Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

In the middle of a desolate Wednesday afternoon in the last sweltering days of May, a handful of mourners were gathered were gathered in the church dedicated to St. Jude Thaddeus in Mobile, Alabama.

The Elementals by Michael McDowell

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This is a short(ish) horror novel from 1981, and was written by the same writer of The Amulet which I thought was really weird and curious, but was also strangely harsh and bleak in a way that wasn’t much fun to read. This one is a lot better in terms of that bleakness. It’s a weird cross between say, Burnt Offerings and maybe a little All the King’s Men mixed in. So the plot here begins with a strange, closed-off family funeral at the end of […]

Scooby-Dooby-Cthulhu

Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero

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Thirteen years ago, a scrappy pack of teen detectives (and their faithful dog) solved a lake-monster mystery in a sleepy northwestern town. The guy in the monster suit would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids! Smash-cut to thirteen years later, and our teens are far from thriving members of society. Plagued by nightmares and hallucinations, powered by alcohol and violence, the twenty-something remnants of the Blyton Hills Detective Club are coming to a powerful realization: they caught the […]

Victorian Gothic and Lovecraft Mashup

Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire

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I liked Come Tumbling Down better than the previous installment of the Wayward Children series in terms of story, but I do think there was an over-emphasis on the concept of who’s the monster. Jack is back at the school but there’s something very wrong with her which if not fixed will definitely destroy her. This was the premise in the previews I’d seen and I have to admit I didn’t see that problem itself coming, although in hindsight it does suit their folkloric homeland […]

“That which does not kill us,” I said, “has to get up extra early in the morning if it wants to get us next time.”

Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch

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Peter Grant and his partner of sorts, Lesley May, have to do a lot of explaining themselves. Not just their actions as members of The Folly, the (tiny) branch of the London Met that deals with “unusual circumstances”, but also every reference that they make about the modern world. Why is that? They’re making these references to The Nightingale; their commanding officer who has been fighting the bad guys (thieves, murderers, Nazis) since before WWII. Before WWII? But how? Well, Nightingale stopped aging in the […]

Gods, Goddesses, Mortals, Action!

The Red Pyramid book one of The Kane Chronicles by Orpheus Collar

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Rick Riordan is a popular author. I have not had the pleasure of reading his novels, but I have meet him once and have read two of his books adapted for the graphic novel format. The Red Pyramid book one of The Kane Chronicles was adapted by Orpheus Collar. And while it is a good story (we are following Egyptian mythology this time), it is also a slow story in places. It took me several days to finish it, as I was only able to […]

“There shall be a fire that knows your name”

Annihilation: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy Book 1) by Jeff VanderMeer

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I’m not adept at describing great things. Maybe at comparing great things. This book reminds me of some of my all-time favorite science fiction: the unbearable and beautiful encounter with the unknowable in Kubrick’s 2001, the complete experience of organic otherness in Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, the blissful insanity resulting being in the midst of the majesty of nature and space in Alex Garland’s movie Sunshine. This book has all of those things, and it’s also it’s own creation. If you’ve ever seen a trailer […]



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