The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Verifiers by Jane Pek

Book #117 of 2022:

The Verifiers by Jane Pek

A story curiously out of time. There’s a lot of talk in this debut book about online dating, corporate collection/abuse of confidential user data, and artificial intelligence, but it’s all conveyed in a fairly breathless manner to the characters and reader alike when none of the revelations strike me as all that unusual. Even the central premise of a top-secret, by-referrals-only detective agency specializing in verifying the details shared in dating profiles feels like it stems from a place of serious misconception about how the industry operates. If this novel were published over a decade ago, or were framed as a clear period piece of that era, I might be more forgiving towards this misplaced preoccupation. But for a seemingly-contemporary title released in 2022, it’s hard not to greet each would-be troubling or shocking bit of information with a, “Well, yeah. So what?”

That aspect of the text aside, I’m also not terribly enamored with the protagonist, a bookish naïf who keeps prying into a closed client file just because she’s nosy, and I don’t like how the narrative ultimately validates her wild speculation that there’s a conspiracy and murder plot behind events that could have so many more plausible alternate explanations. The most successful element is probably the depiction of the heroine’s dysfunctional family, rich in #ownvoices observations of Asian American heteronormative ‘model minority’ expectations, but this is so distinct from the rest of what’s going on in her life that it sometimes appears lifted in from an entirely separate work.

The volume ends without really resolving its main case, which I guess means a sequel is on the horizon. Personally, I won’t be bothering with it.

[Content warning for suicide and domestic abuse.]

★★☆☆☆

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TV Review: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, season 7

TV #36 of 2022:

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, season 7

A curiously bifurcated run. The first half of this last year almost seems to sputter, with some episodes that are absolutely up to the usual high dramatic standards of the series and others that represent some of the laziest, most self-indulgent writing ever. (I’m especially looking at you, “Take Me Out to the Holosuite” and “Badda-Bing Badda-Bang.”) At least it’s not a total letdown, and I want to call out “It’s Only a Paper Moon” in particular as maybe the only holodeck-centered story in any series of Star Trek that actually uses the concept well and doesn’t make it seem like just a silly dress-up game or absurdly deadly piece of malfunctioning tech. Here, it really is a great way to explore Nog’s trauma and prolonged recovery from the events of “The Siege of AR-558.” Such darker themes of war, enemy occupation, and intolerance are maintained, despite the occasional underbaked attempts of levity around them.

And then the back half of the season arrives in a new and unexpected format, telling roughly one long, serialized sprint for ten hours straight, in which the demarcation between one episode and the next practically falls away. It’s an exciting change of pace befitting the climactic stakes of the Dominion War, and it builds to an excellent finale that neatly manages that tricky task of resolving the major narrative, imparting a sense of conclusion for certain aspects, arcs, and relationships, and yet simultaneously suggesting how life will go on in altered form once we’re no longer watching.

It all works, more or less. I’ll confess that the new character of Ezri never really clicks for me, although I understand her on paper as representing a different side of the Trills after six seasons spent with Jadzia. And the mysticism with the Prophets and their supernatural opponents the Pah-wraiths has always struck me as rather abstract and bloodless, so I’m not terribly invested in it here beyond the immediate impact on long-standing characters like Sisko, Winn, and Dukat. But for the most part, seven years of developing plots, political situations, and characterizations pays off in dividends. We even get a phenomenal slow burn of a redemption story for Damar of all people, possibly my single favorite thing that this final season accomplishes.

Deep Space Nine was inevitably going to be a risky departure for this franchise, consciously abandoning the titular “trek” of interstellar exploration in favor of a fixed home on a backwater station, the once and future battlefront where strange species and sci-fi emergencies wouldn’t necessarily be encountered each week, but local politics, tensions, and intrigues could in theory grow gradually into a potent boil. Luckily the program was given the time — and distance, with production attention shared with TNG and then Voyager — to do just that, and the worldbuilding achieved here by the end is staggering by previous Trek standards, which adds a greater pathos to the thought of leaving it and its well-developed cast behind. I cannot honestly say this is the strongest individual outing of DS9, but it certainly departs on its own terms and impresses me as a thoroughly modern piece of television, even at nearly a quarter-century off the air.

This season: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Seasons ranked: 6 > 3 > 4 > 5 > 7 > 1 > 2

TV Review: Bob’s Burgers, season 6

TV #35 of 2022:

Bob’s Burgers, season 6

I’ve now reached the point of this Bob’s Burgers rewatch where I’m caught up with the seasons that I reviewed the first time I saw it, starting in 2016. So here’s what I wrote then, at somewhat less than my now-typical length:

“I feel like Bob’s Burgers is comfortably past its prime at this point. This season was still reliably funny, but I can’t really point to any all-time classic episodes from it. It does seem like the character of Louise got fleshed out a little bit more this season, though – let’s hope that Gene is next, and that the writers continue to bring the jokes even if the plots aren’t as surprising anymore.”

And I do stand by that, for the most part! I suppose the show has proven it still has plenty of gas left in the creative tank, given that it just wrapped season 12 and a feature film, but this particular run doesn’t seem exceptionally exciting. That’s a shame after a couple of strong years, but even baseline Bob’s Burgers makes it worthwhile to check in on the Belchers and all the weirdos in their town.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: What We Do in the Shadows, season 1

TV #34 of 2022:

What We Do in the Shadows, season 1

A confident launch to a mockumentary sitcom with the simple yet irresistible premise of several vampires sharing a house in Staten Island. (I haven’t seen the movie that preceded this, but I understand it follows a different set of characters and isn’t directly related.) The storytelling is very shaggy, and rivaling Quentin Tarantino or Game of Thrones not merely for gore but also for how death can suddenly end — or at least radically reorient — a previously dominant plot concern. Indeed, the only major thread lasting throughout this first season is of put-upon familiar Guillermo meekly chafing under his master’s absurd demands and continued refusal to turn him into one of the undead.

Of course, the main appeal of any comedy is the jokes, and we certainly get that in the overlapping categories of oblivious culture-clash struggles, gross-out humor, and inventive descriptions of sexual depravity. There’s also a delightful recurring bit that I never tire of, where one of the protagonists yells out, “Bat!” every time he turns into a bat. It’s utterly inane, yet hilarious nonetheless. And I love the ‘energy vampire’ played by Mark Proksch of Better Call Saul fame, even though I think his inclusion in the group was funnier before the reveal that he really does have supernatural abilities to that effect and is not just a total buzzkill that the others have mistaken for a peer.

I don’t want to give away all the clever parts, but bringing in certain actors who have appeared as vampires on screen before for some glorified cameo work in one episode here is truly inspired. With moments like that and everything discussed above, I am wholly on board, though I do hope for a little more in the way of structure and character arcs going forward.

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Midnight Girls by Alicia Jasinska

Book #116 of 2022:

The Midnight Girls by Alicia Jasinska

A fun little queer enemies-to-lovers YA fantasy, but with some tonal and worldbuilding issues that are keeping me at a slight distance. The two antiheroines are teenaged assistants to rival witches, tasked with hunting down victims and ripping their hearts out to fuel their mistresses’ magic. They clash whenever they’re sent after the same target, but strike up a flirty friendship when they meet under cover identities and don’t recognize one another right away.

So that’s cute, but it’s hard to get too invested in the struggles of two adolescent mass murderers who are generally pretty remorseless about their slaughtering. It’s also not clear to me, absent fairy tale logic and/or implicit classism, why the witches need princely organs specifically, rather than those of any random peasants. And while I appreciate author Alicia Jasinka’s gesture at diversity by periodically mentioning Jews and Muslims in this fictionalized version of 18th-century Poland, I have serious questions about why the church prayers and holy relics are effective protection against the girls. (If Christian rituals are visibly potent as spells, that should have major implications for religious minorities in the area!) Considering those drawbacks, I’m ultimately only lukewarm on this title, but I’m glad that a sapphic teen romance like this — even a F/F/F love triangle at one point — has become no big deal in the modern publishing landscape.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice

Book #115 of 2022:

The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice (The Vampire Chronicles #2)

1976’s Interview with the Vampire is a modern classic of the gothic horror genre, popularizing a new variety of sympathetic bloodsucker with its brooding and homoerotic immortals. Following in 1985, this first sequel isn’t nearly so good, but it still has moments rivaling that baroque majesty of its predecessor while forming an important link to the remainder of the series ahead.

We’ve switched protagonists to the title figure Lestat, complicated quasi-villain of the original novel, who as a narrator turns out to be more direct and less prone to grandiloquent introspection than Louis. He also contradicts him on several occasions, which reads not as a continuity error so much as a conscious rewriting and emphasis on subjectivity from author Anne Rice. And those tend to be my favorite parts of this book, but they are few and far between, since the point is not simply to retell the events of Interview from a different perspective. Instead, we have a lengthy sequence exploring the (anti)hero’s own history, including the unexpected appearance of Armand and the Théâtre des Vampires, along with nested narratives from other fiends relating their respective origins from centuries further back, all the way on to the ancient Egyptian progenitors of this line. In a minor thread bookending the start and end of the text, Lestat picks up a guitar and becomes a contemporary rock idol, angering those of the undead who want their kind to stay in the shadows forever.

It’s a bit all over the place, in other words, and Rice seems particularly enthralled with the explanatory mythology she’s concocted, which was largely absent in the previous volume. Future sagas of this ilk and installments of this one would balance plot and worldbuilding concerns more skillfully, but the writer’s groundbreaking contribution here is to think through the latter so completely at all. To some extent that makes this little beyond a just-so story for the setting, but it also transitions the action into the high-stakes pulpy thriller mode that subsequent releases like The Queen of the Damned and The Tale of the Body Thief would continue to utilize. I sped through many of those when I was younger, but on this reread, I think I might just bid farewell now after this two-part debut.

[Content warning for gore, incest, slavery, pedophilia, and rape.]

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Knives Out (2019)

Movie #12 of 2022:

Knives Out (2019)

A decent murder mystery, albeit one I feel I might have liked better absent the years of people hyping it up so much. The colorful ensemble of plausible suspects is certainly fun, as is the steady puncturing of their bigotry towards the dead patriarch’s nurse and her immigrant family, and the various twists of the case are neither unduly telegraphed nor unreasonable. I’d say it’s about on par with a typical Agatha Christie plot, while a definite cut below an author like that at her best. Or to put that differently, it fits squarely within the whodunnit genre without ever showing any interest in pushing boundaries and playing with the usual structures of that narrative tradition. I honestly expected more from writer-director Rian Johnson after his visionary work on projects like Brick or The Last Jedi.

To take one example: this movie frequently has a character with a strong motive for lying start to relate some incident, before cutting to the entire flashback scene in question. This could allow for a creative Rashomon-style framing of unreliable narrators, but instead, everything we see is the literal truth — sometimes with additional context temporarily withheld to give the wrong impression, but never presented as a step outside the apparent reality of the tale. Folks in this script only ever lie by omission or when their falsehoods can immediately be underlined as such, which is not really the hallmark of a great detective story. (I suppose that’s befitting the central investigator here, who beyond his odd Southern accent and assortment of other quirks seems neither brilliant enough for viewers to cheer nor bumbling enough to represent a subversive deconstruction of that trope. He’s simply functional.)

Speaking of lies, I can’t believe how the ludicrous early suggestion that one particular person vomits every time she even thinks about being untruthful is never questioned or challenged and ultimately proves as accurate as the rest of we’re told or shown on screen. It strains my credulity toward the nature of this setting, which otherwise seems fairly grounded in its rules of operation, and just seems like a long and silly route to some unnecessary gross-out humor. If the whole notion were a pose that eventually unravels, that would be one thing. But here, as elsewhere, the piece stubbornly refuses to build in the layers of possibility and doubt to keep an audience fully invested and engaged. It’s splashy but surface-level, through and through.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Jewish Book of Horror edited by Josh Schlossberg

Book #114 of 2022:

The Jewish Book of Horror edited by Josh Schlossberg

As usual for a genre anthology, some of these stories strike me as stronger than others, but they are collectively rather great, presenting a uniquely Jewish chorus of voices interpreting and exploring horror in that particular context. Here we find beings of Talmudic folklore like golems and dybbuks and Lilith and mazzikim, but also the more modern terrors of Nazis and homegrown bigots, or even those well-meaning yet alienating Christians who greet our continued existence as a religious minority in their midst with a bit of a blank-eyed stare. And there are Jews pushed to their own darkness too, lashing out and becoming the monstrous themselves.

Categorically, the entries in this volume gain impact by their #ownvoices status, providing a familiar Jewish texture in all manner of supporting background details and asking questions that specifically hail from within a Judaic tradition of practice, belief, argument, and doubt. Many pirates in fiction have encountered ships crewed by the dead, but I’d wager that only a Jewish captain would approach the problem and devise the solution as shown in Richard Dansky’s “On Seas of Blood and Salt.” Nothing but a rundown Catskills camp could possibly serve as the setting for Alter S. Reiss’s “Same as Yesterday,” and the specter of creeping antisemitism alone powers KD Casey’s “The Last Plague,” whose heroine gradually minimizes the visibility of her opening the door for the prophet Elijah each Pesach. The premise of Elana Gomel’s “Bread and Salt” is likewise inescapably Jewish, since it concerns a woman returning to her Ukrainian village after the Holocaust to find her neighbors have stolen her home and a chicken-footed demon has claimed her son, but it also ends on a gutting twist that I can’t imagine working for any comparable-sounding plot in a gentile fairy tale.

There are a few unfortunate missteps. I honestly hate “Eighth Night” by John Baltisberger, a graphically violent, misogynistic, and deeply unnecessary retelling of the beloved children’s picture book Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins. (A sequel or an unrelated Hershel of Ostropol story would have been fine, but subverting the classic original into a splatterfest of rape and gore just feels cruel.) But thankfully that’s the clear low point of the lot, and the rest are generally well worth the price of admission. I wouldn’t say readers need to be Jewish to enjoy this title, but as a Jew I am personally thrilled for everything that’s resonated with and spooked me therein.

[Content warning for suicide, gun violence, and death of children.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Late Show by Michael Connelly

Book #113 of 2022:

The Late Show by Michael Connelly (Renée Ballard #1)

[Warning: discussion of sexual assault and transphobic violence ahead in this review. Additional content warnings for the book listed below.]

Theoretically, author Michael Connelly’s 30th novel should be a reasonable introduction to new character Renée Ballard, the latest protagonist to join the broad Harry Bosch continuity. She’s actually a lot like Harry, another dogged detective with a chip on her shoulder for the corrupt-seeming LAPD bureaucracy. Only in her case, the grievance is more legitimate: she’s been relegated to the department graveyard shift and instructed to hand over any cases she develops to the daytime crew each morning, all because she once refused a supervisor’s drunken advances. This 2017 title narrowly predates the arrival of the conversation-starting Me Too movement, but its heroine is an obvious reflection of the workplace harassment so many people — particularly women — continue to experience.

And yet I’m beyond frustrated with how this element plays out in the text. The main plot involves Renée continuing to secretly investigate crimes in her off-hours, which leads her to find a suspect in the brutal assault of a transgender sex worker. But something apparently tips him off about her in return, and before long, she too has been drugged, stripped, bound, and molested. She also wonders if this villain raped her while she was unconscious, but we aren’t told one way or another, just like we never learn how he realized she was a cop and on his trail. (Elsewhere, a senior officer breaks the law to plant a misleading story about the protagonist in the newspaper, again for no reason that’s ever provided on the page.) It’s a frustrating and needless writing move, and not a good sign that Connelly will be treating this figure on an equal footing with men like Bosch or Haller, who are never threatened with similar peril.

Meanwhile, the victim of the original hate crime is also being handled pretty horribly. Although Ballard speaks up repeatedly to insist that people respect this civilian’s gender presentation and call her a woman, nearly everyone else in the story blithely continues misgendering and deadnaming her, and even the detective herself messes up on several occasions that are not remarked upon in the narrative. As with the assault plot device, I don’t believe the writer is being careful enough in depicting this marginalized group to justify the inclusion of violence against one of their members. These bigotries / oversights are most unfortunate, and they compromise what would otherwise be another solidly competent sub-series debut.

[Content warning for gun violence, gore, drowning, and loss of a parent.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: The Return by K. A. Applegate

Book #112 of 2022:

The Return by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #48)

At this point in the Animorphs series, the overarching plot of the Yeerk invasion and teenage guerilla resistance war is entering its endgame. The companion books are all finished, and each of the six core protagonists has one more adventure to relate to us, before a final volume they’ll narrate together (a Megamorph in all but name). Starting off that sequence is this story, our last solo tale from Rachel.

I only wish it were stronger! There are definitely some interesting component elements here, but they pull against one another in their effectiveness and lose further momentum by being initially couched in a tedious structure of recursive dreams within dreams. See, Rachel is having nightmares where she chafes at Jake’s caution and challenges him for the team’s leadership, alongside hearing mysterious whispers, seeing a creepy red light, and feeling guilty over the measures she took way back in #22 The Solution to trap the group’s recruit-turned-enemy David as a rat. She repeatedly wakes, only to later realize that she’s simply caught in a different dream now. It’s not even clear when exactly she comes to for real — assuming that she ever does — but it’s at least a fifth of the way through the text, which is pretty far in for that sort of gambit.

It turns out, of course, that the arch-evil entity Crayak and his servant the Drode are behind these visions, and when they finally reveal themselves, they also bring their reality-bending powers to bear, which is why it’s so hard to decide how much of the entire experience is/isn’t an illusion. In a flash, the heroine can go from being a rat stuck in a box to her regular human self to that bizarre construct on the cover, the powerful yet monstrous “Super-Rachel.” It’s a temptation narrative, and these demons are offering the teen the ability to save the world from the Yeerks at the awful cost of a friend’s life (first Cassie and then Jake). If she refuses, they threaten her with the same nothlit fate that she brought upon David.

That old foe is here too, still a rat and at first presented as the mastermind behind Rachel’s kidnapping and imprisonment — a convoluted scheme involving human henchmen he’s paid off with money his small size somehow let him steal — before she realizes that he must have had help from someone like Crayak. I understand the impulse to bring back both of these antagonists one last time, and including them in a single encounter is reasonably efficient storytelling. But they represent fundamentally distinctive sorts of threats to Rachel, and author K. A. Applegate / ghostwriter Kimberly Morris never quite manage to get those working in tandem. Crayak’s games are disorienting to goad the narrator into hasty action, while David’s ruthlessness holds a mirror up to her own in an effort to get her to admit that they are equal and thus equally deserving of punishment. These separate ideas are not necessarily incompatible, and Rachel’s answer to both eventually hinges on her protesting that she’s one of the good guys, rather than a vicious champion who could topple and replace Visser One as earth’s conqueror or a cold-blooded killer like David. But the plot doesn’t link all this together as smoothly or explicitly as I’d like.

And for me personally, the rat side of things is the more successful storyline, anyway. Crayak and Super-Rachel and the dream nonsense is all a distraction from the compelling angle of throwing one of the girl’s most shameful acts back at her in a moment when she’s already feeling self-doubt about her role on a team with her apparently less-bloodthirsty friends. Downgrading David to merely another Crayak subordinate is a waste, especially when it’s a foregone conclusion that she won’t ultimately accept the terms of his nefarious offer. There’s something safe and almost quaint about tempting Rachel with razor claws and crocodile skin, but David’s accusations about her character in contrast still pack a wallop. I suspect that’s why he gets the final say in this title, exhausted and begging his long-time rival for death as she sits and weeps over him. The best writing decision in the whole book is to end in a tense ambiguity that keeps her eventual response from us, letting readers ponder for ourselves just who Rachel is and what she’s willing to do when called.

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

★★★☆☆