Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Creepy kids! Drug addicts! Murder! Drawing!

Hidden Pictures by Jason Rekulak

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  How do you feel about kids who see ghosts? Generally, I don’t love the creepy kid genre, but this book is more of a “haunted kid” vibe. He’s not inherently creepy, but you know he’s been through some things. Our main character is Mallory, who is a recovering drug addict. She’s about a year and a half sober and living in a halfway house / community home / something like that, and trying to get a job to keep her life together. She’s a […]

I’m still not sure I’m ok after this one…

The Winters by Lisa Gabriele

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    “Once I made up my mind to leave, a calm came over me. The fight was over. In fact, it felt less like leaving then like Asherley was pushing me out, rejecting me like a body rejecting an unfamiliar organ.” A modern twist on the classic “Rebecca” tale, our young heroine works for a charter company in the Caribbean and until she pays of the debt she owes her employer for her father’s funeral expenses, that is all she’s ever going to do. […]

Just the right level of Creep

Famous Last Words by Katie Alender

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“No matter how many times I vowed to quit, every night I found myself with the candle lit, the ring on my finger, trying to get through to my dad. Because I needed to find him. I needed to tell him I was sorry I killed him.” Willa and her mother are following her new Hollywood hotshot stepfather out to LA. They both hope it will be a chance for them to start over. To put to rest the notion that Willa will somehow be […]

“While I was killing him, I had to wipe my mouth with my sleeve every now and then because I couldn’t stop salivating.”

Mars by Asja Bakić

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Anything can become normal, if you continue to stick through it. War, murder, cults, doppelgängers, being deported to Mars- whatever world you are dropped into becomes your world. Asja Bakić is a master of normalcy in abnormal times and places. Her short story collection, Mars, is filled to the gills with the weird becoming common place. I was originally drawn to this collection for less than academic reasons: it is short and it has a pretty corner! I was looking to race through my Bingo card, […]

“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.  

Everything down here floats…

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I’m on the tail-end of a monstrously disruptive cold, so I had to scrap my plans of having this review out by the 21st, Stephen King’s septuagenarian birthday. In the realm of missed opportunities, this rates as a fairly minor disappointment, but it would’ve fairly cool nonetheless. It is one of the most quintessentially “Stephen King” stories, and it’s recent and wildly successful adaptation should, perhaps, not be seen as particularly surprising. In my mind, it holds a premier place in his oeuvre, alongside The […]



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