Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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A violent, sad, but very satisfying ending (Triple Bingo)

Locke & Key, vol 6: Alpha & Omega by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez

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#CBR11 Bingo: Not My Wheelhouse (horror) (Would also work for Illustrated) Spoiler warning! This is the sixth and final volume in the Locke and Key series. It is absolutely NOT the place to start. This review will probably contain spoilers both for earlier and this collection, so don’t read it unless you’re completely caught up. The first volume is Welcome to Lovecraft.  In this final volume, the Locke kids have to confront the evil that has been haunting their family for over a generation. If there was any doubt that […]

Things just keep looking darker and scarier for the Locke children

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SPOILER WARNING! This review may contain some spoilers for the plots of the two volumes in question.  In volume 4, Keys to the Kingdom, the three Locke siblings are still fighting against the Dark Lady, whose inhabiting the body of the person they think is their friend Zach. He’s posing as Kinsey’s affectionate boyfriend and Tyler’s loyal friend, trying to get one of the siblings to reveal where the crucial and powerful Omega key is hidden. Over the course of this volume, the Locke children seem […]

For the night is dark and full of shadows

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This is volume 3 in an ongoing story arc and really won’t make much sense to anyone beginning the series here. Start at the beginning with Vol 1: Welcome to Lovecraft. The three half-orphaned Locke children, Tyler, Kinsey and Bode, have already gone through so much horror and heartbreak, and it doesn’t seem to be letting up any time soon. Their mother is becoming less dependable, as she’s gradually descending further into alcoholism and madness, aggravated by the evil spirit haunting their lives. Kinsey is […]

The End and The Beginning.

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What a great ending to this series. Endings are so tough. A bad ending can deflate the whole experience of a narrative. A good ending ties everything together, and nothing can beat that feeling of satisfaction you get as all the threads are tied up, secrets revealed, and connections made. Also, though, this was brutal. I’m not saying I haven’t read books that aren’t more of a bloodbath than this one is, because I have, but the body count is large, and people you love […]

The penultimate volume.

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This is the one where you get all of the answers. And they are good answers! There’s nothing so satisfying as a series that poses lots of interesting mysteries, then gives you compelling origins and solutions for all of them. Also, when some of those answers manage to surprise you, and re-contextualize what you thought about the story previously. Clockworks opens with a strange flashback to the Revolutionary War, and we learn at last the origin story of the Keys. And so too do Kinsey […]

Getting ready for the endgame.

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There are only two more volumes after this one, so it’s apparently time for Locke & Key to get ready for the endgame. For as fun as the last couple issues have been (and by “fun” I mean horrifying and interesting and really hard to put down), once everything was introduced in Vol. 1, everything was actually pretty status quo, relatively speaking. New keys, Dodge trying to manipulate the Lockes while hiding in plain sight, bad things happening all over the place . . . but in Keys […]



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