Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


“If, through some exceptional circumstances, you are born without an aunt Mary, one is provided for you by the government along with your birth certificate and a book of grievances.”

Knock Knock, Open Wide by Neil Sharpson

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It is my personal opinion that if her presence on the curriculum had consisted less of accounts of the bleakness of Irish peasant life at the turn of the century and more farmers’ wives cuckolding their husbands with corpses possessed by the devil, the Irish language would be in rude and glowing health today. TW: gore, rape, necrophilia, profanity, death of children, graphic depictions of cannibalism, alcoholism, unhealthy relationships, animal death, and people having their faces eaten off by dogs After reading The Burial Tide, […]

Just The End of The World

The Dead Take The A Train by Richard Kadrey & Cassandra Khaw

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This one was intense. I probably should have paid more attention to the terrifying cover illustration. Or maybe not chose to read a gory horror novel while waiting for an inspection at the mechanic. I thought I was going to throw up all over the waiting room. Julie Crews (yes I am humming the Twin Peaks theme song thank you) has been doing the most gruesome, dead end magical jobs in New York City. Now that she’s in her thirties she’s tired of just scraping […]

Bloody tango steps in Sweden

The Return of the Dancing Master by Henning Mankell

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This is the fave thriller of a friend of mine, I found it on one of the free bookshelves around town and gave it a try. I read quite a few of the Wallander cases as a teen, but I mostly only remember the gory violence and not much else. While not a Wallander case, this definitely doesn’t disappoint either when it comes to cruel ways to die. A former police man is found flogged to death in his house somewhere in the Swedish boondocks, […]

the only Scream sequel I need

The Last Final Girl by Stephen Graham Jones

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Take the meta-horror-commentary of Scream and dial it up to eleven; there at the top of the stairs, silhouetted in moonlight and brandishing a rusty machete, you will find The Last Final Girl. Stephen Graham Jones is leaning hard into the tropes of teen slasher movies, and if you aren’t in on the joke it will fly over your freshly-severed-by-garage-door-head. The story is presented almost as a film treatment; close ups, pans, POVS, and audience responses are all written in and used with cheeky abandon. […]

Started November 12th. Finished January 12th. The breaks in reading were NECESSARY

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

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…but the journey was worth it. This book is brutal. If you are sensitive at all to suffering- be it human, animal, generational, cultural- turn away now and do not look back. Four Blackfeet men engage in a bit of last-minute less-than-legal Elk hunting the weekend before Thanksgiving. What happens that day never really leaves them, but what they left behind comes rocketing back into their lives 10 years later. The 10 years since that day have not been easy; the men are plagued by […]

Oh lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood

A Faint Cold Fear by Karin Slaughter

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On a sweltering summer afternoon, medical examiner Sara Linton is called in to examine a suspected suicide at the nearby college. With her very pregnant sister in tow, she sets out to examine the body. But then the sister is stabbed and suicide becomes increasingly less likely. Chief of Police Jeffrey Tolliver – Sara’s on again, off again significant other – struggles to make headway into the case. First and foremost in his crosshairs is his former subordinate, Lena Adams. Now working as campus security, […]



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