Halloween may be over, but for those who like a good spooky story any time, I found a great book sure to give not only a scare but also some good laughs as well. Blood Lite is an anthology of horror stories “with a humorous bite” and I think it is a wonderful collection. Edited by New York Times bestselling author Kevin J. Anderson, it includes tales from some of the best authors that the Horror Writers Association has to offer, including Charlaine Harris, Jim Butcher, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Kelley Armstrong, and others. While each story is dark, with creatures from vampires to devils to werewolves and more, each also has irony, twists and turns, and humor.

The collection has twenty-one stories, ranging in length from two pages to over thirty. As with any anthology, no one will like every story, and especially with humor, it is definitely hard to please everyone with every tale. However, I think most readers who enjoy these types of stories in the first place will like most (if not all) of this book. I can honestly say that there were only three stories that I truly did not like, and of the rest, naturally I enjoyed some more than others, and I wanted to share a bit about the ones I felt were outstanding.

Jim Butcher's story was a Harry Dresden tale, and I thought an excellent one. In “Day Off”, Harry is trying to enjoy something rare for him, a day with no work or commitments. He is looking forward to enjoying a nice romantic date, but ends up with multiple problems that only he can solve. If you are a fan of Dresden, this is definitely something you'll want on your shelf.

“The Ungrateful Dead”, by Kelley Armstrong, is about a necromancer who ends up trying to help a pair of dead cousins. She ends up teaching them a lesson about being careful what you wish for, and she remembers why it is usually better to ignore the dead.

The shortest story, but one of the best in my opinion is “Old School”, by Mark Onspaugh. This story is about what can happen when people who didn't pay attention in English class dabble with dark forces. Let's just say that punctuation can be very important.

Matt Venne brings us “Elvis Presley and the Bloodsucker Blues”, which tells a different version of the last years of Elvis' life. This story offers an interesting explanation for his weight gain, sunglasses, even his visit with President Nixon – Elvis truly was a creature of the night!

“Hell in a Handbasket”, by Lucien Soulban, poses an interesting premise – practical jokes don't just happen on earth. Demons and angles show they have a sense of humor when a baby shows up at the gates of Hell.

Charlaine Harris, best known for her Sookie Stackhouse (as seen on HBO in True Blood) series, brings us a non-Sookie story with “An Evening With Al Gore”. Things are not what they seem when an affluent couple and their friends decide to try to help some people who are not environmentally friendly see the error of their ways. In the end, they did help the environment in more ways than one.

In “No Problem”, Don D'Ammassa tells us about a scientist who finds he has an interesting ancestor, Viktor Frankenstein. When he decides to try to duplicate his great-grandfather's work, it turns out to be a helpful thing at first, then becomes a very big problem.

“The Sound of Blunder”, by J.A. Konrath and F. Paul Wilson, gives us a story about what happens when a fortune cookie prediciton comes true. Two minor criminals in a jam end up magically transported into the past and accidentally change the future. Just their luck, they still can't get themselves out of trouble.

These are just a sample of the great stories in this book. There are mobsters, monsters, Lovecraft fans, desperate husbands, psycho killers, ostriches fish, and more. We find out that even Smokey the Bear has a dark side. I do want to caution parents – this book may not be something you'd want for young readers. I say this not necessarily because of the fact that the tales are horror stories by nature, but because some of the stories contain adult language and situations. All in all, I highly recommend this book for those readers with a dark sense of humor who can handle monsters, blood, and laughs.