Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


My Best Friend’s Exorcism – A nostalgic and wild ride

My Best Friend's Exorcism by Grady Hendrix

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What a wild and crazy ride this book was! Equal parts, horror, humor, coming of age, and a nostalgic love letter to the 1980s. Looking back at that sentence it is clear that Hendrix was being a bit ambitious in scope, as this is a lot to balance, but he does so with ease. I don’t remember ever vacillating so quickly and constantly from laughter to terror, but the pendulum swings back and forth again and again over the course of this book. What starts […]

Kind regards, OG

The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

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I’ve never seen Phantom of the Opera on stage or as a filmed performance, but I have seen the Lon Cheney film of this novel. And that film, like this novel, is an accidentally hilarious (though very entertaining!) melodrama. But at the same time, it’s drama does not fare too terribly well in 2019 awareness of gender relations, that’s for sure. So here’s what’s pretty funny: The Phantom calls himself in my translation as the “Opera Ghost” and signs all his notes as “OG”. He […]

There were no servants to maintain the house; they were indistinguishable from the guests by then.

Hell House by Richard Matheson

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So like I said the other day with Light Years and how Ender’s Game is just a sub-genre now, the whole “people trying to get to the bottom of a haunted house through a combination of parapsychology, scientific method, and psychical powers” ala The Haunting of Hill House is a sub-genre too. In Shirley Jackson’s novel, which is quite subtle in its narration, themes, and spookiness. There’s a suggestion that our main character’s sense of self and questions about her sexual identity are being explored […]

“A small creature swallowed whole by a monster…”

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

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“Horror,” Laura Miller says in the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Haunting of Hill House, “turns on the dissolution of boundaries […] between the outside of the body and everything that ought to stay inside.” Maybe the way horror lurks in liminal spaces, only rarely coming right out in the open, has something to do with how much I enjoy the genre. And The Haunting of Hill House serves masterfully as our guide to those cracked and uncertain places.  

A Supernatural, Romantic Thriller-Adventure with a Side of Misogyny

The Mystery of the Sea by Bram Stoker

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At the end of the 19th century, Englishman Archibald Hunter moves to Scotland and comes into possession of some documents dating back to the Spanish Armada. He then goes on a treasure hunt with young Marjory Drake, an American heiress, whom he just met. One of the main problems with the book is that it really doesn’t know what it wants to be. In the beginning, Archie has a vision and meets a seer who explains to him that he has the second sight. Shortly […]

Horrorbore

Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix

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I’m the kind of person who picks up books based entirely on the cover. If the back cover pitch does it for me, I will buy it without reading a word, based entirely on how much I like the cover art and blurb. I like to think Publishers have a certain faith in their ability to convey books to us through font and art, and I trust that if they make a cover I really dig then the book will be a-okay by me. This […]



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