Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Would have loved just a smidge more witchcraft

The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson

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Immanuelle Moore knows she must never go into the Dark Woods. Lilith and her coven of witches dwell there, doing terrible things to any good Bethel citizen who wanders in. But her family’s prize ram just ran off, and they simply can’t afford to lose him. She emerges, ramless, with the journal of her dead, blasphemous mother and the sinking feeling that Bethel’s leader, the Prophet, is not as virtuous and strong as he says he is. When plagues descend upon the town and the […]

“…I hunt monsters. And I got a sword that sings.”

Ring Shout or Hunting Ku Kluxes in the End Times by P. Djeli Clark

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P. Djeli Clark continues to amaze me with his writing. In this short novel, he leaves behind the “steampunk” and adds plenty of horror to a story set in 1922 Macon, Georgia. As with his previously reviewed works, Clark creates a world where magic is real and plenty of strong women of color stand ready to wield it. Ring Shout or Hunting Ku Kluxes in the End Times focuses, unsurprisingly, on American racism and white supremacy. I think we all accept that Klansmen are monsters, […]

Don’t you hate it when you’ve hit the ripe old age of 29 and have experienced all the world has to offer, so you rip a hole in reality so you can cavort with pain demons just for a change of pace?

Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker

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(Trigger warnings for various unsavoriness.) I like my horror with a heaping helping of cheese (Slither, Night of the Comet, Cabin in the Woods), so I have never read any Clive Barker, and I’ve never seen Hellraiser. So when my sci-fi library book club picked Hellbound Heart, the book the movie Hellraiser is based on, I was not sure what to expect. I mean, I was expecting gross stuff and a guy with pins in his face, but I was not expecting such unlikeable characters. […]

Sumptuously grotesque

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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I read this for my bookclub and we had our discussion last night where I found myself going to bat for it in a way I didn’t expect. I was both surprised that the other women weren’t on board with it and surprised at how invested in it I had turned out to be. This review might have been a little different if I’d written it yesterday, but context is everything. I find horror as a genre fascinating but I hate being scared which means […]

Delightfully unsettling, Lovecraftian adventure

The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher

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What a journey this book was… This year, I’m trying to branch out and read in different genres and modes, and this book is definitely something that I wouldn’t have picked up before.  The Hollow Places follows Kara (sometimes called Carrot) who moves in with her uncle to help him run his Museum of Wonders after her divorce. It’s a convenient arrangement for each of them as Kara avoids moving in with her mother – whom she loves, but wouldn’t love living with – and […]

Swan Song – Robert McCammon (1987)

Swan Song by Robert McCammon

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I’ve mentioned that I haven’t read a lot of horror novels outside of Stephen King, and while this novel is not exactly horror in the way that not all of King’s novel are either, I find Robert McCammon’s name to be in the same circle as King’s. For the record, I think this way almost exclusively because of the shelves at the local Paperback Exchange in my hometown, which also included Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Robert McCammon, Dennis Etchison, Dean Koontz, and the like. So […]



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