the land of the dead and maintaining balance in the universe have percolated through the genre in her wake, but they start here, with a boy fleeing from a terror that his reckless sorcery has brought into the world, until he finds the courage and wisdom to turn and give chase to it instead. The ensuing series is only a loose saga, and later volumes would return to critique this one for its patriarchal implications and limited roles for girls and women, but it’s overall an influential classic that’s well worth revisiting today.

[Content warning for domestic abuse.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: A Pocket Full of Rye by Agatha Christie

Book #166 of 2022:

A Pocket Full of Rye by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #7)

Another standard and somewhat forgettable / interchangeable Agatha Christie mystery, taking its title from the old nursery rhyme about the four and twenty blackbirds. As usual with this author, those lines of doggerel are soon linked with a series of murders, an apparent bit of “madness” that of course masks the true motive behind the spree. It’s not too difficult to narrow in on the correct suspect, however, and I wish the plot could find more for Miss Marple to do, as she largely just floats around observing the members of the household after arriving on the scene mid-novel, while readers stick primarily with the police inspector’s point-of-view. Although the old lady is the one to draw all the threads together and solve the matter in the end, and the overall result is a perfectly respectable affair, I would not say this is among the stronger showings for either the writer or her detective.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Aviva vs. the Dybbuk by Mari Lowe

Book #165 of 2022:

Aviva vs. the Dybbuk by Mari Lowe

A dybbuk is a ghoulish spirit from Jewish folklore, traditionally said to be haunting a person or place due to unfinished business at the creature’s time of death. In this middle-grade novel, there’s such an entity lurking around the mikvah (a ritual bath site) that twelve-year-old Aviva tends with her widowed mother, although the girl is the only one who ever sees its mischief. Poltergeist-like, the supernatural being seems to lash out destructively whenever the heroine’s emotions are riled, and astute readers will probably predict the exact connection between the two well before the story’s conclusion, though this doesn’t weaken the impact of the narrative device.

The protagonist’s family has been living in their apartment off the mikvah ever since her father passed six years ago, and while the manner of his death likewise isn’t revealed until near the end, it’s clear that there is great unprocessed trauma and mental health struggles in both of his immediate survivors. The older woman spends much of her time staring off into space and making excuses to not leave the house, and her daughter is having difficulty sitting still and following rules in school. When a project for the upcoming bat mitzvah party for all sixth-graders brings her together with her former best friend, Aviva finds herself picking at old wounds she’s been desperately trying to ignore and finally confronting her inner demons, the dybbuk included.

Overall, this is a short but powerful read on grief and lingering pain, with a massive content warning required for both depression and antisemitism. While the mythological element isn’t as prominent as the title might suggest, #ownvoices author Mari Lowe is writing from a very Jewish perspective, building a tale that is both brimming with authentic lived-in details of Judaic life and urgently expressing what it’s like to exist in a community facing both rising levels of outside bigotry and long-standing generational trauma. I worry it might even be too heavy for some in its intended audience, although I trust younger folks to make that determination for themselves as they go along.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Greywaren by Maggie Stiefvater

Book #164 of 2022:

Greywaren by Maggie Stiefvater (The Dreamer Trilogy #3)

I’ve been steadily losing patience with this Raven Cycle spinoff from the start of the second volume on, and unfortunately, nothing in this final novel (which appears to close out the entire franchise, at least for now) does anything to reverse that trend. The two characters I find most interesting, Adam Parrish and Ronan Lynch, are barely in it, and the latter spends the majority of his scenes floating in a weird dreamspace that doesn’t add much to the narrative. We’re given additional retcons about people being either not dead as previously indicated or else secretly someone’s dreams brought to life, and that’s a twist with pretty diminished impact after how many times author Maggie Stiefvater has sprung it on us over the course of this saga. It’s likewise disappointing to learn that Ronan is something of a chosen one, when the most remarkable thing about the premise of this trilogy heretofore has been its treatment of his magical gift as more commonplace than anyone realized in the original series.

In my review of the previous title, I noted “a certain haziness throughout the affair, with no one’s motivations ever feeling particularly well-grounded or urgent.” That’s exacerbated here, and while the mystical vibe allows for some occasional striking imagery and the writer’s typical flowery prose, it’s less satisfying when so abstracted from any concrete relationships. Despite regular reminders that “this is the story of the Lynch family,” the brothers hardly interact with one another at all, and their parents’ backstory feels unnecessarily tacked-on after readers have gotten to know the boys on their own terms for so long. I’m lukewarm about the result as an individual installment, and downright unhappy with it as a conclusion to the extended plot of this setting.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

This volume: ★★☆☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Volumes ranked: 1 > 2 > 3

TV Review: Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi, season 1

TV #51 of 2022:

Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi, season 1

I don’t quite see the point of this latest Star Wars anthology series — and I’m not sure that Disney does either, given their decision to drop the entire first season in the middle of the ongoing Andor release schedule. Theoretically I think this cartoon is supposed to depict short vignettes from the lives of various Jedi, but that intention feels obscured when this initial batch of episodes contains one look at Ahsoka as a baby, then a loose trilogy about Count Dooku’s turn to the Separatist cause / Dark Side, then an Ahsoka training montage, and finally a story about her coming out of hiding to join the Rebel Alliance. Those last two installments in particular seem like showrunner Dave Filoni working to plug perceived plot holes in the haphazard way the Togruta’s arc has developed over multiple earlier programs, but they aren’t really telling us anything new about the character.

The Dooku stuff is stronger, fleshing out his motives and characterization in a way that actor Christopher Lee never got a chance to do in the movies (not to mention providing a long-overdue showcase for Jedi Master Yaddle, a member of Yoda’s species previously confined to the background of certain prequel shots). The Count is still not an especially sympathetic figure, and some of the material will likely feel familiar for anyone who’s heard his backstory in the canon audiobook Dooku: Jedi Lost, but such projects at least present his defection as more nuanced than just the flat embrace of evil that his ‘Darth Tyranus’ name suggests.

If this brief run had included only the three Dooku episodes, or instead a wider variety of Jedi protagonists, I might feel more favorable towards it. But Dooku and Ahsoka are a bizarre pairing to anchor the overall affair, and her storyline across it is too scattered to be effective in aggregate. Future releases could do better in this format, but this debut installment is pretty uneven in both quality and structure.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Amari and the Great Game by B. B. Alston

Book #163 of 2022:

Amari and the Great Game by B. B. Alston (Supernatural Investigations #2)

It remains hard to avoid Harry Potter comparisons in discussing this middle-grade fantasy series, but this second volume is just as engaging as the first and continues to put an original spin on some common genre tropes shared between the sagas. In this story, a new authoritarian figure has come to power in the magical world and swiftly increased the official persecution of non-human creatures and wizards like Amari, who were already being treated as second-class citizens beforehand. (Most people who know about supernatural affairs in the setting are unpowered agents and bureaucrats, tasked with keeping mystical threats in check and hidden from the rest of humanity.) In fact, the thirteen-year-old protagonist only really faces anti-wizarding bigotry in this sequel and not any textual racism as a young Black girl — which I mention as neither a good or a bad thing in and of itself, but simply a noticeable change from the previous title.

As the tale unfolds, this character is struggling with the onerous new regulations, trying to solve the mystery of the inciting incident for which an unknown wizard is being blamed, and eventually getting dragged into the titular secret competition to determine who will lead all magic-users as a war looms ever more likely. Some of the plot developments and hurdles are a tad juvenile for my tastes, but I’m not the intended audience and I’m still enjoying myself for the most part, especially given the ways author B. B. Alston finds to illustrate sound resistance tactics to institutionalized oppression. I’m looking forward to seeing where things go from here.

(I’ll repeat my complaint about the audiobook production from last time, however, since once again the narrator is using the same standard American accent for all characters, even the one whose dialogue regularly features dialectal markers like “ye lasses.” Either another reader or a better director is sorely needed for any further installments.)

★★★★☆