Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


My favorite of the series so far.

The Sandman, Vol. 4: Season of Mists by Neil Gaiman

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My favorite since the first one. It’s been over thirty years since this was published, and it still managed to do things that surprised me. Morpheus, or Dream the Endless, has been informed that consigning his human lover Nada to hell for 10,000 years for the crime of rejecting him and wounding his pride was a not great thing to do, so he sets out to make things as right as he can, which means once again descending into hell and facing Lucifer. He makes […]

Coming of Age with Hurricanes and Ghosts and Jessie’s Girl

Joyland (Hard Case Crime) by Stephen King

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Given the book’s pulpy cover with a buxom redhead, I thought Joyland would be some kind of hard-boiled exploitationy romp. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it’s actually a quiet,  classic Stephen King-type coming of age story, albeit one for twenty-somethings instead of kids. The story swirls around events at an independent amusement park in 1970s North Carolina called Joyland. The park has a mysterious old owner, always impeccably dressed (I pictured Atlanta Falcons’ club owner Arthur Blank) with a twinkle in his eye. It […]

Reading This During the Holidays Was Probably a Mistake

We Are Monsters by Brian Kirk

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Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review. Eh. I tried to get into this. I gave up halfway through and just grudgingly finished this thing over a period of like four weeks. Bah. It had a great premise, it just got boring to me halfway through. And then I kept finding other books to read instead. Maybe if I hadn’t started King’s “The Institute” (nope still not done) and seen some similar themes here, it […]

I release the lock. I open the door. That’s the best definition of love.

The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt

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This is a collection of short stories from Samantha Hunt and one that I’ve been avoiding because I was worried it was going to be another delving into the kinds of modern fairy tale stories that I end up always wanting to the read but never really enjoy much. I think I can be forgiven for thinking that’s what we were going to have here, because of how many of those that have been published in recent years. Anyway, instead, most of these stories are […]

Dreams, after all, are insubstantial things, like mist itself.

The Mist by Stephen King

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It’s been a long time since I’ve read this novella. In fact, I might have read it in like 1990 when we were first allowed to get our hands on a Stephen King book and immediately got intimidated by how much longer this book is than the other stories in the other stories in the book. So anyway, we begin with a trip to the grocery store in light of a series of terrible storms in a coastal Maine town. Following the trail of destruction, […]

A couple of not so thrilling thrillers

The Invited by Jennifer McMahon

The Mother-in-Law by Sally Hepworth

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(3 stars) The Invited by Jennifer McMahon Why do I keep reading Jennifer McMahon books? They’re never terrible, but they’re never great either. But I keep picking them up! Helen and Nate have decided to undertake a rather ambitious project. Quitting their jobs teaching high school, they move to Vermont to build their own home on a piece of property with a very dark past. Helen, obsessed with history in general and with the property in particular, does enough research to realize that a lot […]



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