Only now do we really have Paris, you understand. With these people in custody, we control the city's soul. All great cities have a collective soul, an über-mythic collective heart. The Führer understands this. What is London without the Demon Barber and the Consulting Detective and the Mayor's Cat? Or Prague without the Golem, the Alchemist, the student who sells his soul? These are our real enemies in Europe, Mr. Blaine

I've heard a couple of these stories read on podcasts before; "Famous Monsters" in which a Wellesian Martian is a Hollywood actor, and "Illimitable Dominion" which mixes B-movies with Edgar Allan Poe. There is a lot of mixing and matching characters from fiction, film and mythology in these stories, which makes the reader feel a bit smug when they recognise some of the more obscure references. It is a varied collection of stories and very enjoyable, and only one of the stories is set in the world of Anno Dracula.

One of my favourites was "Is Anybody there?" in which a medium conducting a seance somehow manages to contact the future, and she and her client finds themselves talking to a hacker in his chatroom.

Another favourite was the title story, in which a shipful of vampires fleeing London and Dracula's wrath are given sanctuary in Japan, although by the Emporor's decree, there are officially no vampires in Japan. I have managed to pick up the novel that follows on from this story at the library, so I will be reading "Anno Dracula: One Thousand Monsters (1899)" during September.

Make no mistake: the yokai of Japan were vampires, if distant cousins only to the nosferatu of Europe. The same went for the aswang of the Philippines, the penanggalan of Malaya and the pontianak of Java. They just weren't the sort of vampires Lord Ruthven would invite to Downing Street for whist and a nibble on the maid... or Prince Dracula would baptise with foeman's blood during a Carpathian Guard initiation. ( )

There's more to horror than making people jump out of their seats (though just as there's more to erotica than getting people's rocks off, that's obviously still an important part). It's an exploration of why we don't like certain ideas, where they make our skin crawl, or our stomachs turn, or our suppressed freudian instincts twinge.

Like any genre it's self-referential and across the decades certain figures have come to represent (sometimes diverse, sometimes confused) fears or psychosis: the vampire is lust, the Old World, VD; the spectre is guilt, vengeance, the uncanny; the Gill-Man is... fish. In this collection of stories, Kim Newman draws on those existing characters and tropes to comment on them, us and the culture we all share.

Unlike so many of the authors he tends to get lumped in with, there's more to Newman's mash-ups than just the fanboy joy of seeing your favourite characters reinterpreted; there's always a metatext at work, a gag or commentary on culture or the originating texts themselves, an understanding of which is often key to fully appreciating what the writer is up to. So a fun story about a Nazi Superman also works in questions about the morality of figureheads – while also being a terrifically fun piece about a Nazi Superman.

I wonder how much of that comes from Newman's love for cult cinema (in his other life he is a film critic and long-term writer of Empire's "Video Dungeon" column), where frustrated filmmakers who wanted to make the next Taxi Driver or M were told they had to make Cannibal Holocaust instead. So you ended up with films full of boobs, burns and blood, but which also tried to find a more interesting intellectual theme in the idea of porn stars getting their todgers pulled off.

Newman's love and deep understanding of this subject matter not only shines through, but is the misty, bayou swamp from which his stories emerge. You can't keep a famous monster down, and you can't beat Newman for skin-crawling, blood-chilling, gag-filled explorations of horror pop culture; if you love Famous Monsters, if you like a laugh, and if you know your Frankensteins from your monsters, you can't beat him. ( )