Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Title Says It All

Suburban Hell by Maureen Kilmer

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Read as part of CBR14 Bingo: Monster. One of the women in a group of suburban mom friends turns into a literal monster and it’s up to the other women to save her. For almost thirty years (maybe going on forty), the suburbs have been used as a setting to explore the murky themes beyond the American idyll of house/car/2.5 kids. From mystery to horror to…well whatever John Waters does, we’ve often seen the lily white burbs are not all they seem. The Tom Hanks-esque […]

Double Cannonballing with Canadian Zombies, Necromancers, and Demons

One Heart by Chace Verity

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Chace Verity is one of my favorite authors of the past couple of years. Their soft Canadian demon romances are delightful, weird, and fun. They also acknowledge and address the frustrations of existing in late stage capitalism with it’s dehumanization and the constant grind of mere existence. In One Heart, they give us a true romance where the love interest dies early in the book and then raise their middle fingers at Canada’s far Right. Perfect for spooky season election season. (If you can register […]

Zombie Anthology!!

Nights of the Living Dead by Jonathan Maberry and various

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  This is another one of those collaboration efforts by a bunch of well known (especially in the zombie genre) authors.  Like all of the anthologies I’ve read this year (is anthology the right word?), some were realllllly really good, and I actually wanted to hear more about the characters and world that the author created.  Some were fine and I just read through them and they left my brain forever.  I don’t really remember any of them being truly bad though. There was one […]

A Slice of Fried Gold Movie History

You've Got Red on You: How Shaun of the Dead Was Brought to Life by Clark Collis

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You’ve Got Red on You details the story of how 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, a low-budget British movie about Londoners battling zombies in a pub, became a horror-comedy whose fan base only continues to grow and with each passing year cements its place in pop culture history. I became aware of this book when its author, Clark Collis, guested on the Screen Drafts podcast for their episode on Zombie movies and I’m ever so glad I did. Collis takes the work he did on his […]

Hunting vampires is always a dangerous business

Guilty Pleasures (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #1) by Laurell K. Hamilton

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I’ve had Guilty Pleasures by Laurell K. Hamilton on my shelf for several years. This is the first book in the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series. As a lover of vampires and urban fantasy, I have been curious since it’s been around a long time. I finally decided to pick it up for Dewey’s readathon. One of the bingo challenges was to read the oldest book on your to-be-read shelf. The story introduces us to Anita Blake who is a private investigator. She is licensed to […]

Race, Zombies and US History

Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland

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I read and reviewed Dread Nation a couple of years ago but felt that I needed to do a re-read to refresh my memory before starting book 2 — Deathless Divide. In these novels, Justina Ireland imagines the US in the period immediately following the Civil War but with a strange twist. At the Battle of Gettysburg, the war ended when the battlefield dead rose up as zombies or shamblers, forcing Union and Rebel soldiers to work together against the undead. A new kind of […]



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