The thing about Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden novels is that while they are light reads, they are also nourishing in a way that only the best blockbusters are. I’m not talking Simon West or Stephen Sommers, but guys like James Cameron or the BOURNE movies by Paul Greengrass. They have a brain, a heart, and they engage you without asking you to check your brain at the door the way you would with a James Patterson or Dan Brown novel. If you don’t want to be engaged by your fiction … man, I don’t know what to tell you. Try hard drugs — it’s the same effect and often more interesting an experience.
The setup for TURN COAT — the 11th of a projected 20 — is so simple that I love it: A big-time warden named Morgan, a sort of police officer for wizards, collapses onto maverick wizard Dresden’s doorstep and gasps, “Help me. The wardens are after me.”
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Josh Bazell’s BEAT THE REAPER is a remarkably polished and slick novel for a first-time author. It’s a very funny and breezy read, and should find an audience, and I’m very excited by where he’ll go in his writing career.
But …
See, this is the hard part about reviewing things: You can’t ignore the weak parts, and if you do and write about it anyway, that’s a form of intellectual dishonesty. I wanted to love BEAT THE REAPER — I really did, I rarely have so much fun with a novel. As it is, it’s an almost great novel.
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10. JOKER by Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo — It’s a myth that murderous psychopaths are actually diabolical geniuses like Hannibal Lecter. They would be more like Ted Bundy or BTK: smart enough to blend and charming enough that you’d expect nothing. But in a comic book world, it is perfectly acceptable that The Joker could talk his way out of the Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane by convincing the doctors he was cured. It’s a neat idea and while I’m pretty sure it’s been done before, it’s never been done this well.
Joker is a hard villain to write. Use him too often, he loses menace (much like Anthony Hopkins isn’t quite as scary now that we know his origin, rather than just a man that came from nowhere without an explanation for his evil); write a bad story with him, and you wonder why he’s held up as the ultimate Batman villain. Brian Azzarello, creator of the brilliant neo-noir conspiracy comic 100 BULLETS, likely knew these facts about The Joker as well, and set out to make him a scary character again.
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