Dead Red Heart is the perfect gift book for the hard to please reader, there is, literally, something in here for everyone! From light comedy, to blood curdling terror; from giant mutant possums to heart-warming love stories, there will be something you’ll enjoy.

As I don’t normally read short stories or Anthologies, I am quite excited to discover one of the main reasons why I really should read this style more often: authors. Lots and lots of authors. Many of whom were unknown to me. Because of DRH I’ve got two new authors that I just can’t wait to read more of. And it’s only fair that I have picked up two new favourites really, I loved their world building, I enjoyed their characters, the writing style was well developed and the stories themselves I just can’t get enough of. So my two favourite reads in this anthology are Out of the Grave by Amanda Pillar and Coming Home by Kathryn Hore. Both are stories I would love to read in full novel form, and I am certainly going to be keeping my eyes out for further works from these two.

One of the most delightful things to reading this as my first anthology of short stories since I was a kid, was the blurb about the story by each writer, having that extra insight into the story is wonderful.

Although the theme of ‘Dead Red Heart’ is ‘Australian Vampires’, each author has tackled the idea in a very different manner. Where normally you find anthologies perhaps have a similar theme, but certainly in the same genre, DRH doesn’t. I do wish some of the stories had come with warning labels, or at least little ‘genre icons’ at the start of each story, as some where a little more ‘thriller’ than I’d normally read. But each was well written, and if I did skip the occasional story as it started to get a little too much for me, I still enjoyed the majority of them.

The ‘foundation story’ is “Tide”, is a fascinating concept. The basic idea being vampires coming to Australia as boat people, claiming refugee status from fear of slaughter in their primary eastern European home lands. Each author then gets a newspaper article to write. Some of the results are predicable, but overall tide is amusing and shocking and all the stories flow together to make a very interesting story.

I harp on, but I was so delighted by DRH overall, it’s a wonderfully enjoyable showcase of Australian authors, and a wonderfully diverse range of stories; if you thought vampires had been done... to death... then you haven’t met any of the creative Aussie talent in Dead Red Heart.