Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Demonology

Play Nice by Rachel Harrison

Fiend by Alma Katsu

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I read two books last week, both horror, both the kind of horror that used its tropes to tell a larger tale… Play Nice**** I’ve confessed my love for Rachel Harrison’s work many times in this space. If you don’t count Stephen King — who I don’t exclusively read for horror — Harrison is my favorite horror writer. I love her textured takes on womanhood and the decisions women have to make at critical moments of their lives. I’m glad I was cued into her […]

Break your silence if you would/before the sun goes down for good

The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James

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It’s 1982, and small-town Viv has big-city ambitions. Mostly, she just wants to get out of the town where she has lived all her life; she has a vague ambition to move to New York and become an actress, so off she goes in spite of her mother’s protestations. One dodgy hitchhiker later and she ends up at the Sun Down Motel, a run down establishment in the town of Fell, New York. The hotel manager offers her free board in exchange for running the […]

Twist and Shout

The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware

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Rowan works at a London daycare with the suitably horrible name Little Nippers. Though she likes the children, she dislikes her coworkers and the put-upon, complaining parents that she has to deal with. She lives in a cramped, run-down apartment, which she shares with a coworker who is now on Sabbatical. So when she finds a job ad for a live-in nanny on a country estate in the Scottish Highlands, she does whatever she can to get the job. It doesn’t go well; the book […]

Holiday Reads Part Deux, because I apparently read better in a tent

Craven Manor by Darcy Coates

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John Le Carré

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Craven Manor (Darcy Coates) *** Daniel is down on his luck. He’s a decent guy (this is made abundantly clear) but the only thing keeping him from homelessness is his slob of a cousin. One day, a letter is pushed underneath the door of Daniel’s apartment, mysteriously offering him a job on a mysterious manor that Daniel has never seen even though he grew up in the town. With great trepidation, he makes his way over to Craven Manor, an abandoned home in the middle […]

Home, Very Sweet, Home

A Peculiar Haunted House by Paul Czajak

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I have had the opportunity to read A Peculiar Haunted House by Paul Czajak a few times now (it is due mid August 2024) via online reader copies. And each time I think it gets better. The idea is simple: a house on the street is too peculiar for anyone to live in. In fact it probably is haunted. Spoiler: It is!  Because every time someone moves in and tries to remodel and change things about,  the house will not have anything to do with […]

Yeah, I Don’t Know

Keeper of Enchanted Rooms by Charlie N. Holmberg

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There was a lot I liked about this, but somehow, it kept falling into Uncanny Valley territory for me. Hulda Larkin, a very self-possessed young woman, is in the employment of BIKER (Boston Institute for the Keeping of Enchanted Rooms – an acronym that consistently threw me off). It is her job to subdue enchanted homes into domesticity, in order to preserve their historical magical properties.  In the year 1846, she has been sent to an isolated mansion on a remote island in Rhode Island.  […]



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