Ever wonder what would happen if someone crossed Sex and the City with Night of the Living Dead? In "An Acquired Taste," by Mark Henry, undead glamour girl Amanda dishes over lattes about her tryst with her therapist between meals of human flesh. You'll find this, and twenty-three other tales of dating from beyond the grave, in Loving the Undead: An Anthology of Romance (Sort Of), edited by Katherine Sanger (From the Asylum Press and Books, 2007, $13.95). Brain-eating zombies feature heavily in these tales.

In the opener, "The Smell of Love" by Jessica E. Kaiser, Vanessa is unnerved by her new zombie boyfriend's habit of smelling her brains through her head . . . and oddly jealous when she catches him sniffing a friend's head. Other zombie tales range from the comic to the gory. J. G. Faherty's "Home on the Range" is by far the most stomach-turning entry; the easily grossed-out may want to skip past it. There is even one surprisingly tender zombie tale, "Making the Perfect Man," by Linda L. Donahue. It pays special respect to Haitian "voodoo" legends, to a poignant effect. Vampires, werewolves and ghosts also find love in these pages. Two of the ghost stories especially stand out.

One of them, Leslie Brown's "The Sheik and I," has its heroine Yardley winning a re-animated dead soul as an "Employee of the Month" prize. She chooses Rudolph Valentino, but life with the legendary lover doesn't turn out quite like she planned it. "Fostering" by K. G. Kofmel is a sweet tale, in which Diane's husband's ghost helps her find a new purpose in life. Just as the subtitle An Anthology of Romance (Sort Of) implies, the romance in these stories often takes a back seat to the humor, or the horror. It works for this anthology. After all, that's the way love is: sometimes beautiful, sometimes funny, and sometimes downright scary. You'll probably recognize the feelings, even if your lover's insides aren't slowly being eaten away by maggots.(end)

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