Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Things that go ‘bump’ in the dark

The Anomaly by Michael Rutger

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When I was a kid, my family and I went camping in the bush. On one particular hike, there was a tunnel called ‘The Wombat Hole’ that was notorious with the camping crowd. It was a gradually narrowing natural cave formation that you could walk into, but had to crawl out of on your belly. I’ve no doubt this natural wonder has long been shut, but the early 90s were a wild, unregulated time in Australian National Parks. So my Dad, tempted by the challenge […]

And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

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The first of the Southern Reach Trilogy is probably very familiar to most Cannonballers, so I won’t spend too long summarizing. A group of four women experts are sent in to investigate Area X, an environmental anomaly that has subsumed and remade a section of coast and wilderness and seems to be expanding. Theirs is the latest in a string of failed expeditions, after previous groups of men have either never returned, or come back changed. The women are given no names, only titles, and […]

Agony and Relief: Birth Order as Curse

Secondborn by Amy A. Bartol

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“It’s no good hating them. They can’t feel it, and it will only make you bitter.” — p. unknown  

“I got cabin fever, it’s burning in my brain”

The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay

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Well this book ripped my jaded, horror-loving heart out and showed it to me. This is the second book by Paul Tremblay that has hurt my feelings. The first being A Head Full of Ghosts published in 2016. While both books give us an intimate and ultimately heart rending family drama with ambiguous endings, they are very different stories. Cabin centers on seven year old Wen and her dads Eric and Andrew. The family has traveled to the titular cabin as part of a getaway […]

Only Enjoyed One Time Period

The Winter People by Jennifer McMahon

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Sigh. Well this was an okay story, I only enjoyed the past time period in the book (the Sarah and Martin sections) and didn’t like the present at all except for Ruth. The book fell down at the end too and I honestly didn’t find this too scary. “The Winter People” follows four people (Martin, Sara, Ruthie, and Katherine) in different time periods. Martin and Katherine’s narratives are from the 1908 and Ruthie and Katherine are from the present day. The book focuses on all […]

I’d long since known what was in those trucks.

The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney

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Yes! It’s the book from the movie from everybody’s favorite “YOU’RE A BOT!” gif:  This is the classic sci fi novel from 1955. There’s a cover on one of the older editions of this book that reference it being part of a Stephen King horror series and that makes a lot of sense. This is the exact blueprint for so many Stephen King novels: small town, regular folk doing regular things, awful horrifying thing happens and changes everything, small town regular folk have to readjust […]



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