First up: books with movie connections!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Welcome once again to our recurring MCC feature in which I scribble capsule reviews of everything I’ve read lately that was published in a physical format over a certain page count with a squarebound spine on it — novels, original graphic novels, trade paperbacks, infrequent nonfiction dalliances, and so on. Due to the way I structure my media-consumption time blocks, the list will always feature more graphic novels than works of prose and pure text, though I do try to diversify my literary diet as time and acquisitions permit.

Occasionally I’ll sneak in a contemporary review if I’ve gone out of my way to buy and read something brand new. Every so often I’ll borrow from my wife or from our local library. But the majority of our spotlighted works are presented years after the rest of the world already finished and moved on from them because I’m drawing from my vast unread pile that presently occupies four oversize shelves comprising thirty-three years of uncontrolled book shopping. I’ve occasionally pruned the pile, but as you can imagine, cut out one unread book and three more take its place…

…unless we do as Heracles and Iolaus did with the Hydra: set everything on fire so it can’t regrow. We’re not doing that; consequently, the never-ending literary consumption continues. So far we’ve covered two critical tomes by a premier TV critic, the two comics creators who showed up in my 2025 stacks the most, and a selection of graphic novels and trades that were great and/or tall. Next up: nothing but prose! Novels, memoirs, short-story collections — all words and virtually no pictures, apart from some spot illustrations.

26. John Jackson Miller, Batman: Resurrection (2024). The Comichron proprietor, erstwhile Comics Buyer’s Guide editor and prolific novelist in the worlds of Star Trek and Star Wars turns his attentions next to the curiously specific milieu of Tim Burton’s two Batman films. Miller has fun weaving an amalgam of early versions of Clayface (coming soon to theaters!) into Anton Furst’s baroque Gotham City and nails the actors’ personas (Robert Wuhl comes especially alive). One major qualm: Burton’s vision was several Batmen ago and has been topped on screens a few times since. I’m not sure how much I really want to revisit every version of every IP I’ve ever enjoyed for at least fifteen minutes, even one with fun follow-ups to previous events (e.g., what became of the Flugelheim Museum after the Joker’s “Partyman” spree).

27. Percival Everett, Erasure (2001). Now a major motion picture! Cord Jefferson’s adaptation American Fiction was one of my favorite Best Picture nominees of 2023 and I wasn’t kidding when I said I added the book to my want-list. The book and the film (currently on Prime Video) concern an erudite novelist who’s Black but refuses to be pigeonholed as a Black Writer, but out of desperation to cover his mom’s mounting elder-care bills scores a lucrative deal writing a fake Black-gangsta memoir practically tailor-made for liberal bookworms who super-love streetwise hard-luck minority anecdotes. It’s surprising how much of the book made it into the film, but the advantages of experiencing the complete package — besides enjoying the original writing — include the unfilmable chapters from “Stagg’s” intentionally cringey narrative and from Monk’s hyperpretensious niche-lit. Conversely, an omitted subplot about his dead father’s now-adult love child seems fairly inessential, but the singular ending is more ambiguous than the film’s Wayne’s World-esque multi-ending gag, instead leaving Monk’s fate to our imaginations as an essay question rather than a narrowed multiple-choice.

28. Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye (2006). Now a major motion picture! The creepy historical-fictive mystery follows retired Detective Augustus Landor, summoned to investigate a peculiar death at early 19th-century West Point, who soon recruits as his sidekick the eager young Cadet Edgar Allan Poe. The book is volumes better than Scott Cooper’s Netflix adaptation, which was worth the effort but has less time for exploration and accelerates too rashly toward its outlandish climax. What feels like a slow-burn conspiracy in the novel comes off as a baffling tonal leap writ large. Reading the first-person narrative in Christian Bale’s voice in my head was a perfect match, but while Harry Melling’s Poe was a subtle rendition, its epistolary chapters — notes from Poe to Landor with his side-quest updates — are a richer context for peering inside the mind of the idealistic, inquisitive, pre-alcoholic writer-to-be.

29. Werner Herzog, The Twilight World (2021). The legendary director, TV guest star (The Mandalorian! The SImpsons! Parks and Rec!), and octogenarian Instagram influencer also dabbles in other media, such as this short novel, which I bought as a vacation souvenir from a Charleston bookstore. Inspired by his real-life meeting with one of the last Japanese soldiers in deep island exile to concede WWII was over, Herzog imagines what life would’ve been like for the soldier and his few remaining compatriots as they maintained their vigil for decades and rebuffed all outside-world intervention until and unless someone could definitively convince him his superiors had surrendered and it was time to stand down at long last…which finally happened in 1974. It’s a vividly naturalistic contemplation of single-minded devotion to duty and how a personal code of honor can become a sole source of meaning in one’s life when we refuse to acknowledge that everything else has fallen away.

Two memoirs and two more original novels.

30. Rainn Wilson, The Bassoon King: My Life in Art, Faith, and Idiocy (2015). Venture if you will into the backstory of the Emmy Award Winner who’d make millions laugh and/or recoil as TV’s Dwight K. Schrute, Assistant to the Regional Manager from The Office. Learn of his preschool years in Nicaragua, the culture shock upon moving back to America, the odd jobs, the odder acting roles, fame, love, hardships, his B’nai B’rith beliefs and the rise of his spiritual-minded, interfaith Soul Pancake book, site, channel, and community (which he later sold off and, er, has been through some stuff since this was published). Come for the sitcom anecdotes and memories, stay for the bigger picture about a grateful artist who’s done far more with his life than suffer jokes about beets.

31. Paul Reiser, Familyhood (2011). I’m old enough to remember when the Mad About You star, greedy Aliens villain, and redeemable Stranger Things scientist was a standup comic and My Two Dads star, and recall checking out his first book Parenthood from the library after it came out way back in 1994. When we met him last year at a comic con, that’s when I learned he’d turned it into a trilogy. I’ve missed the middle volume Babyhood, but at least I got to read the finale (?), in which his wife and two sons star in his written standup routines and heartfelt memories, especially warmest when sharing about his son with cerebral palsy. He’s still got his wits and his wit, back in 2011 and today.

(In more recent times he and his son Leon co-wrote a Marvel miniseries called Aliens: What If…? — not listed here because I read its monthly comics release — that posits an alt-timeline where Carter Burke didn’t get his skull caved in offscreen, reunited with his now-adult daughter, rethought his life and of course had to fight more xenomorphs. As you can imagine, Reiser captures his own voice perfectly. Highly recommended for fans of the IP.)

32. John Scalzi, Starter Villain (2023). Another round of breezy SF from the frequently award-winning novelist and blogger about an ordinary schmuck who learns his distant uncle was a de facto James Bond villain who’s just died and bequeathed him a modest (if finite) fortune, an evil empire, a secret volcanic island lair, and a typing cat as his mentor. Once again, hilarity ensues! I’m still running a few books behind, but maybe someday I’ll catch up with his fandom and buy/read his books at release?

33. Elizabeth McCracken, Niagara Falls All Over Again (2001). A recommendation from Nick Hornby’s Substack — in what was originally a free-to-read post before his current sabbatical — this seemingly overlooked gem does for vaudevllle history what Michael Chabon’s Kavalier and Klay did for comics history, except I didn’t have to consult online dictionaries to decode new vocabulary words. A seriocomic retcon of old-timey comedy duos follows the life and vicissitudes of a onetime silent-film star who finds fame when paired with a more rapaciously self-indulgent partner. Faintly resembling Laurel and Hardy — though they also exist here — theirs is a lively, sometimes tragic tale of creative matchmaking, joint success, boastful downfalls, and coping after the spotlights have burned out. Also: fun vaudeville trivia! Like how Charlie Chaplin stole his classic “making cute tiny dancing feet out of potatoes on forks” gag from Fatty Arbuckle.

Short stories! Nothing but shorts!

34. Jonathan Wilkins, ed., Star Trek Explorer Presents: “A Year to the Day That I Saw Myself Die” and Other Stories (2024). A magazine that qualifies for inclusion here only because it’s hardcover, this anthology covers the spectrum of Trek time frames and shows from the original up through Picard season 3. Among the keepers are David Mack’s distant-future contemplation of Odo surviving long enough to witness The Burn; Jake Black introducing Starfleet Cadet Nog to Groundskeeper Boothby, who encourages the bullied Ferengi and reminds him he’s going through exactly what every First Member of a Given Species to Attend Starfleet Academy goes through; Rich Handley’s animated-series jaunt set on Arex’s home planet; and the drop-dead funniest of the bunch, Greg Cox crossing space flimflam-man Cyrano Jones with the notorious spores from “This Side of Paradise”.

35. Robert Greenberger, ed., Thrilling Adventure Yarns 2025 (uh, 2025). The pulp-fiction anthology series’ most recent Kickstarter reward elicits tales from a variety of familiar names from SF and comics past. I missed any and all previous volumes, but adding Christopher Priest to a roster is nearly always enough to divest me of my cash. His complicated cop drama was of course worth the pledge, but other winners include Michael Jan Friedman’s Professor Mystic, very much in the mold of Silver Age superheroes with oddly specific weaknesses; and roman à clef meta-fiction from longtime Superman writer and novelist par excellence Elliot S! Maggin, who draws from his own experiences about how DC swept away their continuity in ’85 and broomed a lot of older writers like him out the door. The most out-of-the-blue choice to us newcomers: Win Scott Eckert’s revival of Irma Vep, the master thief from the French silent-film serial Les Vampires — proof positive that any IP in world history is ripe for a comeback in the right fan’s hands.

36. Ron Fortier, ed., Bass Reeves: Frontier Marshal Vol. 5 (2022). Another ongoing anthology unfamiliar to me until its cover artist tabled at C2E2, this one’s all rowdy Westerns starring the real-life Black frontier lawman I’d never heard of till future Academy Award Nominee Colman Domingo played him in a 2017 episode of NBC’s Timeless. All four tales are worth checking out, including one with him defending a Russian-Jewish snake-oil salesman, one about a gun-toting youngster unaware that withdrawing your deceased loved one’s accounts requires a lot of paperwork, and, in the most rousing adventure by prolific licensed-property novelist Mel Odom (Buffy, NCIS, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, et al.), an intersection of ghosts, witchcraft, and a resurrected gunman. Come for lessons about the Old West, stay for the nods to other Westerns. (One story arms Reeves with a Winchester ’73!)

37. E.S. Fein, Ascendescension/The Process Is Love (2022) The young author tabled at a con and engaged us in friendly chitchat, prompting me to pick up his short collection of shorts, varying in quality and reminding me of my own creative writing attempts from long, long, looong ago. Among those that I’d offer constructive criticism for, the most memorable envisions several of humanity’s quantum computers rebelling and uniting into a single consciousness that calls itself Q, which, as any Trek viewer can imagine, jolted me right out of the story on the first page.

To be concluded!