Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Bewitched

The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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Bingo row 3 – B In my work circles, there’s a story that goes around sometimes where someone died in the automatic rolling stacks and that’s why the archives/records room has manual rolling stacks with a crank and not a button. Is that a story used to justify cheaper rolling shelving? Maybe, but it seriously happened to someone my friend’s friend knew (which I know makes it sound even more like an urban legend). There is a scene in the Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia where […]

Bewitching

The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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BINGO: Diaspora! hot take the horror vibes are stronger with this one, but the issue is that we know the monster is real and therefore are just waiting for the shoe to drop. I was so into Mexican Gothic that I keep picking up Moreno-Garcia’s work, hoping to find the same spark. That being said, I find in general that her writing doesn’t quite grab me, and the plot usually falls a bit flat, so they end up being pretty consistently 3* works. I should also note […]

A Historical Fantasy, A “Neon-Noir” Horror, and Litfic with Magical Realism

Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales by Heather Fawcett

Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa

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Emily’s Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales I loved being back in the world of Emily Wilde, so I had such a warm feeling reading this book, even though the stakes in this book are higher in some ways compared to the first two in the trilogy. In this one, Emily and Wendell go to Wendell’s home realm in Faerie to reclaim the throne and are met with some challenges along the way. Just as we did in the first two books, we get occasional reminders […]

“Montserrat had three loves. One was horror movies. The other was her car. The third was Tristán.” CBR BINGO – Disco

Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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Okay, so this rating makes it seem like I wasn’t a huge fan of this book, but I liked it, I really did! It’s been over a month now, and it’s still in my head and it feels good, hasn’t soured, haven’t forgotten it. But I had a bit of a hard time getting through it while reading, and the magic system was a bit too woobly for me. This is fantasy horror book set in Mexico City in the 1990s, following Montserrat, a film […]

Cutting Room Floor

Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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Montserrat is a sound editor at a second-rate Mexican film studio, struggling to stay in the good graces of her sexist boss and living life mostly on her own. Aside from her cancer-stricken sister, her only real company is her childhood friend Tristan, a former soap opera star now resorting to voice-over work to make ends meet. The relationship between the two friends has a lived-in, comfortable feel, though Montserrat’s long-standing crush on Tristan is an unacknowledged open secret between the pair. They’re the kind […]

Silver Nitrate: a return to horror

Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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mood music: Luzbel – pasaporte al infierno Reminiscent of Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno Garcia returns to her Lovecraftian roots with Silver Nitrate. Set in Mexico during the early 1990s, the reader follows Montserrat (Momo), an audio engineer, and Tristan, a washed-up telenovela actor, whose chance encounter with a golden-era director leads them down a path of occultism and nazi worship. Shortly after moving into his apartment, Tristan meets his new neighbor, cult horror director Abel Urueta, after accidentally receiving his mail and delivering it to […]



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