Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

My Pen is Dry, The Door is Open, and Something is Waiting

Melmoth: A Novel by Sarah Perry

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This is a modern novel that strikes the perfect feeling of a Gothic novel in the style of Poe or Shelly. It is eerie and creepy with a ton of atmosphere and most of the fear and horror coming from not jump scares, but just that feeling that something is going to happen. Also, the monster is the humans. It’s always the humans… but not always int he way you think. Fair warning, I don’t give any major spoilers ahead, but this is a very […]

Switching it up to Faerie Tale Gothic

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  Just last week, I reviewed one of the books in Seanan McGuire’s October Daye series, which is steeped in faerie folklore and mythology. There’s nothing like a good fairytale retelling – folklore characters are in the public domain and are fair game for any author who wants to write their own interpretation of them. It can be fascinating to see what direction different people decide to take. For example, the Cait Sith (or Cait Sidhe) of the October Daye universe are wildly different to […]

I don’t think it’s aged all that well (Plus, half Cannonball!)

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I’ve heard James’ The Turn of the Screw as being a classic Gothic novel, the one that basically begat a genre and inspired authors like Shirley Jackson (whose books I’ve loved so far in my readings). I chose this one for the ‘This Old Thing’ bingo square (it was published in 1898), and I was really excited to finally sit down and read it Unfortunately, I was disappointed. The plot is about a young governess who takes a posting that’s too good to be true in an […]

Full of sound and fury…

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My heart was beating so fast at the end of the first section of The Quick, and Lauren Owen’s ability to write a ripping cliffhanger at section ends was phenomenal. She also has a gift for developing characters that feel real and compelling; to be fair, not all characters – I thought James Norbury, around whom much of the action revolves, was kind of a drip, for example. However, when I thought back over what I read, there was little there there. To take a […]

Well, I think I’ll go and oil my gun.

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Opening salvo, hot take: everything Tom Stoppard has ever written is incredible; this isn’t his best work. The Real Inspector Hound is the first live production of a Stoppard play I ever saw, followed about a year and a half later by Arcadia. So, I will always be grateful to Hound for preparing me, because otherwise Arcadia might have melted my brain, and working directly with Tom (humblebrag) on The Coast of Utopia would have been the actual death of me. Hound is a delight. […]

A healthy dose of indifference and melancholy

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So these two books round out my catching up on lost reviews. I feel like I’ve read a hundred books that I’ve had to force myself to review, because I either didn’t like them enough to form opinions, or couldn’t organize my thoughts well enough to fairly elucidate them. But, now that the pressure of playing catch-up is over, maybe I’ll do a better job going forward. 11. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (3 stars) Merricat Blackwood, her older sister Constance, […]



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