Bands that played the county fair circuit might be a step above garage bands, but it was usually a small step. )ĪS GLEN MANEUVERED HIS CAR OVER THE RUTTED field the sign insisted was the parking lot, Ali frowned out the tinted window at a line of teenagers dressed in white and leading enormous brown cows and wondered if her partner had lost his mind. Enjoy! And if you’re wondering what kind of fruit I think my work is? That would be the nuts. So please pull up a chair in the shade, prop up your feet on the cooler full of the icy beverage of your choice, set the phone on mute, and dig in.

I finished deciding that I hadn’t helped prepare a gourmet meal in this case, but instead somehow created a cool, summer fruit salad: a bursting of sweet strawberries for romantic love, the twang of sour grapes for revenge and loss, chunks of apples and peaches-the stories from established worlds we have become familiar with, and the exotic flavor of kiwi and passion fruit-the tantalizing glimpses of something new we’d like to see more of, all mixed up with the sweet dressing of incomparable, good storytelling from some of the best authors in the paranormal romance and urban fantasy field today. With urban fantasy’s goal of finding the reason behind the attraction and paranormal romance’s open and honest explorations of love and lust, I found a refreshingly wide span of storytelling styles, but the common thread of an intelligent, strong-willed female protagonist in a little over her head rang true in every story.

So it was with great pleasure that I accepted Marty Greenberg’s challenge to put together a short story collection of urban fantasy and paranormal romance: tastefully erotic tales of romance, love, and downright inescapable lust running the stylistic temperature from sweet to spicy to tantalizingly dangerous.

Those masters of the science fiction and fantasy field had created for me a gourmet meal, with its small portions elaborately presented to leave the participant impressed, knowing that they had taken in something out of the ordinary, even if it did leave them hungry for a burger on the way home. Short stories were where I fell in love with the power behind the printed word, a small little nugget of truth or observation, a “what if” of thought pared down to its simplest thought to make the complex easy.

Hotter Than Hell by Kim Harrison