Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“No one ever believes me when I tell them my uncle Earl owns a museum.”

The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher

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This is very readable and I’m glad I picked it up randomly at Barnes & Noble, but it didn’t live up to my hopes. I enjoyed Paladin’s Grace so much that I figured I’d see how Kingfisher did at horror. The Hollow Places follows Kara as she tries to recover from her recent divorce. She comes back to her small hometown to live with her uncle, who runs the Wonder Museum, full of taxidermy, Bigfoot memorabilia, and a picture of the Pope made of sunflower […]

A Great Collection of Short Horror Stories

Full Throttle by Joe Hill

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Any book I buy twice is a good one, and Full Throttle lived up to my recollections as fast-paced, fun reading. This book collects of a bunch of Joe Hill’s short stories, and it’s a great representation of his work. Two stories in here are co-written with his father, but the bulk of the collection is Hill’s work alone, and he really knows how to write. Someone once said that Hill writes better King than King does, which is debatable, but I tore through this […]

Young love and demon hunting

Mooncakes by Suzanne Walker and Wendy Xu

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CBR14 Bingo: Cozy (this is a super-sweet YA comic. While there are some dark themes, the main vibe here is absolutely cozy.) Nova Huang (she/her) is an orphaned young witch, although she sees the ghosts of her parents during each major holiday, and sometimes just when they feel she might need advice or a good talking to. She lives with her two grandmothers, who sell books of both the mundane and magical varieties. Tam (they/them) on the other hand, seems to have been on their […]

Title Says It All

Suburban Hell by Maureen Kilmer

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Read as part of CBR14 Bingo: Monster. One of the women in a group of suburban mom friends turns into a literal monster and it’s up to the other women to save her. For almost thirty years (maybe going on forty), the suburbs have been used as a setting to explore the murky themes beyond the American idyll of house/car/2.5 kids. From mystery to horror to…well whatever John Waters does, we’ve often seen the lily white burbs are not all they seem. The Tom Hanks-esque […]

Personal Essays on Horror, from a Queer Angle

It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror by Joe Vallese (editor)

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When I saw that It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror came out this month I headed immediately to my library catalog to request it and then proceeded to consume it over three evenings. By and large this is an excellent collection of essays featuring queer authors of many stripes taking a movie, sometimes two, and either pulling them apart to discuss representation, or explain why they became fixated on a certain film, or how a film can help them process part of […]

Don’t Look Now & Other Stories

Don't Look Now & Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier

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I bought this collection a few months back and then never got around to finishing it until now. Apparently insomnia has claimed me again, and I finally finished some books and put some others on the DNF list. Per usual, here are my ratings for each story in the collection. Overall I gave this 4 stars since some of the stories were baffling to me. I don’t know what message I was supposed to be getting. “Don’t Look Now” (5 stars)-John and Laura are a […]



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