Let me begin as simply as I can: It’s really weird to revisit Stephen King’s The Stand in late 2023. Here’s where the simplicity stops, because said weirdness is multifaceted, and each facet is rooted in a variety of different variables.

Adam-Troy Castro dives into Stephen King’s new novel Holly, then goes on to recommend a dark Chilean film (El Conde) and the latest adaptation of A Haunting in Venice.

Find out why critically acclaimed editor and author Shane Hawk loves Stephen Graham Jones’s The Babysitter Lives, a novella originally released only in audio.

Find out a little more about Chuck Wendig’s Black River Orchard and why veteran reviewer Adam-Troy Castro is recommending it.

Screenwriter and author Jamie Flanagan discusses the impact of Jeff VanderMeer’s works on their own writing, with a special emphasis on Veniss Underground and Annhilation.

Are you ready for Silver Nitrate, the new novel from Silvia Moreno-Garcia? Let horror expert Emily Hughes tell you why it’s a must-read this summer!

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.