AnythingHorror Central

In a literary world dominated by novels whose Kindle versions are still big enough to choke a dinosaur, the story often goes unappreciated. Which is a shame, as there is a definite skill required to craft a compelling story, personable characters, and vivid settings, and to do it all within a limited number of words. Anyone can build a ship (except the castaways on Gilligan’s Island), but not everyone can build a ship in a bottle.

Amy Grech is one of those people, however. Over the last few years she has managed to sell over a hundred stories to various anthologies and magazines, including The Horror Express, Fear On Demand, The Book of Dark Wisdom, Zombie CSU, Inhuman Magazine, and many others. As you can probably guess from those titles, her genre of choice is horror. Influenced by such giants as Poe, Lovecraft, Shelley, and of course Stephen King, Amy has carved herself a strong reputation in a field usually dominated by men.

BLANKET OF WHITE is her second published anthology, a collection of fourteen stories, mostly horror, but some a mix with science fiction and straight drama, and she has kindly sent me a copy for review. So last night I forced myself to turn off my phone, TV and PC, settled down with the cat and a mug of Earl Grey, and got stuck into it.

The blurb within with book describes its contents as tales ‘about love and loss, lust and more lust’ and ‘dark sexuality’. As I ventured further into them, I found that this wasn’t strictly the case. Many are sexual, in theme as well as content, some explicitly so (“Come and Gone” deals with a man’s masturbatory habits turning blood-oriented; “Crosshairs” features a young boy whose fascination with guns gains a sexual slant, and “Cold Comfort” tells of a policeman’s dangerous sexual relationship with a beautiful but aggressive woman). But others stray a little further from this, into the territory of ‘quiet horror’.

For me, some of my favorites in this collection evoke the great horror writers of the past. The modern Gothic story “Rampart”, whose titular character fears the walls of his castle are closing in to kill him, is pure Poe. The gruesome “Perishables”, where a nuclear war survivor in a fallout shelter subsists on the flesh of his dead wife, was beautiful visceral in a Clive Barker way. And the spooky “Raven’s Revenge”, with its supernatural spirits and karmic comeuppance, could have crept out of a Robert Bloch collection.

Author Amy Grech.

Some stories possessed no horrific elements at all, but proved effective nonetheless (“Damp Wind and Leaves”, about a teenage horror fan meeting a girl at a Halloween party, does very little but is still engaging), though others proved predictable and/or clumsy (Immediately starting into “Prevention”, “Initiation Day” and “Apple of My Eye”, I knew automatically how they would end).

Now I realize that in any anthology, whether of one or multiple authors, you’re gonna get a few you won’t like, so if I identify any problems with BLANKET OF WHITE, it will be ones which run throughout most or all of the stories. In this case, I really only have two gripes. The first is the brevity of most of the tales. Many felt like vignettes or excerpts from larger stories that had been trimmed to meet some unspoken word count. I don’t need a minimum number of words in a story I’m reading, but I don’t want to reach the end of it and think, “Huh? Is that it?”, something which happened to me on several occasions while reading this. And I don’t need to have everything wrapped in a neat little bow, but some resolution would be nice.

My other gripe is with the dialogue. While Amy’s prose is at times evocative and compelling, the dialogue from her characters is at times can come across as stiff, unrealistic, which for me is an impediment to establishing a connection with the story and characters. It was first noticeable in the eponymous story, “Blanket of White”, about the actions of the parents of a girl, suffering from cerebral palsy to end her misery. What should have been a heart-breaking, gut-wrenching story was repeatedly disturbed by my brain telling me, “No 12-year-old kid talks like that.” My brain was right. Mine certainly didn’t at that age, and she was as precocious as you can get outside of a TV sitcom. And there were other examples, mostly of people speaking uncharacteristically for their settings and situations, contrived to evoke horror.

Am I sorry I read BLANKET OF WHITE? Not at all. Amy Grech is an obviously talented writer, and I look forward to seeing what she can do with something more of novel or novella length, when she has the opportunity to flesh out characters and provide stronger resolutions to her tales. Amy has a website here where you can check out her other work and upcoming projects, and you can follow her on Twitter here.

My Summary:

Author:  Amy Grech

Plot:  2.5 out of 5 stars (for the overall anthology)

Gore:  3.5 out of 10 skulls (for the overall anthology)

Zombie Mayhem:  0 out of 5 brains

Reviewed by Derek “Deggsy” O’Brien