Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Blanks by Grady Hendrix

The Blanks by Grady Hendrix

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Well dang. That is how you do it. I maybe forgive Grady Hendrix for that puppet book. Okay, I don’t. I just remembered enough in my brain to still be mad about that whole thing. Anyway, “The Blanks” is horror that is just pitch perfect. Does everything get explained? Nope. But it’s a wild and horrifying ride to the end. Maybe because we know what is next for this family, and it’s nothing good. “The Blanks” follows Rachel and her family (one boy, one girl) […]

The Indigo Room by Stephen Graham Jones

The Indigo Room by Stephen Graham Jones

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Honestly, “The Indigo Room” I swear reminds me a bit of some stories I read in a book when I was a kid. This will drive me up the wall later. But in essence, this short story deals with [redacted] and the horror it can bring. That worked for me somewhat, but the story just dragged weirdly in places and I thought that SGJ could have went a bit further with that ending. It made me think of the short story written by Ted Chiang […]

Jackknife by Joe Hill

Jackknife by Joe Hill

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Trigger warning: Gruesome animal death. Honestly, I don’t know what to say about this one except the main character, Dennis Lange, was a dreadful man. I didn’t feel sad about anything that happened, but think that Hill left too many plot threads I wish he had explored more. This one cried out for more pages IMHO since it just kind of hinted at things that didn’t make a lot of sense. I also think Hill wanted to talk about “canceling” and “MeToo” but this was […]

Gettin’ some lovin’

Young Men in Love: New Romance by Various

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Young Men in Love: New Romance by Anthony Oliveira, Joe Glass, Matt Miner (these two are highlighted as they are the ones in the email that included an online reader link), Luciano Vecchio, Bradley Clayton, Ilias Kyriazis, David Brame, Josh Cornillon and various others, came to me via an email from A Wave Blue World and Diamond Book Distributors. The email itself (which I assume was sent via a mailing list) was from Jesse who has sent other emails for the books they rep. And […]

A hopeful future with robots and food

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

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If you need a story of chosen family and hope and good food, Automatic Noodle absolutely fits the bill. This is a delightful novella of a near-future where California has split from the United States after war, and part of California progressiveness was to give civil rights to human equivalent embodied intelligence (HEEI) robots. But those rights are limited – they’re not able to use a bank, own property, and there’s lots of prejudice against robots (very allegorical to American attitudes towards immigrants and marginalized […]

Stag Dance by Torrey Peters

Stag Dance by Torrey Peters

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I thought this was a great collection. I thought the first story was great with a  sci-fi/speculative fiction bent, and the rest were interesting/great, but I think the one story entitled “Stag Dance” just went on a bit too long. It dragged down the rest of the collection. Be warned that there’s a graphic depiction of animal death in “The Chaser.” “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones” (5 stars)-This was a great start to the collection. We hear about something called The Rift Wars where […]



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