Edward Cullen once told Bella Swan that she was his own personal brand of heroin. Well, there are no heroin-brand Bellas, let alone any sparkly vegetarian vampires, in KNUCKLE SUPPER (Alphar Publishing) by Drew Stepek (pictured). Instead, the reader gets real-heroin-addicted Los Angeles vampire gang members in the middle of a drug war and a young hooker down on her luck.

An anthology of 15 short stories, EYE WITNESS ZOMBIE offers a surprisingly strong variety of first-hand accounts of the zombie apocalypse. This is May December Publications’ first undead omnibus, edited by TW Brown (pictured); after devouring it, readers will be hungry for more.

Author David Grove (MAKING FRIDAY THE 13TH, FANTASTIC 4: THE MAKING OF THE MOVIE) is head-over-Oxfords in love with Jamie Lee Curtis, and his new biography JAMIE LEE CURTIS: SCREAM QUEEN is littered with evidence of this crush. Of course, many of us who grew up watching Curtis in slasher classics like HALLOWEEN, TERROR TRAIN and PROM NIGHT feel the same way.

Literature throughout the decades has often made use of social turmoil and disaster, be it fact or fiction, as a backdrop for dramatic prose. In Margaret Mitchell’s GONE WITH THE WIND, the backdrop was the American Civil War. In John Steinbeck’s THE GRAPES OF WRATH, it was the Great Depression. In today’s media, it’s…zombies! The undead have not only raided movie theaters the world ’round, they’ve invaded your local bookstore as well—and not those mindless monstrosities you see shuffling from the self-help section to the adjoining café with a hardcover copy of some spineless, Oprah-sponsored MD tucked under one arm.

SUICIDE MACHINE, the cleverly written new novel by Mike Watt (pictured), follows Tanith Godwin, demon slayer—and lesbian!—as she discovers that even if you have a centuries-old warrior inside you, it doesn’t protect you from the everyday bullshit of human life.

When it comes to marketing horror movies, the world has changed for the worse. Today, a film sinks or swims based on its on-line presence or how “viral” it becomes. Shame that—because studios, and in turn filmmakers and audiences, seems to be oblivious about just how effective and powerful a damn good movie poster can be. Today it seems all people want—or at least all people get—is nameless, faceless, generic, namby-pamby Photoshop shrugs and designer dropout fodder.

Despite Stephen King’s notoriety for producing elephantine novels with the physical heft and dimensions of cinder blocks, most fans would agree that the breezier format of the novella has framed some of King’s finest writing. “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” and “The Mist” are two of the more celebrated examples on King’s shorter-form résumé, and with the release of his new collection FULL DARK, NO STARS, Fango was anxiously hoping this fresh batch of stories might recall some of the greatness that marked those earlier works.