Entries from May 2007 ↓

A band of survivors huddles in the wreckage of an apartment building while outside, hordes of the hungry, walking dead batter against the barricades. The situation is tense and nearly hopeless, until the sounds of heavy firepower drown the zombie wails. Has help arrived? In a way. Unfortunately, this 'help' is far worse than the zombie siege. There's more than one kind of undead running around this world.

Vampires, not humans, are the stars of this zombie-apocalypse novel. The bloodsuckers are housed inside a veritable fortress, with guns galore and plentiful stores of food (penned up humans). Initially, this fortress seems like it will last forever but then the cracks show.

The leader of the licks is the huntress Shade, inheritor to her vampiric father's kingdom and charged by that old fiend to "restore the City of Roses". Her general, the sexually charged predator called Frost, has another plan: he wants the vampires to abandon the urban locale and move to an island where they might hunt at their whim and 'live' existences of gleeful, animalistic abandon. This city, Frost argues, is nothing but a place for corpses.  The conflict between these two major characters threatens to tear the world apart, if the zombies don't do it first.

The vampires themselves are less the supernatural Un-Dead of Stoker than the action antiheroes of the film Underworld. These creatures screw and banter and scheme and torture like adrenalized humans with an addiction to blood and an allergy to sunshine. They don't have much in the ways of supernatural powers (save one in particular, called The Seer), but they sure do know how to kick butt.

The zombies themselves are not quite the Romero-esque style of ghoul but neither are they the traditional voudoun animate. These things are essentially flesh machines, transportation for a pseudo-sentient mass of black jelly called the Puppeteer, an organism that occupies the head of the dead, reanimates it, and causes it to seek others. These zombies can regenerate 'nonfatal' wounds (dead bang headshots) and as time ticks by, the Puppeteers they are a'changing. So too are their flesh machines. Is it evolution or mutation? Hard to say, since scientific speculations take a back seat to plenty of gunshots, stabbings, clubbings, explosions, invasions, betrayals, messy deaths, and assorted carnage.

Yes, this book is a rush of high excitement and cinematic ultra violence, but there's also time for a (somewhat obvious) mystery: who killed Shade's vampire fadda?  Did his death really come at the hands of lucky humans or was it the work of someone closer to home? All told, with Roses of Blood on Barbwire Vines, D.L. Snell has crafted a solid entertainment, an action packed flick for the theatre of the mind's eye.

Roses of Blood on Barbwire Vines by D. L. Snell
248 pages
Permuted Press
Released May 2007

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Candy apple high heels and red leather dresses. Knives and hitmen. Beautiful monsters roaming inner city hells. Strange, supernatural encounters with a dead man's ashes. Sinister relationships and horrifying flings. Extreme erotic horror alongside quiet ghost stories. All these and more populate Amy Grech's first, full collection of fiction.

These stories have appeared in a variety of publications between 1997 and 2006 (two of them are original to this volume) ranging from erotic-horror (Cthulhu Sex and Red Scream) to the more general-horror (Bare Bone) and even science fiction-horror (Apex and Alien Skin) markets.

This reader has long wondered the best way to approach reviewing collections/anthologies. Since there are several tales, and each of them is brief, how best to review the book as a whole? Summarize each story? Only summarize the most memorable ones? What happens when each of the stories is memorable? Well, this time around, I've decided to offer a few "literary snapshots" and then some notes:

The titular piece finds a pretty young Daddy's girl (in the high heels and leather dress mentioned above) looking for a not-so-gentle lover. What follows is an erotic nightmare. In "Rampart" a man on the edge of madness is certain that his house is moving around him. Not merely the possessions inside the house, but the house itself. "EV 2000" delves into the science fiction side of horror for a rather deadly encounter with blood donation, intelligence, and (quite possibly) evolution. "Perishables" tackles a rather grisly post-apocalyptic nightmare scenario. "Ashes to Ashes" explores what might happen when a grieving widow discovers her husband's urn is empty but a throbbing pile of ashes lies near the washing machine. These are only a handful of the intriguing tales populating this baker's dozen collection.

As a writer, Amy Grech is still refining her craft, and this batch of stories certainly demonstrates both her development and her strengths. Here we find an author with a good eye for necessary details, a good sense for characters, and a fine sensibility for story. Grech displays a knack for spinning nightmares at varying lengths: individual story page lengths range from a whopping 16 pages to a mere 3 (showing that Grech has successfully tackled even the challenging short-short). While this reader found the dialogue occasionally lackluster and a plot or two somewhat predicatable, overall Apple of my Eye is an enjoyable read. Plenty of shivers and shudders await the curious reader of this volume.

Apple of My Eye by Amy Grech
128 pages
Two Backed Books
Released  2007

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