I saw this movie when it first came out – what Batman fan (or, in my case, Joker fan) didn’t? I enjoyed it. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t feel like I had wasted 80 minutes of my life by watching it. I have never read the comic on which the movie was based, it’s on my list though.

This book is set in the year 1988. It tells the story of Batman and Batgirl as they do what they do best – fight crime and try to save Gotham City from a new street drug named Giggle Sniff which is highly addictive and has fatal side effects. The authors do a good job of casually name dropping a lot of well known characters from the Batman series: Alfred, Robin, Maxie Zeus, The Mad Hatter, Killer Croc, Dr. Tompkins, and so on. This book doesn’t focus entirely on the protagonists however as it zones in on other characters as each chapter moves the spotlight to someone else.

My first complaint with this book was that despite its title, and despite the movies focus on the Joker, apart from a few brief short chapters early on in the book he’s only in this final chapters of this novel. At the start Batman and Batgirl fight Maxie Zeus, then the middle of the book focuses on a drug deal, and the Joker isn’t the main concern until the end.

My second complaint is that if you have seen the movie then the book doesn’t really add anything of interest. It’s not a literal book of the movie, there is some added backstory and it goes further than the ending of the movie, it even clears up the controversy about the films ending (you’ll know what I’m talking about if you have seen it). But I felt that it had a lot of filler content that didn’t add anything to the story. I feel that this story works well in a more visual format such as a film or a comic, but it did not translate well to a book.

My third complaint, which is very minor, was that I found a few parts of the book very awkwardly written. The fight scene at the start against Maxie’s two robotic dogs just felt like “Batman jumped over one dog, kicked the other, then threw a batarang at the first, then punched the other”, it was too long and not varied enough for the length. Other sentences were just badly written as if there was a word missing. This did not happen frequently enough that it made the book hard to read, and like I said it was just a minor issue for me.

Overall I’d give this book a 2/5 star rating. I would only recommend it if you really really want to read it, but if you’re just a small fan of the series or curious about the story then I’d propose for you to watch the movie instead.