Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Weirdness in Wink

American Elsewhere by Robert Jackson Bennett

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American Elsewhere only popped onto my radar thanks to a Cannonball review, so thank you for putting a new (to me) writer on my horizon. A slow burn, it put me very much in mind of HP Lovecraft (minus the racism) living in a Stephen King town. I happen to love that kind of setting, so American Elsewhere turned out to be my kind of catnip. Mona Bright has been having a difficult few years. An ex-cop, currently unemployed and drifting following the death of […]

Ramblin’ Rose

Rose Madder by Stephen King

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I’ve become quite a fan of Stephen King in recent years, but a frequent complaint from the less enamored rings true about Rose Madder: the man could stand an editor. I have no doubt that had anyone not named Stephen King submitted this book as a manuscript, any editor worth his or her salt would have cut about 100 pages (they all would choose the same 100 pages to cut, I bet) and made this a much better book. As it is, Rose Madder is […]

Human Nature vs. Theme Park

FantasticLand by Mike Bockoven

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This was everything I want an audiobook to be, and I could barely stop listening to it. So far, it is my favorite audiobook of the year. The voice acting is fantastic, with two actors reading for dozens of characters, and the excitement and thrill the book promises is actually delivered. You know what’s coming at the end, the interview with the subject we’ve all been waiting to hear from, and it’s as chilling as you could hope it will be. It’s a bit slow […]

“For love is no part of the dreamworld. Love belongs to Desire, and Desire is always cruel.”

The Sandman, Vol. 2: The Doll's House by Neil Gaiman

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I didn’t like this one as much as I did the first one, and I don’t think it’s because I read the Kindle version. The whole series is on Kindle Unlimited (the 30th anniversary editions), a service I’m already paying for, so why not try it out in that medium? The formatting on the Kindle version is actually pretty great when you get into the actual comic. The story zooms in on panels and focuses on all the right spots, and it’s big enough to […]

THE END IS NOT NEAR, IT HAS ALREADY HAPPENED, WE JUST DIDN’T CARE

This Book is Full Of Spiders by David Wong

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This Book is Full of Spiders (Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It) continues the story of David Wong, his best friend John Cheese and his girlfriend Amy Sullivan, as they contend with a new set of nefarious beings from other dimensions, only visible to them, after being exposed to a mysterious drug in the first novel in the series, John Dies at the End. This time, their home town of [REDACTED] is being taken over by what appears to be a deadly virus, but only John […]

A ghost story without much story

The Graveyard Apartment by Mariko Koike

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How long would you stay if you suspected your new apartment was haunted? A week? Six months? Two hundred pages? Misao, her husband Teppei, and their small daughter move into a gorgeous new apartment building. The price is suspiciously low, because the building is located right next to a cemetery, temple, and crematorium. Also suspicious: half the new apartments are empty, and the ones that are occupied are rapidly losing their tenants. The first day they move in, the family’s parakeet dies, and the little […]



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