The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

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.

★★★☆☆

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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.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones

Book #111 of 2022:

Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones

A strange little horror novella that’s not as unsettling as I feel like it’s aiming to be, yet not funny/campy enough to constitute a good parody. The high school protagonist makes a lot of bizarre intuitive leaps, and while I think the intent is to show how he’s unraveling under the strain of worrying that a department-store mannequin has come to life to murder his friend group and their families — the first such wild notion, albeit one that’s somewhat reasonable by genre standards — it makes it hard to care about any of his ensuing struggles. (At one point, this kid is convinced on the evidence of a ripped-open fertilizer bag that his unnatural foe is eating the stuff to become kaiju-sized.)

The slasher carnage has a postmodern twist that’s deployed late enough I don’t want to spoil it here, but it’s one of many elements in this title that probably could have used more space to develop and breathe. As is, I don’t really feel attached to any of these characters or the rather hokey premise around them.

[Content warning for gore and death of a dog.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher

Book #110 of 2022:

Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher

An exquisite dark fairy tale, about a woman seeking the services of a necromancer to save her sister from the abusive husband who’s likely to murder her as soon as she produces a male heir. There are impossible tasks met with fierce determination, hard-won and painful lessons, and brusque strangers who turn into devoted allies, all under a delightfully macabre atmosphere of eldritch graveyard magic and righteous vigilante justice against the patriarchy. It’s basically Gideon the Ninth meets The Two Princesses of Bamarre, which is a combination that really shouldn’t work as well as it does here (somehow skillfully avoiding the tonal whiplash of author T. Kingfisher’s earlier title, A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, while maintaining just enough humor to keep the grimness at bay). The most whimsical elements are probably the various animal familiars that populate the text, but one of those is possessed by a demon, another is cursed to be helpful under pain of death, and the third is a reanimated skeleton already. So I still wouldn’t exactly say it’s a walk in the park. Nor would I call it a YA novel given the 30-year-old protagonist, though it shares a few common beloved tropes with that coming-of-age genre.

This is a book that got its claws in me well before the ending, and only grew stronger as I neared that emotional powerhouse of a conclusion. My lone complaint is a minor structural one: we begin in media res and alternate for a while between the heroine on her quest and the backstory that’s brought her to it, but there’s no particular payoff or plot reason for arranging the narrative that way, and I think a more straightforward presentation would have let the story blossom into itself sooner and more naturally. Nevertheless, I love the final effect too deeply for me to rate this any lower than a full five stars.

[Content warning for cannibalism, gore, body horror, death of a dog, suicide, and rape.]

★★★★★

TV Review: Ms. Marvel, season 1

TV #33 of 2022:

Ms. Marvel, season 1

The back half of this season stumbles a bit, both in setting up / dealing with its various villains and in the messy narrative transition from Jersey to Karachi to an episode-long Partition flashback and back, at which point a few dropped plot threads have to be hurriedly picked up again. By and large, however, it’s another MCU success story, and a nice return to form for the Disney+ side of that franchise after the recent Moon Knight miniseries failed to stick its own landing. The nerdy yet empathetic and brave Kamala Khan is an immediately winning personality, and her teenage concerns carry a real Spider-Man vibe that’s most welcome in an often adult-centered genre. (Among the other prospective members of a future on-screen Young Avengers team that we’ve seen so far like Kate Bishop, America Chavez, or Kid Loki, she’s the first to have any meaningful relationships with her peers.) At the same time, the show’s portrayal of its heroine’s Pakistani Muslim immigrant family lends a great cultural specificity as an integral part of the plot throughout.

Most Marvel titles inevitably serve as bridges to whatever’s ahead, and so it’s no surprise that this series is a prelude to next year’s movie The Marvels, which will properly introduce Carol Danvers to her biggest fan (alongside the grown-up and newly-powered Monica Rambeau). And of course there are other hints of big continuity moves on the horizon, like a certain not-so-subtle musical sting in the season finale. Yet Ms. Marvel’s debut here builds out such a warm and well-realized environment for her origin on its own terms over these six episodes that it largely stands apart just fine.

[Content warning for Islamophobia and gun violence, including government agents storming a high school and shooting at kids.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: A Far Wilder Magic by Allison Saft

Book #109 of 2022:

A Far Wilder Magic by Allison Saft

I was initially drawn to this YA novel by its #ownvoices Jewish element, having heard that although it’s a fantasy story set in a different world, the heroine’s religion is a recognizable stand-in for my own. In fact, the situation is even more clear-cut than that: Yu’adir straight-up is Judaism, right down to concepts like chochmah and tikkun olam presented in those familiar Hebrew names. Similarly, the Sumic minority faith is obviously Catholicism, complete with its pope, bishops, confessionals, rosaries, and so on, and the WASPish Katharist majority in society is, well, Protestant. This sort of direct copying is an embarrassment of worldbuilding, and it extends further to the lands that are plainly meant to be Ireland and New England. The year 1718 is even given at one point as being “nearly two centuries ago,” in a setting that, yes, seems from its technology like the early 1900s. I honestly don’t know why this wasn’t just written as historical fantasy, since author Allison Saft hasn’t taken the opportunity to invent anything beyond the magic of alchemy and a mystical fox hunt.

Even setting all that aside, I’m pretty disappointed by the representation of (thinly-disguised) Jewishness in this text. The protagonist’s parents were an interfaith couple, but her Yu’adir father left when she was young, and while she half-remembers a few rituals and teachings, they aren’t a part of her present life. Instead, her experience of this aspect of her identity is limited to the discrimination she faces around her town, which does not appear to have any other residents who share that background. She’s exposed to whispers about Yu’adir controlling banks and orchestrating wars, and because theirs is an ethnoreligion like its real-life counterpart, some of her more aggressive neighbors talk openly about the girl being tainted by degenerate blood. There is no Jewish joy and there is no Jewish community here, and while that may ring true for certain readers — I don’t want to speak for Saft — it’s not a depiction I particularly appreciate myself.

As for the plot beyond such matters, the two teenage leads don’t have any other friends and basically fall for one another at first sight, though they refrain from acting on that for a time by instead focusing on their partnership in the upcoming hunt. She thinks winning the contest will finally earn her absentee and emotionally-abusive mother’s approval; he hopes the prize money will convince that same alchemist to accept him as her apprentice, as well as help support his large Irish-Catholic family. It’s all rather rote and predictable, give or take some weirdness with their quarry and the philosopher’s stone that isn’t adequately explained. So I’d have to say that overall, the whole title feels very half-baked to me.

[Content warning for violence against animals, gun violence, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Defunctland: Guide to the Magic Kingdom by Kevin Perjurer

Book #108 of 2022:

Defunctland: Guide to the Magic Kingdom by Kevin Perjurer

This first written spinoff of the eponymous Defunctland YouTube channel presents the same focus on change within theme parks and attractions that are no longer operational, but in the specific context of Disney World’s Magic Kingdom as it exists in the present. Author Kevin Perjurer takes us systematically through the Orlando park, discussing in each section what’s there now and what used to be. This approach sacrifices the depth of his web content for greater breadth, but it makes the title a good launching-off point for readers to seek out the former. If a few paragraphs about the defunct ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter pique your interest, for example, why not check out one of Kev’s deep-dive videos or podcast episodes on the subject? Similarly, anyone who’s already finished those won’t get just a repeat here, as the framing concerns more of the current landscape instead.

I don’t love how the text is presented as a tongue-in-cheek but still roughly plausible guide to visiting Walt Disney World yourself, though, because so much of the advice considered in that light is simply absurd. It’s fine to organize an overview this way, but no guest should actually progress steadily through a Disney Park one themed land at a time, ignoring peak crowd sizes and queue times. This man honestly suggests Carousel of Progress — a dated audio-animatronic show about technological advances that will never see a wait longer than ten minutes to enter — as your second stop of the day! He also lets his personal feelings vent in a few caustic displays about attractions he hates and won’t ever go on again, which I consider unnecessary and a tad obnoxious.

In the end the whole thing devolves into an extended joking suggestion that you sneak into the underground cast member ‘Utilidors’ and look for discarded pieces of older rides to take home with you. That part makes me feel better about some of the earlier impracticalities, and I do like the writer’s eventual grudging reflections on the phenomenon of theme park evolution: that Disney as a company owes more to the 99% of visitors who don’t know about / mind Mr. Toad giving way to Winnie the Pooh than to the passionate minority who do, and that an attraction disappearing doesn’t erase the joy and fond memories anyone got from it while it was still around.

One ironic truth about this publication is that it has already grown outdated. In the four years since it was released in 2018, Disney has scrapped the FastPass+ reservation system for a rather different Genie+ / Individual Lighting Lane alternative, discontinued the Magical Express shuttle to and from the local airport, altered the arrangement of ‘Extra Magic Hours’ for resort hotel guests, and more. A new Tron-themed roller coaster is being built in Tomorrowland, and Splash Mountain will soon be replaced / rethemed into Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. For readers who notice those details as they affect Perjurer’s descriptions and recommendations, the book itself has become an inadvertent time capsule for the Magic Kingdom of a particular moment in history.

Nevertheless, I think this is an interesting read for anyone who appreciates theme parks or is planning to go to this one, so long as you keep in mind that its advice probably shouldn’t be taken literally. I haven’t liked it quite as much as the author’s videos, but I’ve still learned a lot and would happily pick up any subsequent volumes covering Epcot or the rest.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Under Dog and Other Stories by Agatha Christie

Book #107 of 2022:

The Under Dog and Other Stories by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #31)

Hercule Poirot remains a character I can find either entertaining or frustrating on occasion, and I regret to report that in this collection, he leans decidedly towards the latter. He makes more guesses than strict deductions, and when his friend Hastings calls him out on that, he protests that he is simply applying “psychology” to the situation. At several points, he also lies to a witness or suspect in order to entrap them and secure their cooperation, which is both a devious trick and a sign of how unchallenging these particular cases are when everyone is so easily hoodwinked. (One culprit is caught merely by the detective loudly announcing he has found a piece of evidence that will be kept securely in his room and then having his valet wait to see who comes to steal it.)

There’s some repetition for anyone reading through the Poirot series in publication order too, for although this volume was released in 1951, the nine stories within all date back to the 1920s, and a few had already been reworked into other titles that author Agatha Christie published separately. “The Plymouth Express” is an early version of her 1928 novel The Mystery of the Blue Train, for instance, and “The Submarine Plans” was expanded into the novella The Incredible Theft and included in the 1937 book Murder in the Mews. None of these are nearly strong or remarkable enough to be worth revisiting in this way, which further adds to my low impression here.

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

★★☆☆☆