Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Give this little sapphic sasquatch book a shot!

Patricia Wants to Cuddle by Samantha Allen

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This was weird and I kind of loved it. After seeing this cover I absolutely needed to read it, and that just goes to show you that sometimes you CAN judge a book by its cover. But before I get to what I liked about the book, I do want to nitpick a little, mostly with the marketing. This book is being billed as a “horror comedy” and while it’s most definitely horror, I don’t think it’s comedy. Unless you count satire as a subgenre […]

“I call it relief, though it was only the relief that a snap brings to a strain or the burst of a thunderstorm to a day of suffocation. It was at least change, and it came with a rush.”

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

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Even though after reading Henry James in school several times and then declaring him my nemesis, for he is the master triumphant of the never-ending sentence, and saying I would never read from him again, I could not then resist the pull of an audiobook narrated by Emma Thompson, and indeed I am glad I did not do so. Phewf, done with that nonsense. That is what it is like to read Henry James. The first paragraph in The Wings of the Dove nearly killed […]

Not your mother’s book club

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

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My first time reading a Grady Hendrix novel, I did not realize he was the same author who wrote My Best Friend’s Exorcism and The Final Girl Support Group –  I imagine I will enjoy both of those novels as I quite liked this one. It gave me the same feeling as those first few seasons of True Blood, southern camp at its finest. Think Steel Magnolias, but with an added twist of body horror. Set during the late 80s and early 90s in South […]

“Now, turn down the lights, flip the page, take my hand, and start the dance…”

Turn Down the Lights by Edited by Richard Chizmar

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I continue my efforts to read through the books that have been sitting on my shelves for years. Turn Down the Lights is a collection of short horror and thriller/suspense/crime stories from the long-running magazine Cemetery Dance. Chizmar started the magazine in college and also runs a small press that publishes a variety of genre novels. I got this due to the fact that Stephen King and Chizmar have a long-standing relationship, and the first story in this collection is by King. Then it sat […]

“I made faces like the faces on the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the dead ones, and I lay down flat on the ground like the twisted ones.”

The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher

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I gave T. Kingfisher’s horror oeuvre another shot and I’ve come to the conclusion that I like her romance/fantasy writing more, so I’ll give another one of those a try if I want to read anything else by her. This one follows Melissa, who goes by Mouse, as she heads down to North Carolina to clean out her grandmother’s house. She’s just had a bad breakup and needs to get out of Pittsburgh for a while, so when her dad asks her to take on […]

“No one ever believes me when I tell them my uncle Earl owns a museum.”

The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher

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This is very readable and I’m glad I picked it up randomly at Barnes & Noble, but it didn’t live up to my hopes. I enjoyed Paladin’s Grace so much that I figured I’d see how Kingfisher did at horror. The Hollow Places follows Kara as she tries to recover from her recent divorce. She comes back to her small hometown to live with her uncle, who runs the Wonder Museum, full of taxidermy, Bigfoot memorabilia, and a picture of the Pope made of sunflower […]



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