Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The spill spilled, spilling red…

Night Shift by Stephen King

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OK never mind, here’s one more review for the year. This is a collection of early Stephen King, and it’s his second collection. It’s also the collection that a) scared living hell out of me as a kid — maybe entirely from that creepy original mass market cover I put in this post, and b) was trawled for any imaginable movie they could make from it. While Skeleton Crew came out first, this is the one that has many many bad movies as a result. So, […]

Prepping for the next HBO show

The Outsider by Stephen King

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I missed this one when it originally came out because I had heard there was a connection to the Bill Hodges trilogy and I hadn’t read the final two yet.  The connection doesn’t happen until more than halfway through and involves one of the characters helping with an investigation while also alluding to the final fate of some of the other characters.  In other words, it doesn’t have major plot spoilers for the trilogy so it’s really just a personal preference thing for other readers. […]

Coming of Age with Hurricanes and Ghosts and Jessie’s Girl

Joyland (Hard Case Crime) by Stephen King

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Given the book’s pulpy cover with a buxom redhead, I thought Joyland would be some kind of hard-boiled exploitationy romp. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it’s actually a quiet,  classic Stephen King-type coming of age story, albeit one for twenty-somethings instead of kids. The story swirls around events at an independent amusement park in 1970s North Carolina called Joyland. The park has a mysterious old owner, always impeccably dressed (I pictured Atlanta Falcons’ club owner Arthur Blank) with a twinkle in his eye. It […]

This one has that Stephen King magic.

The Institute by Stephen King

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As readers, I think one thing we all have in common is that every time we pick up a book, we’re hoping it’ll be one of those times where what you’re reading is so absorbing that you forget entirely that you’re reading, your conscious self recedes into the background, and the story just takes over. Those are always the most magical reading experiences for me, at least, and this book, which calls to mind the beginnings of King’s writing career, absolutely did that for me. […]

Dreams, after all, are insubstantial things, like mist itself.

The Mist by Stephen King

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It’s been a long time since I’ve read this novella. In fact, I might have read it in like 1990 when we were first allowed to get our hands on a Stephen King book and immediately got intimidated by how much longer this book is than the other stories in the other stories in the book. So anyway, we begin with a trip to the grocery store in light of a series of terrible storms in a coastal Maine town. Following the trail of destruction, […]

“He was only twelve, and understood that his experience of the world was limited, but one thing he was quite sure of: when someone said trust me, they were usually lying through their teeth.”

The Institute by Stephen King

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Welcome to The Institute, my favorite book of 2019. Was it the best book of 2019? Probably not. But I can’t think of a reading experience that I enjoyed more than this. This book brought me back to the feelings I had when I first discovered Stephen King, back in Junior High, staying up late at night, scared to death about what might happen to my favorite characters. Its been MANY years since those first late-night readings of The Shining and Thinner (not his greatest […]



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