Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Possession-Lite

Come Closer by Sara Gran

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Come Closer is a very short novel about a woman who is happily married (is she?) with a comfortable but rewarding lifestyle (is it?) who suddenly starts having some pretty funky dreams that unsettle her deeply (do they?). I love a good possession story. Give me some strained pea vomit and speaking in tongues any day. Scary stuff. But Come Closer goes to a potentially even scarier place. What if all those things were happening to you but you kind of, sort of… liked it? […]

“Books were a dirty job, one of the black arts, along with witchcraft and printing.”

The Book of the Most Precious Substance by Sara Gran

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This was a fascinating read! I can see why it comes so highly recommended by people whose opinions on books I trust. This is also a genremash book, with a little bit of lot of stuff thrown in, and done very well. We’ve got horror, fantasy (on the dark end), literary fiction, and a bit of a mystery plot as well. I will not be talking hugely about the plot, because watching it unfold is too fun to spoil, but this starts off about a […]

The slow horror of watching your life fall apart, one terrible decision after another

Come Closer by Sara Gran

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I had low expectations going into this book, but I was in the mood for something quietly horrifying and unsettling. I saw someone praising this on Reddit, and it was freely available on Audible. And it was exactly what I wanted. Which is to say, it left me deeply unsettled. Amanda, an architect in what appears to be a happy marriage, finds her life slowly unraveling. It starts off with  a quiet tapping in her apartment that she and her husband can quite track down. […]

Horror Month 2023: #8 and #9

Reptile Memoirs by Silje Ulstein

Come Closer by Sara Gran

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I meant to review every book of Horror Month separately but I happened to consecutively read these two and they both feature women going through…transformations. So I figured it made sense to talk about them both on one page. Reptile Memoirs**** This is billed as a horror mystery but aside from a woman’s weird psychosomatic fascination with a snake, there’s not much in the way of horror, if that even qualifies as horror. That’s okay though; this is an interesting enough mystery tale with shifting […]

Sticky Icky

The Book of the Most Precious Substance by Sara Gran

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Read this as part of CBR15Bingo: sex-banned. This book is about the pursuit of a centuries old erotic text that is said to give its participants magic powers if they follow the rules. It’s also “banned” in some places…the titular book, not this actual book. Although, given its content, I wouldn’t be surprised if it made the list sooner than later.  This is one of those books where I wonder if the author being a favorite makes me too biased to judge it accurately. There […]

The Book I Needed Right Now

The Infinite Blacktop by Sara Gran

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I really needed this book right now. I tried for almost a decade to get into the Claire DeWitt series. I thought the idea of a transgressive detective traipsing around the country solving crimes while spitting wry dialogue would be fun. But I felt like Sara Gran laced her books with too many acerbic observations and dead end philosophies; which inevitably messed with the flow of the book. But as Stevie Nicks would say: Time makes bolder children grow older. My 20s became my 30s. Stuff happened. […]



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