Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Worth your time, but maybe not the lingering headache

The Treatment by Mo Hayder

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Crime fiction is an odd thing. Visit your average thriller-horror-Facebook group and you’ll regularly find people looking for books that portray the extremes of human behaviour. “The sicker the better”, as they put it. Weirdly, The Treatment by Mo Hayder is not one that pops up very often – possibly because it’s about 20 years old – but in all honesty, this book is intense. We didn’t believe in Trigger Warnings in 2022 but this book could do with a couple of them.  On a […]

What Else Would You Look With?

My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

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Promising: Maybe every final girl in the history of final girls has had a horror chick whispering to her from just off-screen. Maybe this isn’t a deviation but the usual build. Just one nobody ever knows about until they’re smack-dab in the beating heart of it. What? Jade looks at him with just her eyes. Stephen Graham Jones’ My Heart is a Chainsaw is an uneven horror story that follows Jade, an alienated teenager who is obsessed with slasher films. Happenings in her town indicate […]

My first Grady Hendrix book, won’t be my last!

The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

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30 Books in 30 Days, Vol. 2 Book 13/30 I was discombobulated for most of listening to this book. But I was interested the whole way through, and nothing about it felt lazy or half-done, like a certain other author’s work did for me. I should probably state up front that I am not at all a fan of slasher movies. In fact, I quite dislike them in general because I find them incredibly stressful and not cathartic in any way (although I have seen […]

Ladies loving ladies and sucking blood in 1872.

Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

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30 Books in 30 Days, Vol. 2 Book 11/30 This sure was something, I tell you what. Before I get to the actual review, I do want to say that I am specifically referring to the version edited by Carmen Maria Machado, with an introduction and footnotes by her. Both things fundamentally changed the experience of reading this. I am still boggled in the mind that this is a book about lesbian vampires and their young female victims being seduced, and it was written in […]

Love, Ghosts and Werewolves

Blackwater by Jeannette Arroyo and Ren Graham

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I found a way to read Blackwater by Jeannette Arroyo and Ren Graham online. Now, I will tell you, buy the book in July instead of doing this. I mean, I read the book that way and still plan on purchasing a copy. Not only do you support an author/illustrator this way, but you will also want to read this book wherever you are. And if you have no service for phone or tablet or whatever kids read on these days, well old school is […]

A successful send-up is tricky to do, and I don’t think this one works

The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

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I loved Grady Hendrix’s book Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires. It was a wonderful, satirical send up of vampire novels and the Southern suburbs. I get that is wasn’t for everyone, but Hendrix really nailed his tongue-in-check, nearly meta take on vampire troupes and Southern suburb living. So when I saw that Hendrix had written a book to be a send of slasher films and final girls, I was stoked. Hendrix, however, missed this mark with this one. The set-up is straightforward: Lynette […]



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