Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Organ Trail

The Hunger by Alma Katsu

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I got sucked into buying this book by the pull quote from Stephen King, but it did not even slightly live up to the hype. The Hunger is a ‘historical fiction’ retelling of the doomed journey of The Donner Party across wild unsettled America which, as is widely known, ended in survival cannibalism. There is so much to tell in that story alone. Who were these people? Who crumbled first and why? How were those who were sacrificed to feed the others chosen? What happened […]

They already were trapped.

The Hunger by Alma Katsu

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This is the case of a good idea already sort of perfected (or done so effectively) by a previous work that this one both feels derivative and cheap. It’s also the case where this one feels underserved by its brevity. So it’s a weird case of it’s not great and there’s not enough of it. The novel takes place on the wagon train of the Donner/Reed Party, famous for its mythic and mythologized end that may or may not have involved cannibalism after the party […]

The Truth About Cats and Werewolves

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I’ve been in the mood for classic horror paperbacks lately. I recently read Whitley Strieber’s Hunger trilogy and liked the first book, so thought I’d try two more of his earlier works. His first book. The Wolfen, was written in 1978. It follows two New York City police officers, Rebecca Neff and George Wilson, who try to solve a seemingly unsolvable case — the brutal attack of two fellow officers. All the signs seem to point to an animal attack, but not just any ordinary animal. […]

A Book Series from Hunger

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Whitley Strieber wrote The Hunger in 1981. It was his second novel and featured Miriam Blaylock, a glamorous female vampire, her current companion John. A third side to the triangle is a brilliant young doctor, Sarah Roberts, whose research may provide an answer to Miriam’s immortality and what it might mean to the human race. The book was memorably made into a sexy, campy feature film by Tony Scott in 1983 with Catherine Deneuve, David Bowie, and Susan Sarandon as the trio. What makes The […]

When Uncle Stevie tells us that a book is scary, we should most definitely listen. #CBR10Bingo

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I’ve been away on vacation (or a series of vacations) for a little over a month, and have a large stack of books to review. But this one had to be first. The quiet horror of it will last with me for a long time. I first heard about The Hunger from Stephen King, who tweeted about it in March: THE HUNGER, by Alma Katsu: Deeply, deeply disturbing, hard to put down, not recommended reading after dark. Of course, that shot it up to the […]



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