04 - Jo Kaplan and What Makes a Great Haunted House?

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This week’s guest is up-and-coming horror extraordinaire, Jo Kaplan. Jo’s new haunted house novel, It Will Just Be Us is a tour-de-force of chills, thrills and things that kill. It’s got everything you could possibly want: creepy old house – check, mysterious locked room – CHECK, a witch who lurks in a swamp – CHECK!!!! It’s also got some of the best female relationships I’ve read in horror for a while, enough to pass the Bechdel test with flying colours.

Jo and I talk about Freud’s uncanny and the infamous Winchester House, how to research her locations (or not), and how to make a ghost feel like something new. This chat feels like getting in at the ground floor of what will be a skyscraper career. Listen now, and you can say you were there at the start!

 The books we discussed this episode include:

The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson (1959)“Jordan’s End”, by Ellen Glasgow, in The Shadowy Third (1923)The Gone World, by Tom Sweterlitsch (2018)House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski (2000)Don’t Turn Out the Lights:  A Tribute to Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, edited by Jonathan Mayberry (2020)The Only Good Indians, by Stephen Graham Jones (2020)Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno Garcia (2020)

Come talk books with us on Twitter @talkscaredpod or email direct to [email protected].

Thanks To Terry Smith Audio for sound editing.

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