Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Here’s How to Identify a Werewolf: They’re the Ones That Never Grow Up

Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones

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This is a werewolf story. And like all werewolf stories, according to our narrator, it always means more than one thing. Mongrels follows a family of werewolves – aunt Libby, uncle Darren, and our unnamed narrator – as they migrate back and forth across the southern US, moving whenever towns become too hot to hold them. Mongrels is a coming-of-age story, following our narrator from late childhood into his teenage years, navigating familial bonds and first loves. Mongrels is a story of being poor in […]

“‘I’m all right,’ I told her. This is a lie, when you’re twelve. And all the other years, too.”

Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones

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A lot happened in this short book; it feels much larger in my brain than 108 pages. It’s always a challenge to talk about novellas without giving too much away, but I feel like that’s not going to be the case here. Mapping the Interior is pretty dense with both happenings and themes, despite the deceptively readable prose. Junior has moved away from the Blackfeet Reservation with his mother and younger brother Dino, after his father’s death. His mother wanted to give the boys a fresh start. […]

“You really named her ‘Linnea’?” “Linnea’s a survivor.” “She dies in every movie.” “Her characters do, but she goes from movie to movie,” Letha says. “She never dies.”

Don't Fear the Reaper (The Lake Witch Trilogy, #2) by Stephen Graham Jones

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So this was a really good book! But it had extremely large shoes to fill. My expectations weren’t that high for it, but only because I purposefully set them low knowing that living up to the genius that was My Heart is a Chainsaw was just going to be a really tall order. I feel like I need to re-read both this one and the first one pretty soon and take it slowly, and tab and annotate, because I got in my own way here. […]

Some Shorts (Evelyn Waugh (1); Italo Calvino (1); Henry James (1); Stephen Graham Jones (1); Cassandra Khaw(1); John Grisham (1); CW Longbottom (1)

The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Henry James by A Tragedy of Error

Midnight Caller by Stephen Graham Jones

Don't Turn on the Lights by Cassandra Khaw

The Tumor by John Grisham

Tears of the Anaren by CW Longbottom

Village of Islands by Jim Shepard

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The Loved One “All the day the heat had been barely supportable but at evening a breeze arose in the west, blowing from the heart of the setting sun and from the ocean” I rented the first disc of Six Feet Under from Blockbuster just as soon as the dvds of the first season came out. I remember that one of the first scenes of the show, and the first season of the show was weird, like the ways that the first season of Sex […]

Don’t Fear the Reaper

Don't Fear the Reaper by Stephen Graham Jones

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Please note that I received this via NetGalley. This did not effect my rating or review.  I just need to give up. I am never going to be in love with Stephen Graham Jones works like my horror friends are. I have tried people. This book was just a mess. Parts of it shone, and I get why my friends like his books when you get to the shiny parts. But the whole plot just gets beyond confusing at one point. And I am so […]

“Shanna was the first to go. And by ‘go’ I mean die. And by ‘die’ I mean get killed.”

Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones

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I suppose it was inevitable that I wouldn’t perfectly gel with every single thing SGJ has written. This was good, but not really my thing. At first, I was really into it because I love a chatty, informal narrator (when done well). And in the style regard, I can’t fault this book at all. It’s solid. But the story itself just didn’t really work for me. The novella opens with our main character, Sawyer, telling us about the time a prank went very wrong for […]



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