Talking Scared
216 episodes - English - Latest episode: 6 days ago - ★★★★★ - 192 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
Episode 200 – Every-Damn-One and Their Scariest Story
July 02, 2024 17:00 - 2 hours - 110 MBSend us a Text Message. 200 episodes! Madness. Who knew there could be so much to say about horror? I knew. You knew. And here we are. It turns out that the real cursed treasure was the friends we made along the way – and how better to celebrate the bicentennial, than by inviting some of the Talking Scared nearest and dearest, to tell us their scariest story? I called, they answered – with tales of voyeuristic ghosts, horrifying roadside encounters, disappearing witches, whispe...
200 – Every-Damn-One and Their Scariest Story
July 02, 2024 17:00 - 2 hours - 110 MBSend us a Text Message. 200 episodes! Madness. Who knew there could be so much to say about horror? I knew. You knew. And here we are. It turns out that the real cursed treasure was the friends we made along the way – and how better to celebrate the bicentennial, than by inviting some of the Talking Scared nearest and dearest, to tell us their scariest story? I called, they answered – with tales of voyeuristic ghosts, horrifying roadside encounters, disappearing witches, whispe...
199 – Josh Malerman & The Most Frightening Love Story
June 25, 2024 17:00 - 1 hour - 54.1 MBSend us a Text Message. My unpaid cohost returns. Josh Malerman ladies and gentlemen. Josh has been on the show many times before, but never have I been so excited to speak to him. His latest novel, Incidents Around the House is about as good a horror book as I’ve ever covered on this show… or possibly read in my life. It’s the story of a young girl, her family, and the entity pursuing them, but – as you’ll hear – it goes a whole lot deeper (and unforgivingly darker) than that. Josh...
Off Book #2 – National Park After Dark
June 21, 2024 16:00 - 1 hour - 47.6 MBSend us a Text Message. In the second Off Book episode we get out of our armchairs and go on a real adventure. Well, not really – but we talk to two people who do. Danielle and Cassie are the hosts of National Park After Dark – a podcast catering to the “morbid outdoor enthusiast.” They have skyrocketed to success, with well-researches stories of murder, maulings and mad incidents out in the world’s national parks. I’ve listened for years now and I’m delighted to finally get the ch...
198 – Paul Tremblay & The Book is Better
June 18, 2024 17:00 - 1 hour - 45 MBSend us a Text Message. Paul Tremblay returns to Talking Scared on a long orbit, like that fabled Planet X that’s going to kill us all. He’s back after two years for another discussion of horror aesthetics, introspective terrors and mixed-media nightmares – this time in Horror Movie, his meta-take on cursed cinema and lethal creativity. Horror Movie is about young filmmakers and the shoot that marks them all, even unto death. It’s also about the making of art, the machinery of fea...
197 – Elle Nash & Insects in the Ozarks
June 11, 2024 17:00 - 1 hour - 51.7 MBSend us a Text Message. Elle Nash’s Deliver Me ruined my week. In the best possible way. This book, about a woman so desperate for a child that she does truly terrible, no-good things, contains some of the bleakest, most brutal scenes I’ve read in a while. And it’s not even really being treated as a horror novel. Elle and I talk about that. We also talk about the hot-button topics of the novel, the patriarchy, the toxic Christianity, the… insect erotica! But we also discuss her...
196 – Todd Keisling & The Eras Tour: Horror Version
June 04, 2024 18:00 - 1 hour - 44.2 MBSend us a Text Message. Todd Keisling can write the hell out of a short story. So well, in fact, that they may convince you to resist a bully, stop going to church, or tell your boss to f**k off! Cold, Black and Infinite is full of liminal tales of the between-places. Cosmic “Otherness” that defies religion or belief. Corporate soul-hells that take everything you have…and more. Weird then, that they are so fun. Todd and I talk about all of that connective tissue between his sto...
195 – Emil Ferris & The Patron Saints of our Imperfection
May 28, 2024 17:00 - 1 hour - 51.6 MBSend us a Text Message. Something new for me this week. A bold venture into uncharted territory. The graphic novel!! As is proper, I’ve started with one of the best. Emil Ferris joins me to talk through the creation of her landmark epic, My Favourite Thing is Monsters. Volume 1 came out in 2017 to rapturous acclaim, and now, Volume 2 picks up exactly where that story of cute werewolves and cherished monsters let off. This is an EVENT!! Emil talks me through this alternative for...
Off Book #1 – Phil Nobile Jr. & Fangoria
May 24, 2024 18:00 - 1 hour - 48.3 MBSend us a Text Message. Believe it or not, there is more to life than just books. Very little, granted… but there is more. Talking Scared: Off Book is a chance for this show to spread its wings a little. To fly further, wider, deeper into the world of horror and come back carrying different kinds of guests in our bloody beak! (ok, I may have stretched that metaphor too far). Basically, I’ll be talking, now and then, to other kinds of horror creatives. Filmmakers, actors, musici...
194 – Alan Baxter & The Flavour of Vintage Blood
May 21, 2024 17:00 - 1 hour - 48 MBSend us a Text Message. We return to Australia for the second time in a month, to find that (once again), home invasion isn’t the worst thing to happen on a typical day. Alan Baxter’s Blood Covenant is a violent, thrilling story of a threeway battle between an innocent family, a nasty criminal gang of bogans (see, I’m learning!) and an otherworldly force that is even worse! Think, what if The Strangers took place in the Overlook Hotel. It’s a hugely enjoyable book that prompts a con...
193 – L.P. Hernandez & Kudos On the Cruelty
May 14, 2024 17:00 - 1 hour - 47 MBSend us a Text Message. A charming man approaches. With dark secrets to tell you. Yeah, that L.P. Hernandez. Author of the novella In the Valley of the Headless Men and the forthcoming collection, No Gods, Only Chaos. Both are great; both are entirely different. One of them will expand your horizons. One of them will shrink you in horror. I’ll let you find out which. We talk about both books in this episode, digging into the real historical mystery behind the novella (it’s fas...
192 – Robert Ottone & Raising Kids in Langan Country
May 06, 2024 18:00 - 1 hour - 51.2 MBSend us a Text Message. Opinions are like assholes, they say. Everybody has one. The subtext of that, is that you shouldn’t show them to people. Well my guest and I don’t hold back on ours this week. Robert Ottone joins me for a conversation about his debut novel for adults, The Vile Thing We Created, which is almost exactly one year old. I loved it, which is more than either of us can say for the one-year old little boy that it is about. This novel skewers the impulse to procr...
191 – Chris Panatier & The Goo of Human Nature
April 30, 2024 17:00 - 1 hour - 56.7 MBSend us a Text Message. Ah the madhouse. The loony bin. The ASYLUM!! A classic horror location. One of my favourites, but problematic as hell in the wrong hands. Thankfully, I have the right author for the topic. Christ Panatier has the talent and the sensitivity to ensure that his novel, The Redemption of Morgan Bright can engage with the tropes without perpetuating them. He brings something as old-as-time but very new to asylum horror, and the results are dizzying, terrifying, awful....
190 – Kaaron Warren & The Un-Cosy House
April 23, 2024 18:00 - 1 hour - 50.7 MBSend us a Text Message. We 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 ...
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 MBSend us a Text Message. I 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? ...
188 – Scarlett Thomas & Hot Gothic
April 09, 2024 18:00 - 1 hour - 53.6 MBSend us a Text Message. I’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 ...
187 – The Carrie 50th Anniversary Deep Dive, with Nat Cassidy & Ally Malinenko
April 05, 2024 16:00 - 1 hour - 73.4 MBSend us a Text Message. Carrie 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 ...
186 – Stephen Graham Jones & The Last Stand of the Final Girls
April 02, 2024 16:00 - 1 hour - 64.4 MBSend us a Text Message. Alas, 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 Stephe...
185 – Cynthia Pelayo & A Mermaid in the Windy City
March 26, 2024 19:00 - 1 hour - 46.6 MBSend us a Text Message. Chi-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 si...
184 – Joshua Hull & It’s a Whole Hole Thing
March 19, 2024 19:00 - 1 hour - 42.6 MBSend us a Text Message. Never 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 endearin...
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 MBSend us a Text Message. Time 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-fre...
182 – Tim Lebbon & Running Towards What Scares You
March 05, 2024 19:00 - 1 hour - 52 MBSend us a Text Message. Sometimes 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 shor...
181 – Haunting Hill House, with Catriona Ward, Johnny Compton & Paul Tremblay
February 27, 2024 19:00 - 1 hour - 64.5 MBSend us a Text Message. Back 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 explo...
180 – Chuck Palahniuk & What Kind of Sex Do You Want?
January 30, 2024 19:00 - 1 hour - 57.3 MBSend us a Text Message. Yes 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 ...
179 – Ally Wilkes & The Ethics of Eating Your Friends
January 23, 2024 19:00 - 1 hour - 52.1 MBSend us a Text Message. Are 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 queern...
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 MBSend us a Text Message. The 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… ...
177 – John Langan & Fishing For Mythologies
January 09, 2024 19:00 - 1 hour - 73.1 MBSend us a Text Message. To 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 sp...
176 – The Best Horror Novels of 2023
December 30, 2023 15:00 - 55 minutes - 38.4 MBSend us a Text Message. Another 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...
175 – The Ghost Story Deep Dive, with Alan Baxter, Lauren Bolger & John Langan
December 24, 2023 17:00 - 1 hour - 70.3 MBSend us a Text Message. Dickens 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 Sallo...
174 – State of the Horror Nation 2023, with Emily Hughes, Victor Lavalle & C.J. Leede
December 19, 2023 19:00 - 2 hours - 82.7 MBSend us a Text Message. And 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...
173 – Michelle Paver & Long Nights of the Body & Soul
December 12, 2023 19:00 - 1 hour - 61.4 MBSend us a Text Message. We’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 wha...
172 – Gemma Amor & The Haunted Penis-Replacement Structure
December 05, 2023 19:00 - 1 hour - 54.1 MBSend us a Text Message. Last 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 perso...
171 – C.S. Humble & Come For the Horror, Stay for the Horses
November 28, 2023 19:00 - 1 hour - 55.9 MBSend us a Text Message. We’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 ...
170 – Luke Dumas & The Ghosts That Time Forgot
November 21, 2023 19:00 - 1 hour - 50 MBSend us a Text Message. Sometimes 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, i...
169 – Tyler Jones & Journeys Without Maps
November 14, 2023 19:00 - 1 hour - 45.5 MBSend us a Text Message. Horror 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 ...
168 – Tananarive Due & Locked in With the Monsters
November 07, 2023 19:00 - 1 hour - 46.6 MBSend us a Text Message. History 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...
167 – Nat Cassidy & A New York State of Death
October 31, 2023 19:00 - 1 hour - 55 MBSend us a Text Message. Sometimes 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 reali...
166 – Sam Rebelein & You Had Me At “Tongue-Monster!”
October 24, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 46.5 MBSend us a Text Message. Some 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 t...
165 – Josh Malerman & Ronald Malfi & The Rock N Roll Rhythm of the Novella
October 17, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 56.2 MBSend us a Text Message. Some 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 nove...
164 – Out There Screaming Roundtable, with Nnedi Okorafor, Lesley Nneka Arimah & Maurice Broaddus
October 10, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 53.7 MBSend us a Text Message. This 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 fanta...
163 – Liz Hand & Visiting the Thing That Walks Alone
October 03, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 47.9 MBSend us a Text Message. Come 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...
162 – Chuck Wendig & American as Evil Apple Pie
September 26, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 48 MBSend us a Text Message. This 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 cov...
161 – Clay McLeod Chapman & The Chesapeake Softshell Shuffle
September 19, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 53.3 MBSend us a Text Message. Clay 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 ...
160 – Isabel Cañas & Many Types of Bloodsucker
September 12, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 46.9 MBSend us a Text Message. I’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 vampir...
159 – Alexander James & An Encounter in the Woods
September 05, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 45.1 MBSend us a Text Message. Why 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 ...
158 – Catriona Ward & Rewriting the American Gothic (Like, Literally)
August 29, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 46.2 MBSend us a Text Message. If 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....
157 – Josh Winning & The World Through Blood-Tinted Glasses
August 22, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 50.3 MBSend us a Text Message. We’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 creepine...
156 – Sadie Hartmann & The Books of Our Horrid Hearts
August 15, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 56 MBSend us a Text Message. Sorry 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 ...