Hungry for You
by A.M. Harte
Kindle Edition
Read an excerpt here.
Publisher: 1889 Labs Ltd.
Release Date: March 2011
Review copy provided by author in exchange for an honest review.
Note: This review is not part of Ms. Harte’s blog tour from a few months ago.

First, check out the amazing book trailer for this collection:

Plot Summary:

“There is no greater drug than relationships; there is no sweeter death than love.”

Love is horrible. It’s ruthless, messy, mind-altering, and raw. It takes no prisoners. It chews you up and spits you out and leaves you for dead. Love is, you could say, very much like a zombie.

In this haunting short story collection, anything is possible—a dying musician turns to tea for inspiration; a police sergeant struggles with a very unusual victim; a young wife is trapped in a house hiding unimaginable evil….

With Hungry For You, A.M. Harte explores the disturbing and delightful in an anthology that unearths the thin boundary between love and death.

Review: This marks the first short story collection from dark fiction scribe AM Harte and it’s a compilation of zombie tales, including the eponymous Hungry for You, in which a zombie hungers only for the protagonist, even though he wasn’t of that persuasion in life. It’s a well-written collection and Harte does a great job of establishing pathos for the characters in each story with an emphasis, of course, on the zombie ones. It fuses a different kind of zombie narrative, one that examines the deeper implications of what being a zombie means, and what it feels like. I would have liked more variety in terms of how the zombies were presented, and it would have been nice to see more of a variation on the traditional zombie origins, although the author does make it a point to separate her zombies from the traditional “we’ve been infected by a virus and now we’re hopping mad” type that dominates most zombie fiction today.

Some stories can be touching, including one in which a guy is changing into a zombie but when his girlfriend infects herself on purpose — the outcome pans out a bit differently than she planned, however. The stories are all relatively engaging and paced decently. Zombie fans will enjoy it, and fans of the more delicate side to zombies/zombie romance should definitely pick this up. It’s not paranormal romance, but rather a clever juxtaposition of zombies and love. Check out some more reviews of this title, including these:

Black Sun Reviews
Zombie Romance Book Reviews
Blatant Biblioholic

Rating: 3.5/5