FlamesRising.com is pleased to present an exclusive preview of a new anthology put together by Kerrie Hughes and Martin Greenberg. THE GIRL’S GUIDE TO GUNS AND MONSTERS includes several of your favorite urban fantasy and paranormal romance authors including: Lilith St. Crow, Anton Strout, Tanya Huff, Jim C. Hines, Mickey Zucker Reichert and Elizabeth A. Vaughan.

Featuring several new heroines that aren’t afraid to do the “rescuing,” this collection of thirteen short stories is all about empowered female characters. Now, you can read an excerpt from three of these stories.

The Girl’s Guide to Guns and Monsters is available now at Amazon.com and DriveThruHorror.com.

Edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes, ZOMBIE RACCOONS AND KILLER BUNNIES is a collection of anthologies that explore the darker side of your favorite woodland creatures like raccoons, bunnies, snakes, bats and more! For this collection, the short stories range from humorous to gory and everything in between. Additionally, the stories explore multiple genres like modern horror and science fiction. Before we offer you a few samples of select short stories from this horror anthology, we’d like to highlight the titles in this book, which was published by DAW in October 2009.

This is a collection of short stories by Jeff Vandermeer both tangentially and directly about a fictional fantasy city called Ambergris, noted for its somewhat piratical past, the presence of mysterious and sinister mushroom men and freshwater squid. It is also very, very, very weird and very, very, very surreal. I suppose, broadly, it fits into the general thrust of the urban fantasy movement but it is also a damn sight weirder, more Burroughs than Mieville. One story might be a more conventional fantasy story, another might play with the relationship between fantasy and reality and the other might leave you scratching your head and reaching for the dictionary just so you could read something fully comprehensible for a change.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough