The Killing Joke - Christa Faust & Gary Phillips - Review

The black cat crept along the narrow top of the brick wall,

its wet fur glistening as rain fell on nighttime Gotham.

Rating:

2.5/5

Recommendation?

Nope, if you want to read purely about batman vs joker like the cover suggests I recommend reading the original comic version.

Warnings

This review contains spoilers

And let's just say that this story isn't very child-friendly. (which counts for the book, animated movie & original comic)

As soon as I spotted the cover and title I knew I had to buy this book and try it. I'm a big fan of Batman vs Mr J. So when I found out that there was a novelization of the "ultimate" Batman vs Joker story, I obviously thought yes, please! But after actually reading it I'm a bit disappointed and here's why:

It wasn't necessarily badly written, not at all actually. But the main issue for me is that there were two story-lines that just didn't have enough of a connection. You had the story about how the ultimate joke came to be and then the story about other bad guys dealing some drugs and killing each other. Yes, the drugs where called giggle sniff and where deprived of jokers laugh gas and yes, once a while there was a small cameo of a character from the other storyline. It just was not enough for me, because for me it felt like I was reading two separate books at once instead of one book with two storylines.

I was waiting for the moment that the two stories met up and made you think: ooh so that's the person that did this thing because of this reason and made this happen because of it. But that punchline never came.

I did enjoy reading the parts that are from the original story. By having it like a novel you get to read the thoughts of the characters more detailed and get a better idea of how the events made characters feel. Which I'm all for!

For the other story-line, I didn't really get a connection with the characters and because I wasn't invested in the characters I also wasn't invested in the story.

Another thing that I was a little bumped about is that in the beginning, they described these outer world robots made with alien technology and all that, but that part also felt like another story since for me it again wasn't intertwined with the rest of the story enough.

Overall I like the idea of a novelization of the Killing Joke, but I just wish they pulled the two story-lines together more so it would make more sense for it to be there.

So since I do really like half of the book and not the other half I decided to give it a 2.5 out of 5 rating.

I am planning on picking up the other 2 books of this series: Mad Love and Court of Owls which are written by other authors and see if I like those better.

Thank you for reading and don't forget:

Why so serious?

Hugs to all and much love!