The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Movie Review: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

Movie #15 of 2022:

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

When I first saw this picture in theaters six years ago, I raved that it was “My favorite sort of prequel, that slots neatly into the existing continuity without the need for retconning AND enhances the viewer’s appreciation of certain elements in the original material.” And I stand by that! It’s not a perfect venture: the logistics at the beginning are a little difficult to track even on a rewatch, and the somewhat-arbitrary ensemble cast takes a while to gel. But there’s a power in revisiting the era of the original Star Wars trilogy like this, with all its iconic aesthetics that later projects like The Mandalorian and Obi-Wan Kenobi have likewise sought to reproduce. And of course, the impact of the story is deepened by its ultimate shape as a tragedy, with every last one of its core protagonists dying sometime during their ill-fated mission on the beaches of Scarif. They succeed in securing the Death Star plans for the Rebel Alliance, but it’s altogether pretty bleak and somber for a big-budget Hollywood victory.

On a writing level, I also really love the decision to set this prequel so close to the classics, such that its closing minutes lead directly into the opening of A New Hope. I know not everyone thinks the CGI recreations of a couple key characters are appropriate and/or effective enough, but for me such devices help this chapter of the saga feel like it truly has been waiting just off-screen for us all along. (It certainly works better than the recast Solo movie, for instance.) And come on, it’s surely hard to argue with that Darth Vader combat scene that single-handedly makes his stature seem more daunting throughout the entire Star Wars franchise.

As you might guess from my timing, I rewatched this film now in preparation for the launch of Andor on Disney+, the unexpected prequel to a prequel (but still set a decade and a half after the prequel trilogy of Episodes I – III) that so far looks way stronger than it has any right to do. I’m glad the same creative team is behind that series, although I do think Cassian’s background is a bit of a blank slate in Rogue One, so it’ll be interesting to see what details they’ve come up with to fill that in. And I suppose we’re adopting the Better Call Saul approach of ignoring the fact that the lead actor is five years older when he’s playing five years younger! Anyway, I’m pleased to find that his introductory piece here remains as excellent as I remembered it, and I’m looking forward to seeing how much of its tragic air of doomed inevitability has been retained.

[Content warning for torture and gun violence.]

★★★★☆

Like this review?
–Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
–Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
–Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6288479-joe-kessler
–Or click here to browse through all my previous reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog

Book Review: The Answer by K. A. Applegate

Book #142 of 2022:

The Answer by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #53)

(A quick note from your reviewer here. If you’ve read my past few Animorphs reviews, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been giving away more and more of the plot each time. These final volumes are just so jam-packed with major developments that it’s hard to discuss them otherwise! But here’s one last reminder as I move forward to talk about the penultimate novel below that spoilers are thick in the air.)

Two words come immediately to mind to describe this second-to-last Animorphs book: propulsive and devastating. Each installment in the franchise’s closing sequence (#49 The Diversion onward, roughly) has been a game-changer in its own way, and yet it’s still a shock to hear our narrator introduce himself here with a curt, “My name is Jake. My name is Jake Berenson.” Yes, many volumes later, the original protagonist who first warned us that he and his friends had to keep their identities a secret is now offering his full name, along with the fact that they were 13 years old back then and 16 now. And why not? The enemy knows who he is. They’ve taken his family and destroyed his entire hometown. Whatever the imagined in-universe audience for these accounts, there’s no longer any point in keeping things from them at this stage.

But the sudden shift to forthrightness marks a character note, too. It signals that Jake is finally at his rawest and most ruthless, with no time left for convenient half-truths. As the story opens, he’s watching the Yeerks burn a two-mile radius around the wreckage of the feeding pool that the Animorphs destroyed at the end of the previous novel, torching the surrounding homes, businesses, schools, and any fleeing survivors both for retribution and to create a zone of protection around the spaceship that’s just flown in from orbit as a temporary Kandrona source. The teen general recognizes that, protected though it is, this vessel must be his group’s next target. And they’ll have to act quickly if they want to win this war, before either the ground forces can get a new pool up and running or the Andalite fleet can arrive to wipe out all life on earth, human and Yeerk alike. The near-certainty of friendly casualties can’t be a deterrent from ordering the Animorphs to embark on their final mission ever.

And they’ll need allies willing to risk dying for the cause, too. First the military leaders who have belatedly come around to the reality that there are aliens invading the planet, and who still have plenty of Controller operatives planted among their ranks that Jake helps root out. Then the auxiliary force of disabled teens led by James, who have so far mostly used their morphing for reserve support. Add to those a rival faction of Yeerks who want independence from Visser One and the long-awaited return of the Chee, about each of which I’ll have more to say further on. And in possibly the biggest surprise, there’s a contingent of free Taxxons led by the nothlit Arbron last seen in The Andalite Chronicles, who wish to betray their old alliance with the Yeerks in exchange for the ability to morph away from their all-consuming hunger.

That’s a nice bit of closure and a welcome throwback to a book that came out four years previously, but it’s also one of the many elements in this title that is quietly horrible the longer you dwell upon it. The majority of the Taxxon species is uninfested, since Yeerks hate the powerlessness of their ravenous bodies and the giant cannibalistic centipedes are generally willing to obey orders in exchange for battlefield carnage anyway. So their unexpected offer of aid is too promising for the Animorphs to turn down, and they seem happy with the idea of morphing en masse into anacondas — once the war is over and the morphing cube has been recovered — and staying in that form for good. Yet that would be a genocide of a sort, since any children they’d produce would be just regular snakes. The creatures may have agency in embracing that fate, but by striking this accord, Berenson and his comrades are ensuring that this generation of Taxxons will be the last.

The Chee’s assistance likewise stings, as it’s gained by subterfuge that cruelly abuses the pacifist androids’ long-running friendship with our heroes. Knowing that their primary contact Erek will refuse to fight or otherwise cause damage to a living being, Jake has Marco lure him out to the team’s woodland camp anyway, and then presents him with a terrible ultimatum: accompany and help us on our upcoming strike against the Pool ship, or Ax here will kill Chapman, the known Controller, school administrator, and early minor antagonist of the series whom the teens have now taken prisoner. It’s not a nice position to put either the android or the aristh in, and yet it pales next to Jake’s treatment of his cousin Rachel or the war crimes still ahead.

The last party in this unusual association is the renegade Yeerk force led by the slug in the head of Jake’s brother Tom, now promoted to the visser’s chief of security. I still think it would have made more sense for him to have split off when he first captured the cube back in #50 The Ultimate, but by playing a longer game, I suppose he’s in a stronger position to undermine his superior and set Visser One and the Animorphs against one another here. Luckily Jake realizes the likely duplicity in his foe’s claim of just wanting to flee the Yeerk Empire, and he quickly makes plans to counter it. In one of his finer displays of cold, Marco-like strategy, he has the insight both to substitute a Chee hologram for Cassie as Tom’s supposed prisoner (whom the treacherous Controller sure enough arranges to get devoured by a Taxxon), and to secret Rachel aboard the Blade ship on a solo mission he keeps hidden from his teammates and us until the very end of this book, when his group has painstakingly managed to take control of the floating Pool ship. Her orders are simple: to kill Tom once and for all if/when his Yeerk shows its true colors. And as the two cousins have privately discussed earlier, before we learn the specifics, there is no plan in place for getting her safely out again afterwards.

That’s a heck of a cliffhanger, which is not a narrative structure that author K. A. Applegate — or her team of ghostwriters, now dismissed for the two-part finale — has employed too often in these books. But it makes for an iconic scene here, with Rachel revealed on her quest to kill the older cousin at his brother’s command and the remaining Animorphs facing down Visser One on his control bridge, while a bitter Erek off in Engineering refuses to restore power to the weapons despite Tom’s ship drawing near. The protagonists seem on the verge of victory for their planet, but as predicted, the cost to get there has been too, too high. James and the entire auxiliary team are dead, gunned down in an assault meant largely to convince the visser that the morph-capable humans were all outside the ship. (A tragic end to their storyline, albeit one that would register more keenly if they had been developed less fitfully as a central part of the action since their introduction, or if their final moments were depicted in greater detail. Most of them never even get a name or significant characterization before their demise.) The human soldiers, free Taxxons, and Toby’s Hork-Bajir squadron have suffered significant losses, too. And although all of our original team has survived thus far, Jake’s taken one more turn for the monstrous that still needs to be addressed.

This mission is a tough ordeal for the young commander, the latest in three long years of guerilla campaigning that have exposed him and his friends to all manner of trauma and steadily ground away at his youth and innocence. Forced again and again to be the one to make the tough call and put lives on the line, he’s risen magnificently to the occasion and led this band of warriors better than anyone could have hoped. But he’s lost some of his essential humanity along the way, and we see the ultimate consequences here. Although he’s reconciled with his girlfriend Cassie for her role in letting Tom’s Yeerk escape with the cube — hoping she could save the boy from the moral weight of killing his brother, a wish that now seems dashed — she’s exhausted and aware of the stakes too, offering little of her typical ethical objections to the battle plan. And when Jake blurts out that he thinks they should get married after the alien threat has passed, she can only smile sadly at this hasty proposal and tell him that she honestly doesn’t know how he’ll ever adjust to regular civilian life again. After all, while she doesn’t mention specifics, her high school boyfriend has hardened into someone able to send grown adults, disabled peers, and even his own family members to their deaths for the sake of the greater good. And finally, as this volume draws to a close, he becomes a mass murderer as well.

Could we quibble about that designation? Maybe. This is a series that regularly traffics in murky morality, and the Animorphs have certainly killed before. They’ve even done it less and less reluctantly over time, culminating in their terroristic bombing attack in the last book, knowing that thousands of enemy forces would be there feeding at the stronghold, temporarily out of their human bodies and in their naturally weaker slug-like forms. But the greater collective of Yeerks on the Pool ship, previously established as a reserve population not yet given a host? Those are helpless noncombatants: 17,372 of them, as Ax helpfully reads off a terminal display. And he and Jake flush them out to die in the cold vacuum of space, a drifting cloud of icy sludge on the bridge viewscreen that adds one final element to that climactic showdown against the weary visser. The dubious justification for this slaughter has divided the fan community for two decades now, but I’ll note that the protagonist seems to have difficulty convincing himself to go through with it, pausing and using the dehumanizing language of “Aliens. Parasites. Subhuman.” before he can bring himself to issue the command and subsequently racing to outrun his feelings of guilt.

We’ll see fallout from all of this in the one remaining novel, which frenetically hops from narrator to narrator like a Megamorphs in all but name to chart the second half of this battle, and with it the epic conclusion of the entire Animorphs franchise. The ultimate fate of our beloved characters remains ahead, and it’s unclear at this point whether anything could possibly heal the cumulative hurt they’ve inflicted and endured to reach this far, that bloody cost of war that seems to be Applegate’s whole point in writing the saga. But you couldn’t ask for a stronger lead-in than the awful rush of this penultimate adventure to get there.

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

★★★★★

Book Review: Fairy Tale by Stephen King

Book #141 of 2022:

Fairy Tale by Stephen King

This new portal fantasy from Stephen King is fine, but its tale of an ordinary kid finding his way into a magical world is not exactly breaking fresh ground for the author of such works as The Waste Lands or The Talisman. There’s also an awful lot of setup here, with over a quarter of this rather lengthy novel devoted to explaining the origins of the Marty McFly-Doc Brown friendship that exists between the teenage protagonist and the old man who eventually reveals the hidden gateway to him. (The curse of being one of King’s “Constant Readers” is that I can’t help but contrast this with the writer’s time-travel thriller 11/22/63, which introduces a similar plot device in a bare handful of pages.) With so much lead-in space dedicated to the hero’s regular life before his mythic quest, it’s somewhat jarring at the end when his ultimate return and transition back to normality isn’t given a parallel treatment.

But the bulk of the story is neat. I don’t know that “Fairy Tale” is the best title for it, since King is mostly just riffing on Jack and the Beanstalk rather than attempting an Into the Woods sort of ur-text mashup, but I like the minor Lovecraftian vibes and the idea of the narrator sneaking into a dystopian giant’s kingdom with his elderly dog in order to find a supernatural way to make her young again. Not all of the component elements quite work for me — like an overly-long dungeon stay while he’s separated from his pet — but as a core concept, the unlikely pair exploring this strange landscape is fun enough. More people in genre fiction should bring animal companions along on their adventures.

My biggest disappointment — beyond a weird editing oversight referencing news events from 2016 in a book set three years prior — is probably that this all turns out to be generally unrelated to the author’s established Dark Tower mythos, with which it shares some obvious thematic dimensions. (There are two direct quotes from that series, but one is unexplained and one is described as something once read in a book, so they function more as sly winking references than overt connections.) It feels like a real missed opportunity to not set these stories explicitly in the same multiverse continuity, especially for a creator who usually revels in that kind of crossover. Still, it’s a solid standalone piece overall.

[Content warning for alcohol abuse, gun violence, racism, ableism, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty

Book #140 of 2022:

Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty

I don’t love this book, but it’s significantly better once you realize it’s been falsely marketed as a collection of short stories when it’s actually a disjointed composite novel. Each entry ends somewhat abruptly, but they are not telling unrelated plots with distinct sets of characters. Rather, they present vignettes from across the life of a single narrator, shuffled around out of order (and without apparent reason) a la Catch-22. So although the individual chapters are more open-ended than I would like, at least there are connections that a reader can draw to plausibly fill in certain gaps in the overall account of the protagonist’s dysfunctional family and their various tragic misadventures.

The strongest element of this title is its #ownvoices portrayal of the Penobscot Tribe of Maine, the small northeastern community of Native Americans to which debut author Morgan Talty belongs. That authenticity is striking throughout his text, even while I personally want more of a sense of purpose and organization to the narrative here.

[Content warning for alcohol and drug abuse, sexual assault, domestic abuse, and infant death.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

Book #139 of 2022:

What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

This creepy little novella is a retelling of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher by way of Mexican Gothic or The Girl with All the Gifts — which is to say, it posits that a rare breed of mushroom colony at the family’s rural estate has gotten its spores into doomed siblings Roderick and Madeline, thereby driving their strange illness and madness. The fungus has also spread throughout the nearby population of wild hares, jerkily controlling their bodies even after death, and appears to be trying to communicate with its human hosts. These animals produce some nice moments of eerie zombie horror, and for an unsettling period, the guests at the secluded manor aren’t sure whether they’ve been exposed and might be carrying the infection, too.

Author T. Kingfisher diverges from the original most in the narrator and supporting cast. Our protagonist now has a name and a more specific identity as a nonbinary friend of the Ushers who uses the genderless ka/kan pronouns of kan home country’s military class, and ka is joined by a few other visitors like a fictional aunt of Beatrix Potter who happens to be an amateur expert on mycology. The queerness is a minor yet welcome note, and the story is less open-ended than its predecessor while maintaining a hint of its ambiguous menace. It’s overall a quick read, but a fun one.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Star Wars: The Princess and the Scoundrel by Beth Revis

Book #138 of 2022:

Star Wars: The Princess and the Scoundrel by Beth Revis

This Star Wars novel — not to be confused with Alexandra Bracken’s 2015 junior novelization of A New Hope, entitled The Princess, The Scoundrel, and the Farm Boy — is slow on plot but rich in characterization, and covering a period that should be of interest for many fans: the time immediately following Return of the Jedi, when Princess Leia and Han Solo get engaged and married and embark on their honeymoon (which doubles as a public expression of confidence that the Empire has been shattered and call for unity in the new Republic government, due to the identity of the bride). The story moves at a languid pace, spending its entire first quarter with the protagonists still on on the forest moon of Endor and then most of the rest with them on an interstellar cruise ship, but the action does pick up near the end as onboard intrigue spills into open conflict with a remnant of imperial forces who refuse to believe that the Emperor is dead.

And while that summary may not sound like much, the whole enterprise is honestly a delight. Author Beth Revis maintains a tight focus on her two POV leads — avoiding the most common issue I have with spinoff material for this franchise — but she really captures the essence of all the returning figures, right down to the impatient and self-important Chief Chirpa of the local Ewok tribe. She also goes into great depth on the newlyweds’ lingering traumas from the events of the movie trilogy that often get ignored in such sequels: Han losing a year while frozen in carbonite and struggling to adjust to how his friends have changed in his absence, and Leia enduring the destruction of her home planet, torture on the Death Star, and discovery that her assailant there was her birth father. Unlike Luke, she is plainly not ready to forgive Darth Vader and accept his last-minute change of heart, which adds an interesting tension to her character throughout. The romantic relationship at the core of the title is likewise developed at length, showcasing why these lovers mean so much to one another while simultaneously underlining the stress points that will eventually lead to their separation. It’s a tricky balance, pulled off rather well.

Less successful in my opinion is the primary setting itself: the Halcyon starship, better known as the fictional theming for the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel now open at Walt Disney World in Orlando. I have not stayed there — and probably won’t anytime soon, given the exorbitant price tag — so I’m not sure how many of the details here are fun references that would make a visit more immersive versus new inventions from the writer herself. But the book hypes the luxury of the cruiseliner to a frankly absurd degree, with some sections that feel directly lifted from corporate ad copy in their lavish descriptions of the food and guest quarters. I’m assuming the volume was commissioned primarily to help market the resort destination, and I don’t begrudge Revis for working within those constraints. (In fact, I think it’s remarkable how good a yarn she’s spun despite them.) But this aspect of the text is distractingly silly, like when the stars of a TV show start talking about how much they love the new features of the car brand that happens to be sponsoring their episode.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connelly

Book #137 of 2022:

Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connelly (Ballard and Bosch #1)

Detective Renée Ballard has only appeared in one Michael Connelly book before this, but there’s still a frisson of crossover thrill when she encounters the author’s more established hero Harry Bosch early in this volume. After cautiously feeling one another out and recognizing a certain mutual competence, the two cops team up as unofficial partners, looking into the cold case of a murdered teen runaway that Harry took on as a favor to the dead girl’s mother at the end of his previous adventure. Each protagonist has other assignments too, and while none feel as gripping, they introduce their share of complications to pad out the story — including Bosch getting abducted from his home by gun-wielding mafiosos, which is a short-lived but interesting change of pace for him.

It’s a decent installment for the most part, with the writer’s typical verisimilitude in describing both police activity and the neighborhood specifics of the L. A. setting. The ending is a bit of a letdown, however. Spoilers in the rest of this paragraph: first Renée’s big clue comes from a random meeting instead of strong investigative work — there’s even an earlier lead that occupies a sizable chunk of the text but gets dropped without comment and never revisited once she finds the better suspect — and then she foolishly goes on her own to break into the guy’s workplace late that night, rather than waiting to gather evidence through legal means. (The murder is from nine years ago; they could have taken another six hours to solve it.) Finally, when Harry shows up in the nick of time to save her from the inevitable confrontation, he resorts to torture to get a confession, breezing past the cruelty and inadmissibility of that move alike, and then turns the man over to potential vigilante justice at the hands of a victim’s father.

So that’s odd and somewhat frustrating, but at least the new partnership feels promising for the future of the franchise. I’m almost caught up at this point, since this novel came out in 2018, but I understand Ballard and Bosch have continued to work together in subsequent releases. Here’s hoping that they show a little more restraint going forward.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Sacrifice by K. A. Applegate

Book #136 of 2022:

The Sacrifice by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #52)

The last story with Ax as its sole narrator is also the strongest one yet. The plot is deceptively simple: together with the rest of their small resistance force, the Animorphs propose, debate, and ultimately carry out a bombing assault on the local Yeerk pool. Unlike their early-series raids, this promises to represent a significant blow against the occupying enemy, but it’s also one that will likely cause heavy human civilian casualties too. And so most of the book is actually a tense atmospheric piece in the run-up to what they fear will be a suicide mission, with ample space for meaningful character moments around the team’s fugitive home in the woods punctuated by quiet outbursts of sorrow and fury.

The mood is subtly altered, and the once-cohesive band of friends is fracturing along predictable stress lines. Jake is still wracked with guilt over not being able to save his family, and angry at his girlfriend Cassie for letting Tom’s Yeerk escape with the morphing cube, though no one else knows the reason for his animosity at first. Meanwhile she’s upset that everyone is even considering taking innocent lives, while all of them are concerned that Rachel’s bloodthirsty battle rage may be spiraling out of control.

Aximili is standing back and watching all this, but he’s caught up in the emotional drama too. When Cassie’s secret comes out, prompting Marco to yell and her best friend to almost punch her, the Andalite finds himself feeling genuine hatred towards the girl. His thoughts draw explicit parallels between Cassie and Seerow, the disgraced member of his species whose “Kindness” of providing technology to an alien race first unleashed the Yeerks on the rest of the galaxy, and he coldly reflects that she’d have been executed for treason on his planet. Speaking of which, we learn that he’s been in clandestine communication with the military leadership back home, who tell him in their latest exchange that they’ve decided to “quarantine” the earth rather than help defend it, and that they don’t want any major action on the ground to interfere with their plans. Reading between the lines, the cadet understands that this is effectively a death sentence for humanity if he obeys the command to call off the attack.

As a protagonist, his arc in these novels has always revolved around his conflicting loyalties between his own people and the Animorphs, and it’s a well-earned triumph to see him elect, after much soul-searching, to stand with his young companions for good. He’s one of the volunteers at the end to ride the bomb-laden subway car into the Pool, but he also realizes he was too hasty to judge Cassie, whose objection that some of the opposing soldiers may wish for peace proves apt when Controllers help them open the cages to give captive humans a chance to flee. He sees that the power to morph might grant Yeerks a way to escape their parasitic nature, and in setting a delay on the explosives and issuing a warning first, he and the rest of the heroes embrace the new mantra that she proposes: “Defeat the Yeerks. Don’t become them.”

Prior to the fireworks of the big finale, we get another great scene of the teens — now confirmed to be high school age, though we don’t know exactly how much time has elapsed since book 1 when they weren’t — explaining the reality of the invasion to a group of strangers, which will never stop being weird and delightful following all the secrecy of the initial volumes. Rachel’s mom Naomi proves surprisingly useful for once, and has some nice exchanges with her daughter and nephew that seem to bring closure to their respective strife. Even here outside the camp, however, the endgame aura of dread is palpable. Yeerks can morph into deadly creatures of their own, which results in more human Controllers getting killed rather than just dodged or left unconscious. Thanks to the governor’s speech from the last title, news of extraterrestrial invaders is out there in the world, producing unease even when not wholly believed. And the very route that the group uses for their strike has been built at Visser One’s command for speedy processing of masses of new host bodies, in a continued abandonment of the slow infiltration favored by his predecessor. The shocking imagery of “people being rounded up and forced at gunpoint onto trains” recalls the horrors of the Holocaust even before Rachel makes that point explicitly.

In essence, then, everything is reaching a boil here, creating a heady effect for long-time readers. The trauma that these war-hardened children have experienced has never felt more acute, nor Cassie’s concerns over the morality of their actions more apt. It’s our final volume not penned by credited author K. A. Applegate herself, and returning ghostwriter Kimberly Morris delivers on just about every conceivable level, making this the finest of the ghostwritten lot in my opinion. It’s a climactic moment all around, leaving only two installments remaining until the bitter end.

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

★★★★★

Movie Review: Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)

Movie #14 of 2022:

Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)

Another Marvel feature that’s solidly entertaining in the moment but pretty disposable in the long-term franchise view. Leaning heavily on the space-rocker tone set by director Taika Waititi’s earlier Thor: Ragnarok, this sequel slides into the status of second-best Thor movie more or less by default. It’s got the requisite Marvel action sequences, comedic banter, and crowd-pleasing soundtrack. It just doesn’t have much of a coherent plot or anything new / meaningful to say about its characters.

Best served by the script is probably a returning Natalie Portman as Dr. Jane Foster, now dying of cancer and discovering that she can wield the power of a rebuilt Mjolnir to channel her ex-boyfriend’s might into vitality and thrilling superheroics (which is somehow also killing her faster, in one of the film’s many bizarre contradictions). Thor as usual is the dullest part of his own story, and Christian Bale as the piece’s villain opposite him becomes the latest figure to disappear under the weight of his own makeup, ultimately registering no more personality than previously vanquished Marvel baddies like Lee Pace as Ronan the Accuser or Christopher Eccleston as Malekith the Accursed.

I see two big, somewhat overlapping problems with Gorr the God Butcher — these supervillain names! — one on the micro-level of his present excursion and one on the macro-level of the MCU at large. In the immediate issue, his motivation and aims are all over the place. He’s mad that his personal deity didn’t intervene to save his daughter (and is basically a jerk all-around), so he decides to kill him and all his kind. That’s an idea with potential for interesting philosophical engagement! But… he’s also being influenced in all this slaughter by a corrupt ‘necrosword’ that’s never explained beyond its label. And about halfway through, he reveals he wants to go to the one spot in the universe where apparently any wish can be granted — something that surely should have been in play in several previous adventures, right? — to just make all the gods dead at once. As a foundation for a character it’s a bit abstract and confusingly written, and it doesn’t give Bale much to work with in the end.

The bigger franchise complication is that the notion of what a god even is in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has become hopelessly muddled by this stage. Thor is called one because ancient earthlings didn’t have any other way to conceptualize his alien grandeur, as we learned back in his very first outing. But he doesn’t have any modern worshipers whom he could ignore and betray in the way Gorr objects to, and it’s not clear why the unpowered Asgardians, now just a diaspora population living in Norway, would be on his chopping block either. Is he also going after the Egyptian gods on Moon Knight, or the djinn on Ms. Marvel, or the demons that Dr. Strange battles, or all manner of other powerful non-humans we now know exist throughout this fictional cosmos? Can we even come up with a plausible definition of godhood in this series that excludes, say, Gorr himself?

So it’s kind of a mess. A generally fun one, to be clear, and an installment that incrementally pushes Marvel’s queer representation up another fraction despite the absence of a much-missed Loki, alive in some form on his own show but dead for all intents and purposes here. (Valkyrie is now explicitly said to have a slain female love interest, Korg has a living male one — though his species might be single-gendered — and Heimdall’s son rejects his birth name in a scene that has some arguable transgender undertones.) As I often say at the end of a 3-star review: it’s not a bad title! It’s just not an especially good one, either. Watch it if you feel like you’ve got the two hours to spare, but there doesn’t seem to be anything too critical for the future of the MCU that you’d miss if you don’t.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Book #135 of 2022:

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

This loose retelling of the 1896 classic The Island of Doctor Moreau relocates its action to Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, a setting that #ownvoices author Silvia Moreno-Garcia paints as vividly as she has in previous releases like Mexican Gothic, now against the backdrop of the historical indigenous uprisings that were happening around that time. She also introduces a new character, the titular mad scientist’s child, although I might have been more impressed with this addition if I hadn’t already read the very similar premise in Megan Shepherd’s 2013 novel The Madman’s Daughter and its sequels. (While this volume of course can and should be judged on its own merits, the two works are rather alike, right down to their love triangles and the unsurprising reveal that Moreau’s daughter is — spoiler alert — actually one of his hybrid animal creations.)

The plot here is generally decent, but the book has a few issues holding me back from embracing it fully. First, on a structural / stylistic level, we’re alternating between two POV figures, which would be fine, except for how the end of one scene often gets immediately and unnecessarily repeated from the other person’s perspective, to no apparent payoff. More importantly, I’ve found the second protagonist to be thoroughly unlikeable, largely due to the inappropriate relationship he pursues with the young woman in his care. They are both consenting adults, but with a significant age gap, and when he meets her at the beginning of the story, she’s only 14 whereas he’s 29, a divorced man in a completely different life stage. He then joins the household and watches her grow up, and when we jump to six years later, his sections regularly include thoughts about how her body now oozes sexuality or how he wishes she were one of the prostitutes he visits in town. It’s pretty gross, especially since the couple do — predictably — wind up in bed together at one point.

Perhaps that’s a reflection of my distaste over problematic romances in fiction and not a flaw in the narrative per se. My 3-out-of-5-star rating (“I liked it,” on the Goodreads scale) hopefully captures that this tale does more right than wrong, on balance. But all I can ever offer in a review like this is an effort to critically work through my own subjective reactions to the media piece in question. And in this case, the writer I’ve enjoyed in the past has missed the mark for me.

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

★★★☆☆