Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“You could have kissed me or slit my throat and either would have made as much sense.”

A Dowry of Blood by ST Gibson

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CBR15 Passport Challenge: Books you already own #1 In a lyrical letter to the lover she killed, Constanta recounts their history together, as well as that of his other ‘brides,’ and what drove them to do as they did. I had high hopes for this book. I don’t usually love vampire romances, because I feel like they often underplay the dark and twisted nature of the vampires of myth – so the fact that this book promised to go back to those terrifying roots drew […]

“Just a girl and her giant stuffed elk head”

The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher

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The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher. I really enjoyed this. I read one of the author’s other horror novels The Twisted Ones last year and really enjoyed that one until the end, but then it sort of lost me a little bit. But this one? This one had me all the way through and I felt that it really stuck the landing. Rest of the review at my reading journal dreadpiratekel @ dreamwidth

The Dark Carnival

Hide by Kiersten White

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Fourteen people participate in a mysterious competition for a chance to win a life-changing amount of money. The challenge: to hide in a decrepit amusement park, and not get found out. But what the hiders don’t know is the true nature of the seeker… One of the worst ‘hot takes’ I ever read on the Internet was a post positing that there must be a limited number of souls to go around to all the billions of people on Earth, and that most people must […]

This YA horror was more disturbing to me than some adult horror books I’ve read.

The Taking of Jake Livingston by Ryan Douglass

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It’s nearly always a good thing when one of your only complaints about a book is “I wanted more”. I say nearly, because I have read some stinkers where the main thing wrong was that the author didn’t actually do the work of fleshing out the world and the characters. Here, that’s not the problem. It’s pretty clear from reading this that the author did his work. It’s a concise YA horror story about a young man who can see ghosts (among other abilities), and […]

“Shanna was the first to go. And by ‘go’ I mean die. And by ‘die’ I mean get killed.”

Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones

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I suppose it was inevitable that I wouldn’t perfectly gel with every single thing SGJ has written. This was good, but not really my thing. At first, I was really into it because I love a chatty, informal narrator (when done well). And in the style regard, I can’t fault this book at all. It’s solid. But the story itself just didn’t really work for me. The novella opens with our main character, Sawyer, telling us about the time a prank went very wrong for […]

“The first thing I hate is called a Russian doll. It holds a smaller version of itself inside it, and another inside that and so on. How awful. They are prisoners. I imagine them all screaming in the dark, unable to move or speak. The doll’s face is broad and blankly smiling. It looks so happy to be holding its children captive.”

The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward

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So after a night where this book sat in my subconscious probably doing things to me, I’m upping my rating to five stars. I can’t stop thinking about it, and the ending did what I want more horror endings to to do for me. There are quite a few people who experience a sort of literary catharsis with the presence of violence and gore, but I am not one of those people (and maybe they don’t even care about catharsis! who knows!). This book has […]



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