Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Where It All Began

Carrie by Stephen King

by Leave a Comment

There’s not a lot to say about reading Carrie because everyone already knows the story. I did and I hadn’t even the seen either of the movie adaptations. Carrie is bullied at school because she her strict religious upbringing has left her a near-total outcast from normal teenage society. When she gets her long-delayed first period during a post-gym class shower, she freaks out because she thinks that she’s bleeding to death. The other girls think this is hilarious and mock Carrie by throwing sanitary […]

If Jack Reacher were written by Tom Clancy, but with monsters

Patient Zero by Jonathan Maberry

Zero Tolerance by Jonathan Maberry

Material Witness by Jonathan Maberry

Deep, Deep Dark by Jonathan Maberry

by Leave a Comment

Joe Ledger works for the Baltimore PD, and was an Army Ranger back before 9/11 blew up the world. He’s a pretty normal dude in his mid-30s, except he’s an absolute badass who’s really good at beating people up. We’ve seen this story told a thousand times. If this was a movie in the ’80s, it’d probably star Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone. If it was the ’90s, it’d probably star Mel Gibson or Bruce Willis. If it was made today….I don’t know. Maybe the […]

Looks like I’ll be gorging myself on these

Feed by Mira Grant

by 2 Comments

Feed is a stonking little zombie novel which is also the opening entry in a series, and one that I enjoyed so much that I immediately downloaded the rest on finishing.  Feed is set twenty years after the Rising, when George Romero films stopped being horror films and started being survival guides. Humanity found a cure for the common cold, as well as a cure for cancer. But when the two combined, it created the Kellis-Amberlee virus and now everyone in the world is infected […]

Stranger King

Revival by Stephen King

by Leave a Comment

A six-year-old boy playing with his toy soldiers in the front yard is interrupted by a visitor, the new minister at the family church. The Rev. Charles Jacobs is bright and energetic, with his pretty wife and young son completing a picture-perfect family. The six-year-old, Jamie Morton, will become enthralled by Jacobs and his twin passions, for God and electricity. Conducting youth service in the church basement, Rev. Jacobs spices up his scripture lessons with his various electrical toys and experiments, including a toy Jesus […]

A disappointing end to a promising series

The Cthulhu Casebooks - Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows by James Lovegrove

by 1 Comment

Endings are always difficult. Wrapping up a series based on someone else’s original work, doubly so (a fact all Game of Thrones fans learned the hard way this year). This book concludes Lovegrove’s trilogy of placing Holmes into a Lovecraftian universe and the results are not that great. The fist difficulty is with the source material. Doyle only returned to Holmes reluctantly, and the stories of Holmes towards the end did not have the same energy or enthusiasm as the earlier works. Yes, Lovegrove incorporates […]

Horrors of the Road

Alice Isn't Dead by Joseph Fink

by Leave a Comment

I heard about Alice Isn’t Dead in a review, I think maybe NPR. It sounded interesting so I picked it up. What I noticed quickly but hadn’t realized at first is that the author, Joseph Fink, is one of the Welcome to Night Vale guys; this tells you a lot about the tone and general type of story to expect if you’re familiar with either the podcast (I am not) or the first novel (which I’ve read). The novel was more openly horror than I […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo