Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“If I die, you can always make another me.”

Mickey7 (Mickey7, #1) by Edward Ashton

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What a way to start the year—existential crises and smart-assery. Mickey7, aka Mickey Barnes, is our guy. He’s an Expendable on a mission to establish a beachhead colony on a far-flung world. Expendables are just that—they are the people sent on suicide missions, given dangerous tasks, experimented upon medically to develop vaccines and treatments for whatever exciting new ailments await colonists on their new planet. He’s the guy who will die for you, only to have a new copy of himself ready to go 24-hours […]

“For I fear that the day when aliens reveal themselves to us fully will also become the first day of the end of life on Earth as we know it!”

UFO Mushroom Invasion by Shirakawa Marina

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This is the second book in Ryan Holmberg’s imprint of classic SF/horror manga from the 1970s/80s. I will say I enjoyed Her Frankenstein better but I thought UFO Mushroom Invasion was also interesting and had some striking moments that made me glad I read this. I do understand that smaller print books tend to be more expensive because they have smaller print runs and tighter economics to work out, but $19.95 is a tough price point for me here considering that most manga is ranging […]

Helpmeet: the little book of surrealistic body horror

Helpmeet by Naben Ruthnum

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mood music: Me and My Husband – mitksi At a cool 94 pages, Helpmeet was a quick read. Still, in even such a short novella it packs a punch with detailed descriptions of body disfigurement and decay as we follow the complex marriage of a couple living in 1900s New York City. We are introduced to Louise Wilk, a former nurse, as she is packing up the final items of her home in preparation for her move to her husband’s childhood home in Buffalo, New York. […]

“I made faces like the faces on the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the dead ones, and I lay down flat on the ground like the twisted ones.”

The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher

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I gave T. Kingfisher’s horror oeuvre another shot and I’ve come to the conclusion that I like her romance/fantasy writing more, so I’ll give another one of those a try if I want to read anything else by her. This one follows Melissa, who goes by Mouse, as she heads down to North Carolina to clean out her grandmother’s house. She’s just had a bad breakup and needs to get out of Pittsburgh for a while, so when her dad asks her to take on […]

“No one ever believes me when I tell them my uncle Earl owns a museum.”

The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher

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This is very readable and I’m glad I picked it up randomly at Barnes & Noble, but it didn’t live up to my hopes. I enjoyed Paladin’s Grace so much that I figured I’d see how Kingfisher did at horror. The Hollow Places follows Kara as she tries to recover from her recent divorce. She comes back to her small hometown to live with her uncle, who runs the Wonder Museum, full of taxidermy, Bigfoot memorabilia, and a picture of the Pope made of sunflower […]

“Not running from your emotions is a sign of strength:” Life Lessons from Hell

Hell's Paradise Vol 1-13 by Yuji Kaku

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CBR14Bingo: Monster — many of the characters are seen as monsters and they also fight monsters The story of my struggle to get all thirteen of these volumes would drag on too long, but sufficed to say that the paper shortage and resultant out of print plague striking manga has affected us all and I had to wait over a month for the tenth volume to show up. What I really liked about this series was that it’s complete and thirteen volumes is a satisfying […]



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