Cannonball Read 13

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Dracula sucks…but the book doesn’t!

Dracula by Bram Stoker

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Dracula sucks but the book doesn’t. I go through phases of reading classics or otherwise tackling books with reputations of being difficult. Sometimes it’s easy to see why books are classics – they’re timeless and engrossing. A Tale of Two Cities is that way for me. So is Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Other times the classics feel like archaeological work. The reader is excavating and extrapolating. Dracula felt like work to me, but the reader can definitely appreciate the book’s influence on future work. In particular, […]

Spoooky

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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Counter-intuitively, this Gothic horror novel was an absolute joy to read. My attention span in 2020 is limited at best, but I could not put down Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic. Her main character, the impetuous and steel-spited Mexico City socialite Noemí Taboada, is truly alive. The rural Mexican setting is a delight, and the creepiness level is appropriate for those of us less versed in horror. Noemí Taboada is a Mexico City mover and shaker. She lives in the 1940s-50s era, and has expansive ideas […]

My Pen is Dry, The Door is Open, and Something is Waiting

Melmoth: A Novel by Sarah Perry

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This is a modern novel that strikes the perfect feeling of a Gothic novel in the style of Poe or Shelly. It is eerie and creepy with a ton of atmosphere and most of the fear and horror coming from not jump scares, but just that feeling that something is going to happen. Also, the monster is the humans. It’s always the humans… but not always int he way you think. Fair warning, I don’t give any major spoilers ahead, but this is a very […]

Switching it up to Faerie Tale Gothic

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  Just last week, I reviewed one of the books in Seanan McGuire’s October Daye series, which is steeped in faerie folklore and mythology. There’s nothing like a good fairytale retelling – folklore characters are in the public domain and are fair game for any author who wants to write their own interpretation of them. It can be fascinating to see what direction different people decide to take. For example, the Cait Sith (or Cait Sidhe) of the October Daye universe are wildly different to […]

I don’t think it’s aged all that well (Plus, half Cannonball!)

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I’ve heard James’ The Turn of the Screw as being a classic Gothic novel, the one that basically begat a genre and inspired authors like Shirley Jackson (whose books I’ve loved so far in my readings). I chose this one for the ‘This Old Thing’ bingo square (it was published in 1898), and I was really excited to finally sit down and read it Unfortunately, I was disappointed. The plot is about a young governess who takes a posting that’s too good to be true in an […]



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