Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Later – Stephen King (2021)

Later by Stephen King

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The newest Stephen King, and I feel like his last couple have been clicking for me in good ways. I don’t think that each of the novellas from If It Bleeds were great, but a few were. I also really liked The Outsider and very much liked The Institute. You can tell from the cover of this book that it’s part of the Hard Case Files series, but like Joyland, and even like his straight-up hardboiled detective novels, the Bill Hodges series, this book is […]

Crime Spree

Skin Deep by Sung J. Woo

The Concrete Blonde by Michael Connelly

The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny

Hell in the Heartland: Murder, Meth and the Case of Two Missing Girls by Jax Miller

Later by Stephen King

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I binged a lot of crime fiction (with one non-fictional exception) as there was a lot of traffic on my already long commute this week, allowing me to synergize eyeball reading with audio. Plus I took off the weekend so I had some extra time… Skin Deep 3 stars So rare, entertaining and enjoyable to have a transracial adoptee as a protagonist. While author Sung J. Woo doesn’t lean too hard on Siobhan’s background, he weaves it in to make her a fully realized person. The […]

Not a bad way to spend a few hours, but I really could have done without those last few pages.

Later by Stephen King

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Like The Colorado Kid and JoyLand before it, Later is one of King’s Hard Crime Case releases – paperbacks made to look like pulp paperbacks with vibrant cover art (that doesn’t always match up to the story), that all come in on the short side for King, maybe about 250 pages. The main reason that I don’t think this one was quite as successful as the other two is that this one takes place pretty close to now. The main character, Jamie, is a young […]

Paperback Writer

Later by Stephen King

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Stephen King is a writer who can do anything, but should he? Later, his newest novel out in paperback from Hard Case Crime, is an unusual effort. It is perhaps best taken as a sort of exercise that doesn’t entirely succeed. It is an attempt to write a fairly typical King premise in the style of pulp fiction. Later is written entirely in the first person. The narrator, Jamie Conklin, is a young man relating events from his childhood through to adolescence. Jamie lives in […]

Do You Guys Wanna Go See a Dead Body?

The Body by Stephen King

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Here we have another Stephen King story overshadowed by the film adaptation, in this case the 1986 classic Stand by Me. (Side note: you may have noticed by now that I’ve been making my way through the novella collection Different Seasons, which in addition to the three novellas I’ve reviewed so far has a fourth entry which I think is too short to be counted as a separate book.) Anyway, while it’s impossible not to see the movie play out as you read along, King’s […]

Lessons Learned

Apt Pupil by Stephen King

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Stephen King strikes out on an unlikely course in this novella and follows it through all the way to a chilling conclusion. Thirteen-year-old Todd Bowman seems like a perfectly healthy and happy boy. He’s good at sports and does well in school (hence the “apt pupil” descriptor) and his successful, happy parents love him to pieces. After a magazine article piques his interest in the Holocaust, Todd makes a shocking discovery.  A local old-timer is actually a Nazi war-criminal named Dussander living in America under […]



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