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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