Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Modern haunted house story with a twist

Kill Creek by Scott Thomas

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I love horror, and haunted house stories are my favorite subgenre of horror. I’m always on the lookout for new (to me) horror writers and twists on the usual haunted house theme. Kill Creek promised both. Four famous horror writers are invited to spend Halloween night at the infamous house on Kill Creek. They’ve been invited by media mogul Wainwright, who wants to interview them for his website. The authors couldn’t be more different from one another or Wainwright. Sam writes stories about families struggling […]

A missed opportunity in a creepy, engaging story

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

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I admit, I’d let The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires slide off my radar almost as soon as I saw the news of its publication. It looked a lot more True Blood with a dash of Steel Magnolias, and if I’m going to read about vampires these days, I want something real weird like Robin McKinley’s Sunshine, on in a queer revisionist take on Harry Potter, like Rainbow Rowell’s Wayward Son books. (Book 3 needs to hurry up and get here already.) But then a friend of mine mentioned […]

Bunnatine, Immy, Demon Lover, and Ghost Boyfriend walk into a bar…

Get In Trouble by Kelly Link

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Well, sometimes it’s a bar filled with men raised by wolves. Sometimes it’s a space ship. A warehouse full of mysterious sleeping people. A magical house full of “summer people”. A haunted house on a space ship. A lake where a few dozen nudists disappeared in the seventies. The penthouse party at a hotel full of dentists and super heroes. The crumbling remains of a Wizard of Oz theme park. A pocket universe that opened above Florida. Kelly Link writes things that are fantastic and […]

In the middle of a desolate Wednesday afternoon in the last sweltering days of May, a handful of mourners were gathered were gathered in the church dedicated to St. Jude Thaddeus in Mobile, Alabama.

The Elementals by Michael McDowell

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This is a short(ish) horror novel from 1981, and was written by the same writer of The Amulet which I thought was really weird and curious, but was also strangely harsh and bleak in a way that wasn’t much fun to read. This one is a lot better in terms of that bleakness. It’s a weird cross between say, Burnt Offerings and maybe a little All the King’s Men mixed in. So the plot here begins with a strange, closed-off family funeral at the end of […]

Scooby-Dooby-Cthulhu

Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero

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Thirteen years ago, a scrappy pack of teen detectives (and their faithful dog) solved a lake-monster mystery in a sleepy northwestern town. The guy in the monster suit would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids! Smash-cut to thirteen years later, and our teens are far from thriving members of society. Plagued by nightmares and hallucinations, powered by alcohol and violence, the twenty-something remnants of the Blyton Hills Detective Club are coming to a powerful realization: they caught the […]

Victorian Gothic and Lovecraft Mashup

Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire

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I liked Come Tumbling Down better than the previous installment of the Wayward Children series in terms of story, but I do think there was an over-emphasis on the concept of who’s the monster. Jack is back at the school but there’s something very wrong with her which if not fixed will definitely destroy her. This was the premise in the previews I’d seen and I have to admit I didn’t see that problem itself coming, although in hindsight it does suit their folkloric homeland […]



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