You can reduce the vampire to a snarling beast who slits throats, but—the energy invested in any fresh iteration aside—the trope is much more interesting in terms of control; sometimes driven by outright mind control, and sometimes in more subtle terms, such as the seductive voice whispering blandishments that the given victim cannot resist. This time out we have two vampire stories (Night’s Edge, a novel by Liz Kerin, and Renfield, a film) about co-dependent, toxic relationships, as poisoned by love as they are by supernatural power.

But why bother pointing out the myriad failures of a half-century old novel? Matheson is dead, but like Hell House’s moldering emasculated patriarch Emeric Belasco, he haunts us still. With a lingering nostalgia unmoved by decades of new and exciting work, many horror publications and fans insist that the genre’s golden age rests squarely in the lap of about four white men who wrote most of their best work between 1970 and 1985.

There exists an intermittent but very real phenomenon of movie critics, mostly male but some female, revealing—sometimes inadvertently and sometimes unabashedly—that they are deeply in love with the actresses they write about. It is always actresses, for some reason, at least in the manifestations I have seen. Examples would be the one well-known TV guy who kept praising one lady as the most fascinating actress of her generation until his partner finally demanded, “Can you name even one memorable movie she’s been in?”

My quarterly review column “Read This!” is being replaced by “de•crypt•ed,” a space where guest authors revisit favorite books to decode their personal interpretations for the benefit of other readers. The recipe is a flavorful, well-seasoned stew of analysis and homage, with a dash of memoir in any influence the work has had on the author’s own. For my farewell column and the debut of the new I want to share a notorious Russian novel I first read in the Michael Glenny translation: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.

Of late I have gravitated to reviewing one book and one movie, a mixture that is more or less appropriate even if it also leaves me feeling apologetic toward those publishers who have left my shelves groaning with works that surely deserved some coverage here. (Movies, I feel, even as a guy whose mania for the art approaches laser focus, can largely carry their own water.) But it ain’t going to change this time, as we once again have one book, and one movie, fortuitously linked by the commonality of predatory smiles.

Ready for some classic tropes? Terence Taylor reviews Arthur Shattuck O’Keefe’s new novel The Spirit Phone (that’s right: this one features both Nikola Tesla and Aleister Crowley!) and Sign Here, Claudia Lux’s new novel about living and working in Hell.

If you’re looking for a movie, Adam-Troy Castro recommends the SFnal body horror of Crimes of the Future (the latest from director David Cronenberg). He’s also excited about the fantastic new anthology Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology, edited by Vince A. Liaguno and Rena Mason.

This month Terence Taylor dives into the realm of horror comedy, reviewing If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe by Jason Pargin and  Suburban Hell by Maureen Kilmer. Will these books make you laugh or scream? Read the review to find out!

It’s Alive! by Julian David Stone is not a horror novel. It is indeed being published in the historical fiction category, appropriate enough because it does involve actual people and actual events. So why does Adam-Troy Castro think our readers will want to read it? Check out his review to find out!

This month Terence Taylor reads two works centered on identity: Ally Wilkes’ new polar horror novel, All the White Spaces, and Aaron Durán’s new comic book, Season of the Bruja.