It was a good month for vampires. Besides the first public release of photos showing Nicolas Cage’s turn as a decidedly Lugosi-esque Dracula in the upcoming film Renfield, the Lord Ruthven Assembly announced the winners of its annual awards for vampire-related media. Jessica Levai’s The Night Library of Sternendach: A Vampire Opera in Verse won in the fiction category while Simon Bacon’s The Transmedia Vampire: Essays on Technological Convergence and the Undead and Violet Fenn’s A History of the Vampire in Popular Culture: Love at First Bite were joint winners in non-fiction. Midnight Mass won in the media category and, finally, Elizabeth Miller earned special recognition “for her foundational contributions to vampire, specifically Dracula, studies.”
And Morbius came out, too — although judging by the response so far, this may not be remembered as one of the high points of vampire cinema.
Sadly, this is also the month in which Fireside magazine announced its impending closure. The magazine published fantasy works that were sometimes horror adjacent or at least eerie, including Nicasio Andres Reed’s haunting “Body, Remember”
Doris V. Sutherland 