Sometimes you have to break out of your comfort zone. For novelist Laura Lippman, whose portrait is on the cover of the new Mystery, Thriller, and Horror Issue, that meant putting aside her penchant for dark suspense fiction—she’s best-known for her tough-minded Baltimore PI, Tess Monaghan—and trying something new: a cozy mystery. The result is Murder Takes a Vacation (Morrow/HarperCollins, June 17), which our starred review calls “another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.”

“I want to pretend this was a conscious act of rebellion in which I write a genre that has been derided by men in my field,” Lippman tells contributor Connie Ogle in the cover story. But no. Lippman happened to be watching the film Charade, a delightful 1963 caper in which Audrey Hepburn (in her 30s) encounters Cary Grant (almost 60) in the Swiss Alps, then sets off with him to solve the murder of her husband, flirting all the while. Lippman wanted to try a lighthearted story with an older woman and a younger man—and thus she sent Mrs. Blossom (Monaghan’s assistant) on a Seine River cruise where she encounters not one, but two, mystery men. And one of them ends up dead.

Think writing a cozy mystery is a breeze? Lippman did. “The joke was one me,” she says. “It was the hardest book I’ve ever written in my life.” And yet: She’s already at work on a second Mrs. Blossom book, set at a posh resort in Tuscany.

As with writers, readers may find it useful to break out of their comfort zones, too. I haven’t read horror fiction since Stephen King’s Cujo scared the devil out of me at age 15, but in preparing this special issue, I’ve decided (gulp) that it’s time to try again. What better place to start than Quan Barry’s The Unveiling (Grove, October 14), which sends a Black film location scout on an Antarctic cruise with a bunch of privileged white tourists—and then strands a small group of them on a remote island as reality becomes increasingly warped. Our starred review calls it a “terrifying must-read set at the ends of the Earth.” I can handle that—right?

An author I’ve long been curious about—but quietly passed over because of the fear factor—is Stephen Graham Jones. Jones’ latest is The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Saga/Simon & Schuster, March 18), what our reviewer calls an “ambitious, centuries-spanning American gothic”—essentially a “vampire Western” that involves an actual historical event, the Marias Massacre of 1870, in which 200 Indigenous people were killed by U.S. Army forces. Our starred review dubs it “a weirdly satisfying and bloody reckoning with some of America’s most shameful history.”

In another interview for the issue, Trang Thanh Tran, author of the YA novel They Bloom at Night (Bloomsbury, March 4), tells contributor Ilana Bensussen Epstein that reading and writing horror fiction paradoxically gives her comfort. “I have a lot of bad scenarios in my mind, so being able to write them out is a form of catharsis for me.… You visit these horrors, and then you get to leave.” I can see the point—but I’m still avoiding Saint Bernards.

Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.