Cannonball Read 18

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, […]

Short reads to finish off my reading year (and help me to finally complete my double Cannonball)

Night of the Scoundrel by Kelly Bowen

The Monsters We Deserve by Marcus Sedgwick

A Match Made for Thanksgiving by Jackie Lau

A Second-Chance Road Trip for Christmas by Jackie Lau

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Night of the Scoundrel by Kelly Bowen Rating: 4 stars In this novella which concludes Kelly Bowen’s The Devils of Dover series, we finally find out more about the mysterious King, who has been popping up in Bowen’s books for a long time. A shadowy London crime lord with connections to smuggling, art forgery, theft and all sorts of other untoward business, he is not a man to cross. He discovers that a man he believed to be dead, a man who ruined his childhood and set him […]

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. […]

“Mors irrumat omnia. Death fucks us all.”

Ninth House (Alex Stern, #1) by Leigh Bardugo

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I don’t know, I kind of feel like my brain has been hit by a tornado. This book was a lot. In a good way. But still, a lot. I’m not quite sure I’ve finished processing, but I definitely enjoyed the ride. This is just going to be one of those books that will sit in my brain and sort of gel there, and then eventually I’ll read it again and everything will just click. I’ll probably up my rating to five stars; I usually […]

“How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams.”

Dracula by Bram Stoker

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I don’t have the time or energy to write as much or as deeply as I would like to about this strange, 100+ year old book, so I’m just going to settle with posting some brief thoughts below. Somehow I managed to make it out of years and years of schooling, with two English degrees, without reading this book. Which is right up my alley! All that discussion of monsters and things that are taboo swathed in metaphor. I love that shit. When I first […]

“Love is desire sustained by unfulfillment.”

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter

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While I like to think of myself as generally well-read there are definite gaps in the more classic authors of certain genres. Authors I enjoy, including Neil Gaiman, have pointed to Angela Carter as an immense influence on their own work. Thankfully someone had gifted The Bloody Chamber & Other Stories to me a few years ago. The stories in the collection share a theme of being closely based upon fairytales or folk tales and Carter toys with Gothic fiction and gender, utilizing classic Gothic […]



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