A great review here from Dandelion Girl:
Views of a Dandelion Girl: Kissing Frankenstein & Other Stories

And here from Annette Thomson:
Nettie Thomson: Kissing Frankenstein & Other Stories

And here are the Amazon reviews

Lots of us have blogged about the anthology as writers and I’ve come across many of these doing a book search on Google. If you like you can share the links here.

Please leave a comment below if you’d like to leave a link to a blogpost about the anthology

‘Sorry,’ I said meekly, and wondered why it was me who was apologising. Somehow the new flexible and automorphing glass we all had nowadays didn’t make life any easier and could be hard to cope with, specially when things went like this. Even burglars, it was said, got told off when they tried to break windows: ‘Push us aside, peel us back, bend us out, but don’t even think of trying to break us. We don’t break, us flexiglass windows.’
‘Bossy, uppish, trying to run the world,’ I thought. Even before today I’d known that the usual glassware, bowls and jugs in the kitchen could be very difficult. Better be careful. ‘Really sorry,’ I repeated and added idiotically – I could have kicked myself, though it would have been better to kick the wineglass – ‘I hope you’re OK, not … hurt or anything?’

‘Hmmm.’ The glass wasn’t going to be friendly, that was clear. It went on:
‘You listen. Right now I’m a wineglass, red wine, white wine, whatever. But if I wanted I could’– there was a theatrical pause –‘very quickly…’ It speeded up: ‘turn myself into a copita, one of those slender sherry glasses, know the ones I mean?’ I nodded. ‘Dive into me then, and you’re a goner: head down, drowning in amontillado, legs kicking, but not for long. And I might not take pity and help you out the next time.’

‘No,’ I agreed, as the pause lengthened. This was crazy, being scared by a glass.

‘I don’t think you’re taking me seriously,’ it said. ‘We’ll teach you.’ It raised its voice. ‘Guys, girls, all of you! Everyone out. We need to give someone a lesson.’

Out of the kitchen cupboards they poured, literally. The floor was awash with a flood of liquid glass. I could still move my feet, but they were heavy and getting heavier every second.

‘Ever wondered how flies get trapped in amber?’ laughed the glass, itself still in wineglass form, but beginning to melt and drip. ‘Well, now you know.’

Muriel Higgins

Muriel Higgins is a retired teacher of English as a foreign language and text-book writer. Born and educated in Scotland, she has lived in several countries overseas and moved to Dorset in 2005.

Una Roberts pointed to a row of pink stars. ‘And Samuel, he always takes priority around Passover – that’s like Easter to people of the Jewish persuasion.’
She made it sound like a tongue twister. And I would have laughed, but for her earnest expression.
‘And he’ll leave early on a Friday – in the winter months, you understand.’ (Yellow stars, unbelievably.)
I could have told her that I did Comparative Religious Studies at High School, and that I understood very well indeed.

‘Tajinder, you already know about (blue stars); and Mary-Beth likes to,’ she paused and cleared her throat, ‘Honour the Old Ways – she splits her days around the eight nature festivals.’ Then she sighed and turned back to the wall planner.

‘And how about you, Mrs Roberts.’ I figured it was time I said something.

She let slip a little smile. ‘Oh, I try to be flexible where I can – one has to be mindful that we are a multi-cultural society now.’ She shifted round and stared at the array of stars and extended marker lines. I couldn’t see an extra colour there, for either of us.

‘Christmas, Easter, public holidays mainly – it’s easier for me because I’m only ten minutes from home.’

I failed to see what difference this made to having time off from work. But I stuck with my winning formula and just nodded.

‘So anyway, Matthew, have a think about when you’d like your vacation time – no rush at all.’

I scanned the chart for gaps between stars and marker lines and thick red ink that shouted CONFERENCE and END OF MONTH FIGURES. I spied a space mid August and gazed upon it covetously.

‘That’s when I visit my mother,’ she said. ‘I just haven’t had a chance to mark it up.’ She plastered five green stars across the week, like barbed wire.

And we stood for a while, side by side, as if she was silently daring me to take my chances and pick again. I slowly extended a finger and she followed my lead, slapping the board like a flyswatter. July, August and September fell beneath her stubby arm, the flesh extending down into the top edge of October.
‘Early June will suit me fine,’ I said quietly, picking out the silver stars from the pot and readying the first one on the strip.

She glanced sideways at me, catching the corner of my smile. ‘Oh no dear, that won’t be possible. June we keep free wherever we can, just in case.’

And that was how I wound up taking my annual vacation in early November. And it naturally followed that I yearned for the sun and that meant a long journey. So the second year, when I weighed it all up, I figured there was little sense in going back to the job. After all, I was lower on the list than a week of “just in case”.

And working in a café seemed the perfect thing to do while I was figuring out what to do next, which was where Old Davey had his bright idea at the end of an evening shift. The big room out back – Davey said it used to be a repair room when the café was some kind of big electrical shop. Well, that became the first little theatre this place ever had. And folks got to like it. So we needed more people and some local talent.

Well, one cool June morning, this woman breezes in, with her hair tied just so and one of those smart embroidered jackets on. And under her arm is a play she’d just written, and she hands it to me confidently. Only she looks away as soon as I started to read it.

Three months later, we’re sitting together at the side, watching the big performance, her hand in mine. And that, kids, is pretty much how I met your mother. And that is why you should take any job on offer, at the beginning. Because you never know quite where it’s gonna lead.

And as the kids made a face and went outside to clear the tables, Martha stuck her head past the doorway and rolled her eyes. ‘Are you coming through? Because we’ve got customers and I want to get this place cleaned before curtain up.’

Derek Thompson

Derek Thompson is a writer and humorist living in West Cornwall. He writes fiction and non-fiction, but flash fiction holds a special place in his heart. As the saying goes: “Sometimes less is more.” His blog lives at: http://www.alongthewritelines.blogspot.com and you’re all invited.

She battled her way down the rough path to the beach, the wind snatching her breath away, rain and salt spray lashing her face. Even the gulls seemed scared, clinging to the cliff face in sullen masses as the gale raged on. The waves were rearing up, pounding the cliffs in fury. Bucking broncos, Stefan had said, trying to explain the fury and power of a stormy sea to Marina. Never go out to sea when the weather is like that.

Marina trudged back to the boat house. She was stuck here for another day at least. Still, at least the boathouse was warm and snug. She and Stefan had converted it together into a simple homely cottage for their frequent trips to the coast.

She spent the rest of the day indoors, secure against the elements in the sturdy building of stone and wood. Towards evening she thought the wind was abating and tuned into the shipping forecast. Stefan had taught her how to understand the technical terms and phraseology. She was right, the storm was passing.
The following day the wind had dropped. The sea was calm and a thick quilt of cloud spread across the sky, its greyness mirrored in the dark depths of the sea. Marina could see the Shark’s Teeth, the row of granite pillars jutting black and jagged out of the sea just beyond the mouth of the cove, and knew the time had come.

She walked over to the small rowing boat she and Stefan used to fish in the cove. Stowing her bag with care in the stern, she dragged the boat into the water and jumped in. She pulled steadily out to sea, drawing comfort from the rhythmic motion of the oars. Drawing level with the Shark’s Teeth, she shipped her oars and for a few moments sat still as the boat bobbed up and down. Above her head the gulls swooped and sailed on the unseen air currents with insolent ease.

Marina took the urn out of her bag and to the threnody of the gulls’ mocking calls scattered the ashes it contained onto the sea. Stefan was in the place he loved best.

As Marina rowed back to land the mist rolled in behind her. She beached the boat and looked back out to sea. There was nothing to see but fog.
Iris Lewis

Iris Lewis is a short story writer and poet living in Gloucestershire. After a management career in the education and health care sectors she is now able to devote more time to creative writing. She has only recently started to submit her material for publication. As a new writer she is delighted that she has been successful in both having her poetry and flash fiction accepted for inclusion in anthologies.

I toss my sandwich crusts to the birds, their feathers frayed and singed by the war. The hills on the horizon seem guarded, as if a secret waits in their folds. They know when we will once more turn the world on its head and shake the loose change of good living out of its pockets.

I shield my eyes from the bloody horizon. The hills turn black. Black with memories of screaming birds scattering.

The birds have rediscovered their nests. And I have come home.

Home to find my Lorna’s hands roughened and mottled from war-work and scrubbing and turning the soil. Our servants gone. Either dead or with new independence, working in factories where they run a line of machines instead of running back and forth at our command.

We’re on our own now. Me in my seersucker trousers instead of my strong khaki. No men at my side. No gun in my hands. I feel like white blubber, awake in the deep-blue of the night with my grotesque dreams of hearts blistering like blooms from khaki shirts.

“Only one way to get these blighters. And that’s to stand up and be counted.”

All my mates were called Tommy. No point remembering names now. And that was Tommy’s last shout before he spun three times and flopped like a fish back into the trench.

And Lorna in her patched frock, holding me with her hardened hands. That’s what I came back to. This is our new life. The cries of scorched birds, the flinty eyes of the brooding hills, servants’ bells that will never be answered.

The sun drops into its slot, glad to be gone. I stand up and brush the crumbs from my trousers. I go home through fields still peppered with prisoners of war, berry-brown and flaxen-haired. Longing for home too.

We all wait together for the new dawn.

Joanna Campbell

Joanna Campbell of Gloucestershire writes short stories all day at home in the Cotswolds, with three cats and occasional bowls of cereal for company. She has been published in various magazines and anthologies. In 2010 and 2012 she was shortlisted for both the Fish and the Bridport Short Story Prizes. In 2010 she was shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize. She is currently writing a novel as well as trying to be her husband’s company secretary. She hopes she is a better writer than she is a secretary, as does her husband.

‘No! She’s not dead!’

Great Uncle Jazeps, known to me as Uncle Jaz, gave me the timber shack today. It leans towards the fence, and one of the boards has slipped, leaving a triangle of sunlight on the back wall. He also let me have all the old tins of paint and second-hand brushes on the shelves.

‘You paint, make pretty, huh? Ya?’ Uncle Jaz had offered. ‘Maybe Auntie Pauline will give you mat for floor?’

‘Ya, Uncle Jaz.’ It was almost the only Latvian word I knew, along with Soodi, which I knew meant shit. I wasn’t allowed to say shit but Soodi was all right. I watched him lever the lid off with an old chisel, turquoise paint flaking onto the floor in bright flecks.
Great Aunt Pauline often shouts, but the shrieks sound different now. I scoot forward to look out of the door.

As she bellows, Auntie Pauline folds in the middle, until she runs out of sound, thin curls hanging down. Then she unfolds, the air squeezing back into her with a wail, like a pair of nylon, floral bellows. Uncle Jaz pats her as she rises, shaking his head. All I can pick out is the word ‘Jimmy.’

I hope he’s not coming home to take his old room back.

I dip the most pliable brush into the paint. It’s the colour of the bathroom wall, where it clashes with the primrose bath, sink and toilet. Where Uncle Jaz goes every morning with the Angling Times. At some point he sings some of the Latvian anthem, partly in Russian because he learned it at school. The first brushful glows against the faded creosote.
Words float through the missing window pane.

‘That T’resa, she was never good enough for our Jimmy.’ Hiccoughs punctuate Auntie Pauline’s shrill voice.

I like Teresa, she gives me sweets when she babysits, sherbet lemons that fountain sharpness and sugar into my mouth, butterscotch blocks in silver paper.

‘Is accident. It must be accident.’ Uncle Jaz, stretching the English words into funny shapes, shaking his head, white hair flowing onto his collar, blue eyes lost in nests of wrinkles.

The turquoise covers five long boards and starts the sixth. It rolls off the edges where creosote has oozed in from outside, forming balls of glossy colour. The next pot is called ‘Autumn Peach’ and is the colour of the best back room, the one reserved for guests. It has twin beds and matching polyester bedspreads that slide off the second you sit on them. The paint smells like new plasters, and is a similar shade. It’s thin at the top, solid at the bottom. It runs down the boards and streaks the floor.

The neighbour’s in the garden too, the one Auntie Pauline calls “that fat slut.” She’s soothing, I can hear lots of ‘loveys’ and ‘pets’.

‘I know he never done it, Cath.’

Cath’s voice doesn’t quite penetrate the shed, so I stand on one of the other tins to look through the dust and spiders’ webs on the window.

‘It must have been an accident. Don’t you worry, pet. It will all get sorted out.’

‘The police have always had it in for my boy.’ Pauline starts wailing again. The police are always arresting Jimmy, he seems to spend every winter in HMP Portsmouth.

Looking back at my work, the end wall of the shed is now more gravy-coloured than Autumn Peach, so I try another tin. It’s bright pink, and covered in a thick layer of khaki oil. I stir it a bit with the screwdriver. I pick a slat at random and touch the brush to it, paint oozing down the bristles and dropping a lazy ‘S’ and a few spheres of colour into the dust of the floor.

Uncle Jaz is shouting now. ‘Pauline!’ Then a lot of words, some Latvian, some words I’m not allowed to say. I peer around the door to see two policemen holding his arms. He’s crying, great sobs barking around the garden.

‘Is good lad, means no harm…’ He keeps lapsing into Latvian, which only Auntie Pauline can understand. Everyone is shouting.

‘My boy wouldn’t hurt a fly!’

‘There’s a young woman dead, Mrs Balodis. Someone knocked her down.’

The other neighbours hiss and growl like cats, standing by the shed.

‘I hear he ran her over with her own car.’ Mrs Madderly, whose husband always wanted us to reach into his trouser pocket for a toffee.

‘I hear he reversed over her.’ Mrs Pruitt, who told my brother off for falling off her wall and breaking his arm. ‘That Jimmy was always trouble. His mother is a bag of nerves.’

‘Poor Teresa. She was such a sweet girl. Not too bright, though, hanging out with Jimmy.’

The inch of blue in the battered tin is thick, the skin trampolining the brush off until I stir it a bit. I wipe it off on the corner of some newspaper. It goes on like blue cheese spread, and smells similar.

Mrs Pruitt has to speak louder over the commotion. ‘They’re a bad family, I’ve always said it.’ Mrs Pruitt, who Uncle Jaz took to the hospital when her husband has his veins done.

‘And those kids, in and out of care.’

I slide back into the shed, crouch over the tins and brushes with their broken promises. I will go back to the children’s home. Pea-green walls and urine flavoured mattresses. My eyes start to itch with tears, and I rub my sleeve over my face, leaving a smear of wetness from the paint. It might be for Teresa, but it’s probably for me.

Rebecca Alexander

Rebecca Alexander is a fiction writer and poet living in North Devon. She left a career as a psychologist, listening to people’s extraordinary stories, to write her own. Her first novel, Borrowed Time, was a runner up in the Mslexia competition, and attracted a literary agent. She blogs at http://witchwayblogspotcom.blogspot.co.uk/

Rachel Carter

Rachel Carter from North Devon writes short stories and flash fiction (some of which are published with Ether Books), and takes part in the online Friday Flash community. She has studied 13 Open University modules, and has a diploma in literature and creative writing. Whilst putting together this anthology she is supposed to be completing an honours degree and her husband’s VAT return. She blogs and shares short stories at: A Voice Released

‘Greetings,’ said the alien. ‘Are you the leader?’

‘Huh?’ said Fat Bob through gravy and crumbs. He looked down at the visitor. ‘Hey this ain’t Hallowe’en already is it?’ He hated the whole thing. Last year he had opted for ‘trick’. No way was he parting with one of his beloved pies. They had lured him out into the garden onto a patch of autumn leaves. But the leaves gave way. The devils had dug a pit and it was two days before he got out.

He wiped a greasy sleeve across his mouth. He really wanted to get back to his pie and chips. And a second pie, chicken surprise, was warming in the oven. The oven Martha had got at the dump. Resourceful Martha. The door kept falling off and one ring only worked if two of the others were on. We’re wasting gas he would say timidly. But she insisted her innumerable ‘bargains’ outweighed the utility bills. His trousers fitted her better. He was used to being led, and anyway she was one hell of a pie-maker. But as he got fatter she got thinner. Rare wasting disease the doctor had said. Then one day she wasn’t there anymore. He sure missed her pies. He experimented and pretty soon had the hang of it. And he could be resourceful too. He found breeding and slaughtering his own chickens cost-effective. Then he discovered roadkill, and was not averse to adding snails, beetles and suchlike.

He grinned at the bug-like creature on the doorstep. He’d give it trick or treat.

‘I guess I am the leader. Good first question,’ Fat Bob said. ‘Hey, good disguise too. Come right on in.’

Michael Kirby

Michael Kirby is from Chudleigh in Devon and has been writing ‘longish’ short stories for about five years. One of these stories was long-listed for the Fish prize. He is ‘at last’ editing his own ‘twenty odd year old’ Sci Fi novel. This is his first try at Flash fiction.

Kevlin Henney

Kevlin Henney from Bristol writes shorts and flashes and drabbles of fiction and articles and books on software development. His fiction has appeared online and on tree with Litro, Fiction365, Dr. Hurley’s Snake-oil Cure, The Fabulist, The Liminal, New Scientist and FlashStories.net. He blogs at asemantic.net and tweets as @KevlinHenney.

The Moroccan sun glared down, a burning copper penny in the sky. She closed her eyes, leaning back against the whitewashed wall, trying to ignore the unsettled stirrings of last night’s lamb.

When a shadow fell across her she sighed with relief.

It was short-lived. ‘Miss Williams! Are you going to find out where our tea is? It’s eleven o’clock!’

Jenny looked up into a fat, sweaty face that made her fingers twitch into a fist. ‘Certainly Mrs Walton-Clarke,’ she said, summoning a smile. ‘I’ll just see to it.’

As soon as they were in the car the shoes were coming off.

Rin Simpson

Rin Simpson is a Bristol-based freelance journalist and creative writer, and founder of The Steady Table writers’ group.

There had been safety in winter gloom. The chill, damp months had been her friend; had given her excuses aplenty. Her heart did not want to be woken. Darkness was a numbness she had got used to. Daffodils disturbed her. They glared their yellowness, trumpeting change. Time was moving in the wrong direction. She wanted the past again; the self she used to be.
The armchair was an embrace. Slumped, head down against the future, Sylvia longed for the years that had given her the best of her life. The date-arrested calendar above her head was holding back the worst of times, but the days kept on bringing them anyway.

Molly pushed the handwritten note through the letterbox; muted lilac paper, a picture of violets (somehow soothing) her carefully chosen words below in blue ink – an invitation to tea. Should she really be writing an invitation to something like tea? What did other people do? It felt, in this case, like the right thing. A cautious move; not too sudden. Face to face might be too much.

Molly pictured herself laying the tea table, gracing it with her grandmother’s white lace tablecloth, her mother’s rose-patterned tea service; each an inheritance she didn’t deserve. She imagined her own hands fulfilling the gestures performed for her countless times by hands aged and worn. Her assertions across the tea table had pushed her cup towards them, daring them to fill it with something new, something impossible. Breaking brittle biscuits, she had sipped tea with a sense that communion was pointless. Her terms had been strict. They had failed to apply to anyone except herself, alone…

Molly had only fully glimpsed her neighbour once in the short time since moving to this street. Molly had knocked on the door, wishing to borrow milk. She had noticed that her neighbour had deliveries from the milkman. Everything seemed to be delivered to the door – groceries, parcels… invitations to tea. The door didn’t deliver to the world. The world came knocking. When Molly had knocked, it had opened on a sad faced woman, her expression somehow a darkening of the shadows in her hallway. In that grainy interior, loneliness had grown into a beast that prowled the threshold. The woman held it back by the collar, her eyes turned down in self-conscious defeat.

Ever since that moment, the woman – Sylvia – had preyed on Molly’s mind, mixing with memories of her mother, her grandmother, the ways in which Molly had, over and over, let them down. She did not like to contemplate her past, or the person she used to be. It had been the worst of times. But it was behind her now. The daffodils in Sylvia’s garden were like sentinels to the future. Molly would make amends. Not to her mother, not to her grandmother; not directly anyway. Her regrets gathered round the fact that it was too late for that now. But, she could change; move forward.

As she posted the invitation through the letterbox, pulled her fingers from its spring, Molly thought of the poet John Donne. She pictured him in the old St Paul’s, its stone-cold space swimming with the multi-faceted gleams and shadows of diverse minds. She imagined them gathered together in a net of words by the poet dean, whose journey through the passionate life had washed him to a shore where ‘No man is an island.’
No woman neither.

Returning to her kitchen, Molly wrote in the date a few days ahead on her calendar – ‘Tea – with Sylvia.’ She would keep on knocking.
“Never send to know for whom the bell tolls,” she said to herself, resolute, flicking the calendar to look ahead at the months that would be her change.
“It tolls for thee.”

Melanie Doherty

Melanie Doherty lives in South Gloucestershire. She has had the itch to write from a very early age. In past years, several of her short stories for children were published in magazines – but more recent times allowed very little space for her inner storyteller. For her, this chance to attempt a piece of flash fiction was a timely prompt to let it spread its wings again! Melanie blogs at http://bookishnature.wordpress.com/