Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Pike, This Ain’t Wuthering Heights

The Shocking Experiments of Miss Mary Bennet by Melinda Taub

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Mary Bennet is famously the odd one out among her bright, vivacious sisters – an awkward show-off and a bore. But in this book, it’s what Mary’s doing off the page that deserves attention. This book is part-sequel, part-companion to the fabulous The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch, which I read and greatly enjoyed last year. You haven’t got to read that book to enjoy this one – Mary and Lydia are after all not exactly close – but there’s definitely some things which […]

Things That Go Bump at the Dinner Table

Fears: Tales of Psychological Horror by Ellen Datlow (editor)

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In this anthology of psychological horror, we encounter killers, madmen, and twisted families in this presentation of the many shades of human depravity. My preferred subgenre of horror is psychological horror. Here there’s no ghosts or curses or demons – just the strange and terrifying excesses of human nature. The horror is enhanced by the fact that, bar the occasional tinge of the supernatural, everything that happened in this book could happen in real life. All of the stories included in this book were originally […]

“I have just drawn my weapon and killed a Coke machine, sir.” CBRBINGO – Green (BINGO!)

The Tommyknockers by Stephen King

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According to many Constant Readers, this is Uncle Stevie’s worst book, but I don’t agree! It is extremely flawed, but I also found it very readable (it probably helped that Edward Herrmann narrates the audiobook, and he is a wonderful audiobook narrator). This is sci-fi horror. A woman named Bobbie, a writer of western novels, finds a buried object in the ground and becomes obsessed with unearthing it. Doing so changes her and the town she lives in forever, and in really really creepy ways. […]

Bodies and Christ

American Rapture by C.J. Leede

This is My Body by Lindsay King-Miller

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Being back in grad school, I just do not have the time to read like I used to. However, last week on a retreat, I knocked out two religious horror books I had been meaning to read for a while and since they were both thematically similar, I figured I’d dump the reviews here. American Rapture This is juuuuust clearing the 4-star threshold, mostly because I liked C.J. Leede’s writing, even if her plotting and pacing could frustrate. I also get easily annoyed with survival […]

Carrie-ish

The Weight of Blood by Tiffany D. Jackson

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I saw Spaceballs before I saw Star Wars. I saw Robin Hood, Men in Tights before I saw Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. And I read The Weight of Blood before I read Carrie. And honestly, I think I made the right choice! I can’t imagine reading a story like Carrie from the perspective of a white guy in the 1970s, no matter how many times he claps back at JKR. I had some preconceived notions about this book – mainly I thought it was […]

“Magic Is the First and Last Religion of the World. It Has the Power to Make Us Whole.”

Imajica by Clive Barker

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Damn, the effort I have gone to in my search for a book that fits the “I” square! I went through a bit of a horror-reading phase in my early twenties, and Clive Barker was one of the authors I had on rotation. But I never did pick up his fantasy doorstopper Imajica—I think I was just a little too intimidated. But in the age of e-readers, what’s to stop me? Imajica is certainly epic in scope; the story covers the Five Dominions that make […]



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