What do you get when you combine 13 short stories, events from an author's life, and the philosophical musings and rants of a youngish old curmudgeon? You get This and That, the fascinating new must read book from popular novelist and historian J.T. McDaniel. The stories cover a wide range of subjects and genres, from the submarine stories McDaniel is most widely known for, to hard boiled mystery, whimsey, baseball, and even a vampire or two. Here, too, McDaniel finally comes out of the pseudonymous closet and admits to also sometimes being the weird old octogenarian erotic vampire writer Jacob Thomson. In the autobiographical section, McDaniel decided to limit things to only the interesting parts, including military service in Viet Nam and Japan, a musicless high school musical with a future Broadway actress, Fiddler on the Roof with a future Transformer as Tevye, and the strange tale of Sebastian Cabot's arse. The final section is filled with blog posts, essays on old movies, bad movies, cars, planes, trains, vampires, Madeline Smith's breasts (lovely), Steve Reeves' voice (just fine, actually), politics, how you can be Conservative without being superstitious, and the principles of Theistic Atheism. Just to round things out, stops are also made in the realms of conspiracy theory, cults, and alien abductions.