Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

For the night is dark, and full of terrors

Through the Woods by Emily Carroll

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4.5 stars CBR13 Bingo: Shelfie In five creepy stories ranging from the historical to more recent times, writer and artist Emily Carroll gives us her take on proper spine-tingling fairy tales. Accompanied by her absolutely beautiful art, the tales are all the more chilling because of the illustrations. This absolutely qualifies as a graphic novel, or probably more accurately a graphic short story (or fairy tale) anthology. Some of the stories are short, some are longer, all managed to truly unnerve me, while also entertaining […]

The Black Lizard Book of Pulps – Otto Penzler (2007)

The Black Lizard Book of Pulps by Otto Penzler

The Third Murderer by Carroll John Daly

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Yeah this book is super long. I went to Otto Penzler’s bookstore in NY this summer. I didn’t see him there, but they mentioned him around the place a little. He’s very much into this material and his passion shows through in all the section breaks and introductions. The shorter introductions written by the other writers are very distinct. Laura Lippman and Harlan Coben both take the assignment in straightforward ways and introduce their sections — Dames and Crimefighters — in earnest. Harlan Ellison takes […]

Two 3* sci-fi novels

I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories by Bo-Young Kim, Sophie Bowman (Translator), Sung Ryu (Translator)

The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

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I’m Waiting for You and Other Stories This is a three star book because I liked “I’m Waiting for You” and “On My Way” much more than I liked “The Prophet of Corruption” and “That One Life.” “I’m Waiting for You” and “On My Way” take the concepts/consequences of faster-than-light travel and take them to their logical, inevitable ends (and, when I say end, I really mean end). Apparently written as a commission for man to use to propose to his female partner, this story […]

You’ll never look at a giant space worm the same way again.

Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back by Various

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When it comes to Star Wars two distinct story universes have to be discussed. The first, the movies, tend to be simplistic and aimed at children and pre-teens. The movies largely follow the Skywalker family and those ancillary to them, and while there are interesting tangents, they follow a pretty safe, unsurprising track. Even the movies that try to do something different such as The Last Jedi are eventually course-corrected back to the path that provides maximum merchandise sales and the least amount of controversy. […]

The Devil’s Details

Hit Man by Lawrence Block

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Read as part of CBR13Bingo: Gateway. This is an excellent introduction to Lawrence Block, one of my favorite writers. Also proved an excellent introduction for me to his Keller series.  I really don’t have the words to describe Lawrence Block. It’s an appreciation for him that has grown as I’ve gotten older and my tastes have evolved. In my 20s, I’d look for the pulpy mystery shlock with exciting hooks. Now that I’m older, I appreciate the mundane nature of life and how fictionally exciting […]

A Brief Moment in Time– In the Stories and In My Mind Alike

Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor

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Filthy Animals is a novel composed of a group of short stories and characters that all link together in some form or another. The first story deals with an emotional young man named Lionel as he begins embarking on strange and perilous encounters with a man in an open relationship. From there, we also meet a babysitter who has exploded her life, a group of teenagers that engage in a night of emotional and physical violence against one another, dancers at an academy, and a […]



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