Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

This is the slasher send-up I wanted

My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

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TW: abuse, alcoholism, self-harm, suicide BINGO: COLD [a portion of the story takes place in the frozen Idaho winter; also there are some cold-blooded murders] Jade is obsessed with horror movies. Specifically she loves slashers. She knows everything there is to know about the movies, the plots, the directors, the film-making process, everything. It is her entire life and personality, to a fault. She doesn’t have much else to do in a small town in Proofrock, Idaho. She even weaves in her slasher obsession into her […]

Competent, Readable Science Fiction

Darwinia by Robert Charles Wilson

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Robert Charles Wilson writes enjoyable, twisty sc-fi and Darwinia fits into his usual pattern of work. It’s a straight forward book that I know I’ve read before, but I had no memory of any of the twists or the plot. I guess that’s part of my general sense of okayness with the book — it’s not groundbreaking or revelatory, but it is competent and fun, and not everything is going to be Ursula K LeGuin. You’ll probably like it but won’t remember it in a year. I […]

Revelator: Sometimes God is One of Us

Revelator: A Novel by Daryl Gregory

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To risk starting out on an annoyingly pretentious foot, Daryl Gregory is an author I liked before he was cool. I’d been enjoying his work before he broke out into the front tables of bookstores with Spoonbenders, and I feel an affection for his writing and the interesting things he does within the horror/fantasy field. I find him to be a writer like Robert Charles Wilson, a sure-footed storyteller whose name on the cover of a genre novel guarantees an interesting and fast moving read. […]

“Lip . . . Dip . . . Paint.”

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore

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What I have to say about this book can be whittled down to one classic Samuel L. Jackson moment in cinema: And I truly mean that. Anyone with an ounce of empathy will find this one a tough go. Moore extensively researched the women this story is about, and she pulled not only from scholarly books and articles about them, but from their own personal correspondence, journals, and memories from friends and family. The result is that you get a clear picture of just exactly […]

My high hopes for horror were halted

Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez

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I read another one of Enriquez’s collections of short stories, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, earlier this year. I loved that collection so much. In my review, I called it the ‘most effective collection of short stories I [had] ever read’ and a ‘knockout’. I figured that Things We Lost in the Fire would be similar. Unfortunately that is not the case. In Things We Lost in the Fire, we have the same elements in each short story present in the collection of short stories in The Dangers […]

A masterclass in the novella; body horror and racism collide.

Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark

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We know that the people who join the Ku Klux Klan are monsters. Average people who act in monstrous, horrible ways. But what if some of the Klan members were actual monsters? Giant, hulking, dog-like beasts that want to consume and destroy Black people? Such is the premise of Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark. Maryse, a Black woman, hunts these monsters in Prohibition America with the help of her magical sword infused with the anger, pain, and despair of Black men and women of […]



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