Talking Scared
203 episodes - English - Latest episode: 1 day ago - ★★★★★ - 159 ratingsConversations with the biggest names in horror fiction. A podcast for horror readers who want to know where their favourite stories came from . . . and what frightens the people who wrote them.
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Episodes
190 – Kaaron Warren & The Un-Cosy House
April 23, 2024 18:00 - 1 hour - 50.7 MBWe all love a good spooky house. And most of us enjoy a terrifying home-invasion ordeal (or at least, I know I do). What happens when you put them together? Kaaron Warren’s The Underhistory is the answer, but it’s nothing at all like what you’d expect. This new novel by the award-winning Australian writer is a story of memory, of rooms and architecture, of violence and misogyny, and of a very unusual old lady. We talk about all of that and more. It’s a great conversation, one in whic...
189 – The Black Girl Survives in This One, with Saraciea J. Fennell, Desiree S. Evans, Monica Brashears & Eden Royce
April 16, 2024 18:00 - 1 hour - 53 MBI bite off a lot this week, in a five-way conversation with editors and contributors to the ever-so-of-the-moment anthology The Black Girl Survives in This One. That’s a promise right there on the title page, but as you will find out, survival is not always the same thing as living happily ever after. Saraciea J. Fennell, Desiree S. Evans, Monica Brashears & Eden Royce talk to me about the vision (and necessity) of the project and where their stories came from? We discuss the role of ur...
188 – Scarlett Thomas & Hot Gothic
April 09, 2024 18:00 - 1 hour - 53.6 MBI’m in literary hero territory again … at least this time it’s sunny! My guest is Scarlett Thomas, the groundbreaking writer of PopCo, Oligarchy, The Seed Collectors and the (post)modern speculative classic, The End of Mr Y. She’s one of my favourite writers, who has never seen five or six separate genres she can’t mash together. This time around we are talking “Hot Gothic” in The Sleepwalkers, a darkly playful tale of a vacation–and a marriage–gone horribly wrong. We cover acci...
187 – The Carrie 50th Anniversary Deep Dive, with Nat Cassidy & Ally Malinenko
April 05, 2024 16:00 - 1 hour - 73.4 MBCarrie White turns 50 years old today! April 5th, 1974 – the day King’s debut came out, and the world of horror we know live in changed forever. To celebrate such an auspicious anniversary, there are only two people I could invite to this party. Step up Nat Cassidy and Ally Malinenko – writers who understand King and that bitter, brutal world between childhood and adulthood. We talk about empathy and monsters, about the horror of high school, the abject and the menstruation tabo...
186 – Stephen Graham Jones & The Last Stand of the Final Girls
April 02, 2024 16:00 - 1 hour - 64.4 MBAlas, we come to the end! Stephen Graham Jones’s The Angel of Indian Lake brings the most important horror trilogy of the century to its conclusion. For one last time we return to Proofrock, Idaho – to watch Jade Daniels do battle with monsters in the wood and the demons in her head. SGJ also comes back to Talking Scared to finish our adjacent trilogy of conversations about these books. We talk about slashers and final girls for sure, but as ever with Stephen, these are windows onto...
185 – Cynthia Pelayo & A Mermaid in the Windy City
March 26, 2024 19:00 - 1 hour - 46.6 MBChi-Town!! We’re heading to the midwestern metropolis this week, for a conversation with Cina Pelayo – all about murder, mystery, history and strange things in the water. Her new novel, Forgotten Sisters is a heady, dreamlike concoction of Chicago lore and much older horrors. It features a pair of very wyrd sisters and a house by a river that holds nothing good. As well as all of that, we talk about Cina’s personal journey with the paranormal, mermaid sightings, writing law enfo...
184 – Joshua Hull & It’s a Whole Hole Thing
March 19, 2024 19:00 - 1 hour - 42.6 MBNever mind the floor is lava. This week the ground has teeth. Joshua Hull is our guest, to talk about his obsession with dangerous, weird holes. He wrote one into his hilarious, grisly horror movie, Glorious (on Shudder) and now he’s given a hole a whole personality in his debut novella, Mouth. It’s a grindhouse, b-movie celebrations, with larger than life characters, grisly death, and the most lovable monster of the year. We talk about writing endearing creature features, abou...
183 – Joshua Hull & It’s a Whole Hole Thing
March 19, 2024 19:00 - 1 hour - 42.6 MBNever mind the floor is lava. This week the ground has teeth. Joshua Hull is our guest, to talk about his obsession with dangerous, weird holes. He wrote one into his hilarious, grisly horror movie, Glorious (on Shudder) and now he’s given a hole a whole personality in his debut novella, Mouth. It’s a grindhouse, b-movie celebrations, with larger than life characters, grisly death, and the most lovable monster of the year. We talk about writing endearing creature features, abou...
183 – Gwendolyn Kiste & Working Through Your Ghosts
March 12, 2024 19:00 - 1 hour - 43.7 MBTime to get liminal and haunted. Gwendolyn Kiste comes back to Talking Scared for another high-concept twist on the Gothic. In The Haunting of Velkwood, and entire street turns ghostly overnight. Yeah, I can’t explain that any more clearly, we’ll leave it to Gwendolyn. Despite this being a book centered on trauma and angst, we do a whole lot of laughing. Amongst the chuckles we also sneak in conversation about the many meanings of the word haunted, child-free horror fiction televisu...
182 – Tim Lebbon & Running Towards What Scares You
March 05, 2024 19:00 - 1 hour - 52 MBSometimes you meet someone who just gets you. Like Tim Lebbon. A man who writes riotously good adventure-horror novels, and also likes running outrageous distances up big hills. What a pleasure it was to speak to him. The main topic of conversation is his new novel eco-horror novel, Among the Living. A story of ancient buried history and ‘intelligent’ infection, it blends the paranoia of The Thing with the ragtag group heroism and intensity of Aliens. In short, it’s good! Tim and...
181 – Haunting Hill House, with Catriona Ward, Johnny Compton & Paul Tremblay
February 27, 2024 19:00 - 1 hour - 64.5 MBBack from a too-short break, but ready to delve into the greatest haunted house of them all! Shirley Jackson’s Hill House. The place where the scary things walk alone. Thankfully, I am not alone. I’m joined by my own group of creepy ghost-hunters: Paul Tremblay (A Head Full of Ghosts, Cabin at the End of the World), Johnny Compton (The Spite House) and Catriona Ward (Last House on Needless Street, Looking Glass Sound). I can think of no better collective to explore the corridors of this ...
180 – Chuck Palahniuk & What Kind of Sex Do You Want?
January 30, 2024 19:00 - 1 hour - 57.3 MBYes I put sex in the title to make you download it. Did it work? It shouldn’t be necessary, ‘cos this week’s guest is an absolute literary icon. Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, Haunted, Lullaby, Choke, and last year’s Not Forever, But For Now – a writer who helped shape the nihilism and extremity of 90s and noughties fiction. The man who makes people faint with his short stories. He’s here, talking to us! In this conversation Chuck and I roam all over the blasted map of h...
179 – Ally Wilkes & The Ethics of Eating Your Friends
January 23, 2024 19:00 - 1 hour - 52.1 MBAre you hungry? If so we have a chewy, salty, deeply flavoured feast for you this week. Ally Wilkes returns to Talking Scared to discuss the icebound horrors of her new novel, Where the Dead Wait. It’s a tale of Arctic exploration gone very wrong, complete with haunting, human suffering and the morbid fascination of cannibalism! Don’t pretend that hasn’t whet your appetite. Ally and I get into the raw details of consuming human meat, we talk about queerness in historical horror ...
Episode 179 – Ally Wilkes & The Ethics of Eating Your Friends
January 23, 2024 19:00 - 1 hour - 52.1 MBAre you hungry? If so we have a chewy, salty, deeply flavoured feast for you this week. Ally Wilkes returns to Talking Scared to discuss the icebound horrors of her new novel, Where the Dead Wait. It’s a tale of Arctic exploration gone very wrong, complete with haunting, human suffering and the morbid fascination of cannibalism! Don’t pretend that hasn’t whet your appetite. Ally and I get into the raw details of consuming human meat, we talk about queerness in historical horror ...
178 – Jenny Kiefer & A Solid Foothold in Horror
January 16, 2024 19:00 - 1 hour - 42.4 MBThe first new book coverage of 2024 – and it starts us off on suitably horrific footing. Jenny Kiefer’s debut novel, This Wretched Valley, has been getting a huge amount of early buzz in horror circles. It’s the story of four unlucky adventurers, who head into the Kentucky woods and meet all manner of nasty sh*t. It’s a tightly wound tale of misadventure, that takes at least some inspiration from the Dyatlov Pass mystery. And if you don’t know what that is… boy have you got a wiki h...
177 – John Langan & Fishing For Mythologies
January 09, 2024 19:00 - 1 hour - 73.1 MBTo kick off a new year of Talking Scared, I’ve gone and hooked us a big guest, with a whopper of a story. John Langan is the author of The Fisherman. It’s one of the great works of supernatural fiction written this century, but its story doesn’t end at its back-cover. The strange mythology of The Fisherman extends beyond, swimming further downstream, to pop its monstrous head above the surface in John’s wider universe of short stories and novellas. In this special episode, we talk at...
176 – The Best Horror Novels of 2023
December 30, 2023 15:00 - 55 minutes - 38.4 MBAnother year done. We squeaked through without another plague or a nuclear apocalypse (don’t tempt fate Neil!!) and along the way, oh the stories we read! The only thing left to do after mopping away the chalk pentagrams, is to run you through my very favourite books of the year. The so-called Best Horror Novels of 2023, as chosen by me. Ten of them to be precise, cos humans are obsessed with round numbers. Mwaha, in fact I talk about thirteen!! Thanks again for listening and suppor...
175 – The Ghost Story Deep Dive, with Alan Baxter, Lauren Bolger & John Langan
December 24, 2023 17:00 - 1 hour - 70.3 MBDickens said that Christmas Eve was a time for ghost stories, and who am I to argue? It is my show though, so I get to pick the ghost story – and I picked Peter Straub’s classic novel of the name. A tale of old men with horror in their youths, seductive evil and a town besieged by winter and… worse things. It’s a slippery beast though, this novel. So to really help pin it down, I needed help. I called and help came, in the form of Alan Baxter (author of Sallow Bend, The Gulp and many...
174 – State of the Horror Nation 2023, with Emily Hughes, Victor Lavalle & C.J. Leede
December 19, 2023 19:00 - 2 hours - 82.7 MBAnd so we come to the end of another year in horror. Time to look back at the best that 2023 has had to offer, as determined by three of the best in the business. My trusted horror chancellor, Emily Hughes joins me – alongside C.J. Leede, the author of this year’s gloriously transgressive Maeve Fly, and the maestro of the macabre himself, Victor Lavalle. Together we cover the year’s freshest nightmares in the macro and the micro, looking at wider trends and picking our own favourite horror...
173 – Michelle Paver & Long Nights of the Body & Soul
December 12, 2023 19:00 - 1 hour - 61.4 MBWe’re going up in the world this week – longitudinally and latitudinally, with the GOAT of endurance, adventure Gothic, Michelle Paver. Michelle joins me for a big conversation about her novels Dark Matter and Thin Air – two of the most effective ghost stories of the 21st century. One takes us to the Arctic, the other to a Himalayan peak, both places littered with the dead… who may still be around. We talk about how ghost stories work, their tradition and what perhaps differentiates ...
172 – Gemma Amor & The Haunted Penis-Replacement Structure
December 05, 2023 19:00 - 1 hour - 54.1 MBLast time Gemma Amor came on the show we had a good ol’ chinwag about our haunted brains. This time around we get to some other ghosts, in her new novel, The Folly. It’s a sharp slice of coastal Gothic; Cornwall’s answer to The Shining if you will. The story follows Morgan and her aging father to the weird structure of the tital, where they find hauntings of many stripes, some uncannily familiar. It wouldn’t be a Gemma Amor episode if things didn’t get personal – and we talk about a...
171 – C.S. Humble & Come For the Horror, Stay for the Horses
November 28, 2023 19:00 - 1 hour - 55.9 MBWe’ve had Cowboys versus Aliens but have you ever considered a threeway fight between gunslingers, vampires and weird cosmic cultists to an Elder God? If not why not? What do you even think about when you are washing the dishes? But fear not, C.S. Humble has you covered. His weird western trilogy, That Light Sublime is packed with all of the above and more. In The Massacre at Yellow Hill and A Red Winter in the West Seth introduces a cast of lovable rogues and the stakes of their battl...
170 – Luke Dumas & The Ghosts That Time Forgot
November 21, 2023 19:00 - 1 hour - 50 MBSometimes two words can make a jaded horror reader sit up straight. Ghost is one, Dinosaur is another. Ghost. Dinosaur. Have you ever heard a more beautiful combination, a sweeter symphony of syllables. If “Ghost Dinosaur” doesn’t make you go squeeee and shake your fists in excitement, I don’t know how to help you. Anyway, that’s the focus of Luke Dumas delightful new novel, The Paleontologist. It’s a story about a haunted man, a creepy museum, institutional intrigue, mu...
169 – Tyler Jones & Journeys Without Maps
November 14, 2023 19:00 - 1 hour - 45.5 MBHorror is about finding light in darkness. That’s the mission statement of this podcast, at least. And it’s never been truer than in this week’s episode. Tyler Jones re-joins us on Talking Scared to talk about his new novel, Midas. We cover its original mix of western tropes, Gothic fantasy and cult horror, but it’s family that lies at the heart of both the book and the conversation. Tyler talks us through the real life emotional rollercoaster that inspired this story. It’s a persona...
168 – Tananarive Due & Locked in With the Monsters
November 07, 2023 19:00 - 1 hour - 46.6 MBHistory is haunted. Ghosts are injustice persevering. So many horror stories hinge on that idea, but for Tananarive Due it’s more personal than that. Her new novel, The Reformatory, is borne from the ghosts hidden in her own family history. The story takes place in a hideously cruel juvenile correction facility, in a racist town, in the 1950s. As you can imagine, very few good things happen to her child protagonist. We talk about the link between horror and history, about writi...
167 – Nat Cassidy & A New York State of Death
October 31, 2023 19:00 - 1 hour - 55 MBSometimes when you’re doing something scary good company can be a blessing. Nat Cassidy is good company. And this week he talks me through the haunted hallways and avenues of his New York horror ode, Nestlings – but he also helps me tackle the very real world horror that is turning our newspapers into nightmare-fodder and the Middle East into a tinderbox. But have no fear (well, always have a little fear!) this is no mere despairing, depressing look at reality. We also talk about ga...
166 – Sam Rebelein & You Had Me At “Tongue-Monster!”
October 24, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 46.5 MBSome stories are just too big for one podcast. Some stories should be too big for one book. Sam Rebelein’s Edenville is one such story. This 300-something page novel has more crammed into it than your average fantasy trilogy. There is backstory upon backstory, a cosmic framework, and enough different monsters to fill Guillermo del Toro’s minibus. Yet somehow Sam corrals it all into a whimsical horror romp – a well-organised riot. We talk about ideas… about thinking them up, letting ...
165 – Josh Malerman & Ronald Malfi & The Rock N Roll Rhythm of the Novella
October 17, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 56.2 MBSome stories are too short, some are too long, but some stories are just right. It’s the Goldilocks zone: the novella. What is the secret to crafting a longer story but not letting it run away from you? How do you sustain the terror beyond the shortest form? How do you know what to keep in and what to cut out? This is the art of the novella, and I’m joined by a pair of expert practitioners to talk it through. Josh Malerman and Ronald Malfi have both published novella collections this year...
164 – Out There Screaming Roundtable, with Nnedi Okorafor, Lesley Nneka Arimah & Maurice Broaddus
October 10, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 53.7 MBThis week is a special roundtable episode. An exciting, challenging and very very thought-provoking tour of contemporary Black horror, in the company of three writers at the bleeding edge. Nnedi Okorafor, Maurice Broaddus and Lesley Nneka Arimah are just three of the contributors to Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror. It’s curated by Jordan Peele, who knows a thing or two about that particular landscape, and these three authors present a fantastic cross-section of how...
163 – Liz Hand & Visiting the Thing That Walks Alone
October 03, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 47.9 MBCome home!! We have to come home!! The House is calling us. Yep, this week we are going back to the most haunted house of all. Hill House. Shirley Jackson’s classic bad place. And we’re going in the company of three-time Shirley Jackson Award Winner, Elizabeth Hand, whose new novel is the first ever sanctioned sequel to Jackson’s classic. A Haunting on the Hill submits four new unwitting victims to the horrors of Hill House. But that’s where the stories diverge. Liz’s take on this sour...
162 – Chuck Wendig & American as Evil Apple Pie
September 26, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 48 MBThis week on Talking Scared we are joining hands with Chuck Wendig to take the fight to Big Fruit. They have been lying to us about apples all our lives. Chuck’s new novel, Black River Orchard is all about apples. Tasty, evil, corruptive. The book grows from the fertile soil of American small-town horror, and we talk about some texts in that storytelling style, as well as how Chuck himself approaches writing such big books with so many character arcs. We also cover apple-lore, how politi...
161 – Clay McLeod Chapman & The Chesapeake Softshell Shuffle
September 19, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 53.3 MBClay McLeod Chapman returns to Talking Scared to answer some serious questions, the first being what the holy f**k Clay?! Clay has never been a writer to shy away from a high concept challenge (haunted mushrooms, anyone?) but his latest novel, What Kind of Mother goes into the uncharted regions of the mind and soul, dredging the craziest of horrors from the murky waters of his native Chesapeake Bay. We talk the terrors of both adolescence and parenthood, the terrible power of imagina...
160 – Isabel Cañas & Many Types of Bloodsucker
September 12, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 46.9 MBI’m back, partially rested and with some romance lingering in my soul. Good timing, cos this week’s episode focuses on the heart as well as the blood that it pumps. Isabel Cañas returns to the show to talk about her second novel, Vampires of El Norte – a sweeping historical love-story set against a backdrop of class tumult, war and … yeah… vampires. It’s not a spoiler guys – it’s in the title! Isabel speaks so eloquently about the relationship between vampirism and cultural legacy, ...
159 – Alexander James & An Encounter in the Woods
September 05, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 45.1 MBWhy do we keep heading back to the woods? WHY?? Nothing good ever happens there. Alexander James would argue otherwise, but he’s clearly made of sterner stuff than me. In his debut novel, The Woodkin, Alex parlays his love of the wild outdoors into a story that heads toward a familiar backwoods nightmares, before veering far off the beaten trail into something stranger and even scarier. In this episode we talk about his love for the woods of the Pacific Northwest (and yes! I ask him about...
158 – Catriona Ward & Rewriting the American Gothic (Like, Literally)
August 29, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 46.2 MBIf you thought The Last House on Needless Street was tricksy, just wait until you hear about Looking Glass Sound. This is Cat’s ode to the Maine of Stephen King, the enigmatic narrators of Shirley Jackson and… well, a host of other comparisons that I foist upon her in the next hour. Above all that though – the book is so typically, inimitably Catriona Ward. It’s a destined Gothic classic that takes the genre, crumples it into a ball before rewriting the whole thing. We cover the purpose o...
157 – Josh Winning & The World Through Blood-Tinted Glasses
August 22, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 50.3 MBWe’re off to La La Land this week, to talk cursed films, 90s horror nostalgia and Winona Ryder(!!) Our guest is Josh Winning – who has parlayed his years of writing from and about film sets into a horror novel. Burn the Negative is set in the backlots, soundstages, cutting rooms and dank motel rooms of Hollywood. It features a film with a fatal jinx and a whole lotta love for the 90s teen slasher. Amongst all of that, Josh and I also tick off the uncanny creepiness of child stars, the va...
156 – Sadie Hartmann & The Books of Our Horrid Hearts
August 15, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 56 MBSorry not sorry this week. Yes I’m going to destroy your wallet and your bookshelves…but you LOVE IT!! Our guest is Sadie Hartmann, AKA Mother Horror to the likes of us. One of the most influential horror reviewers in the world. The editor in chief of Dark Hart Books and the co-owner of the Night Worms horror subscription service. She knows a thing or two about this haunted library. And she’s written a book to guide the unwary, or the just-plain curious. Or anyone who wants a new book to r...
155 – Stephen King & Writing From the Nerve Endings
August 08, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 47.4 MBOur guest this week is Stephen King. That’s it. That’s the intro. Stephen King. The architect of modern horror and the creative north star of my life, and many of yours. He’s on the show, talking about his new book, Holly and why the central character just won’t let him go. We cover his attitude to academia, horror and hope, how his worldview sits with a fractured reality, and we even hear some exciting, exclusive details about some upcoming books. I lack the words to convey my delight. ...
154 – Alex Woodroe & The Sweet Science of Folk Horror
August 01, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 50.4 MBWe’re off on a Goth pilgrimage this week folks, to the motherland, Transylvania, to talk folk-horror and more with Alex Woodroe. Alex is a Romanian writer of dark fictions, the Editor in Chief of Tenebrous Press, and the debut author of Whisperwood. The book brings the monsters of Romanian myth and legend to the fore in a battle of wills with an isolated village. There isn’t a vampire in sight. Bram Stoker didn’t know what he was talking about. Alex does! And we get into lots of things, fr...
153 – Chuck Tingle & Riding the Lonesome Train
July 25, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 59.8 MBThis week we’re joined by the man, the myth, the mystery that is Chuck Tingle. Who knows the truth of this enigmatic figure? What visage lies beneath the pink bag that forever encases his face? Does he really have a PhD in massage? Puzzles abound… The one thing that’s certain is the brilliance of his new novel. Camp Damascus is a full-bloodied horror novel set in that most hideous of environs: a religious community and a gay conversion camp. Sounds triggering. It may well be … but Chuck h...
152 – Andrew Michael Hurley & Our Green, Unpleasant Land
July 18, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 50.3 MBThis week I’m recording very close to home with Andrew Michael Hurley. Andrew burst onto the folk-horror scene with subtle aplomb (can one burst subtly?) back in 2014, with The Loney. That slice of weirdness was set in the very town in which I spent my wet, dismal childhood holidays. It conjured shivers in more ways than one. Now he is here to talk about the reissue of his 2019 novel, Starve Acre. It’s a bleak, bitter, wintery tale of isolation, grief and ritual, set in the Yorkshire Dal...
151 – Verity Holloway & The Onion Skin of Trauma
July 11, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 47.7 MBWar, what is it good for? Absolutely noth…. well actually, it is quite good for horror stories. Our guest this week doesn’t plumb the usual horrors-of-war route, though. Verity Holloway’s The Others of Edenwell is a supremely subtle, slow-burning excavation of trauma and national nightmares, set in a (supposedly) idyllic spa-cum-convalescent-hospital as battle rages elsewhere. Of course, there are horrors much closer to home. It’s possibly my first foray into the First World War on this p...
150 – Danielle Trussoni & Puzzling All Over the World
July 04, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 42 MBThis week Danielle Trussoni arrives at Talking Scared in a rush. She has a meeting to get to, and we have LOTS of things to talk about in less than an hour. Her new novel, The Puzzle Master crams in enough for a whole Discovery Channel series on conspiracy, mysticism and esoteric history, plus dolls, Golems, quantum computing and a cute little Dachshund named Conundrum. How is a host supposed to cover all that at a rush. The answer, drink more coffee and don’t pause to breathe! We manage ...
149 – Clowns at Midnight – The Big IT Deep-Dive (Part Two), with Ally Malinenko & Nat Cassidy
June 30, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 65.6 MBThrust your fists against the post and still insist you see the… …oh hello. You came back. Thank Gan. We have a monster to defeat this week. Yes, this is the second part of the Talking Scared dive into Stephen King’s IT. This time we are getting weird. Joined by stalwart friends, Ally Malinenko (Ghost Girl, This Appearing House) and Nat Cassidy (Mary: An Awakening of Terror), I’m delving below ground and into the cosmic tangle that underpins all of King’s fiction. We’re asking what is ...
148 – Feral Childhoods – The Big IT Deep-Dive (Part One), with Ally Malinenko & Nat Cassidy
June 26, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 63.8 MBCome get a balloon, bring your slingshot, let’s float…it’s here!!! Yes, finally we’re off to Derry, to do battle with that goddamn clown. But as everyone knows, we can’t fight Pennywise alone. That’s why I’m taking my trusty, loyal, brave band of Losers with me. Nat Cassidy (Mary: An Awakening of Terror) and Ally Malinenko (This Appearing House) are joining me for a tour of the sewers, subtext and sociological horrors at the heart of King’s IT. Halfway through we realised this would to be...
147 – Mike Flanagan & Lighting Up the Darkness
June 13, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 52.8 MBI’ve rarely been more excited about an episode – for you to hear it or, indeed, about its very contents. We’re joined this week by Mike Flanagan. Yes, that Mike Flanagan. The genius loci of modern visual horror, the writer and director behind Midnight Mass, The Haunting of Hill House, Doctor Sleep, The Midnight Club and Oculus. Our most literary horror director and a man who understand that horror is where the heart is. If you think my praise is too gushing then… we’ll just have to disagr...
146 – Paula. D. Ashe & A Bizarre & Bitter Reprieve
June 06, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 47 MBIf horror is indeed a broad church, then our guest this week is preaching from the darkest of pulpits. Paula D. Ashe is the author of We Are Here To Hurt Each Other – a collection of short stories that has accrued infamy and acclaim in equal measure over the last 12 months. Her stories are cruel. They present a depraved world of man (and woman’s) direst excesses, a world that rubs against the numinous and the cosmically amoral. Can you say ‘trigger warnings needed’! We talk at length a...
145 – Sarah Gailey & The Scariest Place in the House
May 30, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 53.5 MBWhat if the house that shaped you was a broken, haunted place? That’s one of many questions we explore this week, in the company of Sarah Gailey. Their 2022 hit, Just Like Home is out in paperback and … hell … do we get our fingers right into its dusty, cobwebbed corners! We talk about serial-killing fathers and monstrous mothers, the power and pitfalls of descriptive prose. We discuss Freudian metaphors and the profound fears of childhood, offer a fresh take on the thorny question of unl...
144 – Nicholas Binge & the Spookiest of Entanglements
May 23, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 43.6 MBIn the immortal words of Creed’s Scott Stapp, “can you take me HIIIGHER?” Yes, I can. Our guest this week is Nicholas Binge, author the new buzzy, horror-sci-fi novel, Ascension. It’s about a very weird, very big mountain that appears out of nowhere to lure the unwary upwards. Nothing good occurs, of course. Again…much like a Creed concert. This is where the comparison’s to terrible post-grunge rock ends (thankfully) cos Nick and I have much more fun making comparisons to the likes of Con...
143 – Alice Slater & Bookish Murder Vibes
May 16, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 48.7 MBWe are paying tribute to the best of us this week. The booksellers. Keepers of the flame, beacons in the night, purveyors of meaning in a cold, dark universe … usually. Alice Slater used to be a member of that celebrated guild, now she’s written about the light and dark side of the trade in her debut smash, Death of a Bookseller. It pulls back the curtain on an industry we all care deeply about, to reveal the obsession, madness and … murder(?) behind the chai lattes and instagram posts. In...