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
155 – Stephen King & Writing From the Nerve Endings
August 08, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 47.4 MBSend us a Text Message. Our 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 word...
154 – Alex Woodroe & The Sweet Science of Folk Horror
August 01, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 50.4 MBSend us a Text Message. We’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 ge...
153 – Chuck Tingle & Riding the Lonesome Train
July 25, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 59.8 MBSend us a Text Message. This 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 ...
152 – Andrew Michael Hurley & Our Green, Unpleasant Land
July 18, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 50.3 MBSend us a Text Message. This 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,...
151 – Verity Holloway & The Onion Skin of Trauma
July 11, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 47.7 MBSend us a Text Message. War, 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 ...
150 – Danielle Trussoni & Puzzling All Over the World
July 04, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 42 MBSend us a Text Message. This 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 paus...
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 MBSend us a Text Message. Thrust 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 ficti...
148 – Feral Childhoods – The Big IT Deep-Dive (Part One), with Ally Malinenko & Nat Cassidy
June 26, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 63.8 MBSend us a Text Message. Come 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 ...
147 – Mike Flanagan & Lighting Up the Darkness
June 13, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 52.8 MBSend us a Text Message. I’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… ...
146 – Paula. D. Ashe & A Bizarre & Bitter Reprieve
June 06, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 47 MBSend us a Text Message. If 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 need...
145 – Sarah Gailey & The Scariest Place in the House
May 30, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 53.5 MBSend us a Text Message. What 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 t...
144 – Nicholas Binge & the Spookiest of Entanglements
May 23, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 43.6 MBSend us a Text Message. In 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 compar...
143 – Alice Slater & Bookish Murder Vibes
May 16, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 48.7 MBSend us a Text Message. We 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...
142 – Katrina Monroe & Birthing the Ultimate Body Horror
May 09, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 50.5 MBSend us a Text Message. No book has ever made me so painfully aware of my nipples as Katrina Monroe’s The Graveyard of Lost Children. And I won’t ever have to breastfeed. Katrina’s novel is a full-treatment of the horrors involved in motherhood. Yes there is love, but there is also social pressure, paranoia, loneliness and chafing! And that’s before we even get to the spectral Black-Haired Woman who haunts the unlucky mothers of Katrina’s second novel. Parenting horror has seen a lot of g...
141 – Justin Cronin & Telling the Goat Joke
May 02, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 49.6 MBSend us a Text Message. You will know Justin Cronin as the author of the landmark The Passage. That trilogy set the world of horror and science fiction (and all points in between) alight in the early 2000s and he’s back after eight long years, with The Ferryman. This time he’s swapping vampire plagues for something wholly more subtle … but no less terrifying. I can’t tell you what ‘cos that would ruin it for everyone, but it may shake the very building blocks of your reality. Justin and I ...
140 – Andrew F. Sullivan & The Cutest Mould in Fungus City
April 25, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 47.3 MBSend us a Text Message. What if the world ended, not with a bang, but a slow squelch? That’s sort-of the premise of The Marigold, the brand-new novel from Andrew F. Sullivan. In this book a slow apocalypse is corroding Toronto. Above ground, urban development is driving ecological disaster, whilst in the basements and dark places a new fungal menace is squirming from the shadow. You may never look at your own athlete’s foot the same way. Andrew and I talk about many things, mushrooms and...
139 – Ai Jiang & Home is Where the Haunt Is
April 18, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 42.9 MBSend us a Text Message. This week we’re dissecting spectres and excavating the haunted house in Ai Jiang’s word-of-mouth smash, Linghun. Ai’s novella is a blast. A read-in-one-sitting tale of grief and greed and ghosts and what the word HOME really means. We go deep, talking about different cultural iterations of the supernatural, the impact of location on writing style…and the horrors of the Edinburgh vaults. Enjoy! Linghun was published on April 4th by Dark Matter INK Support Talking...
138 – Rachel Eve Moulton & The Bellybutton of the Beast
April 11, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 45.9 MBSend us a Text Message. Back to the Island this week! With Rachel Eve Moulton and The Insatiable Volt Sisters. Rachel sophomore novel is the weirdest island story since Lost, or Brexit. It features a strange family with a stranger secret, curses, killer quarry ponds and the wearing of other people’s skin. And yet you probably still want to visit Fowler Island (I did). We talk about working with surrealism, about writing volatile sisters and gendered monsters, and about the wonderful horr...
137 – Kelly Link & Once Upon a Time in a Ghost Story
April 04, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 46.3 MBSend us a Text Message. Fairy tales are the first horror stories, right? Kids being eaten by witches, narcissistic imps who steal your babies. That’s the good stuff. Kelly Link knows a thing or two about the darkness inside fairy tales, and how to (re)tell them for maximum effect. She is a superstar of the short story, a Pultizer nominee and someone who just plain knows a lot of interesting stuff. Her new collection, White Cat, Black Dog takes some of your favourite stories and twists t...
136 – Max Booth III & Stories With Teeth
March 28, 2023 14:00 - 1 hour - 47.5 MBSend us a Text Message. Terrible times and awful words await us this week. Thankfully, on this show that’s a good thing! Our guest is Max Booth III, the wizard behind Ghoulish Books and the author of bathroom-set apocalypse, We Need to Do Something. He’s here to talk about his new collection of uber-dark stories, Abnormal Statistics. These tales are pitch black, treacle-thick pieces of clotted nastiness. Bad things happen to lots of people, most frequently children (but never dogs). Many ...
135 – Victor LaValle & The Weird, Weird West
March 21, 2023 19:00 - 1 hour - 54.6 MBSend us a Text Message. Wagons West this week, with a guest I’ve been trying to get on the show since the early days. It’s Victor Lavalle. I had always wanted to speak to him about The Ballad of Black Tom in the dream that we could join together to call Lovecraft names. As it turns out, that will have to wait, cos he’s brought out a brand-new novel … and it’s a Weird Western. Cue squealing!! It’s one of my favourite sub-genres. We talk about homesteading and wilderness, about bad neighb...
134 – Margaret Atwood & Hope in the Dystopia
March 14, 2023 19:00 - 1 hour - 54.6 MBSend us a Text Message. There is no cool and collected way to introduce this week’s episode. Our guest is Margaret Atwood. Yes, that Margaret Atwood. The author of The Handmaid’s Tale. One of the few writer’s who genuinely deserves to be called an icon (though she may be tired of the term). She published her first novel in 1969 and now as she enters her seventh decade of writing, her stories are no less challenging or surprising. Her new collection, Old Babes in the Wood is a feast of d...
133 – Jacqueline Holland & At Last! Vampires!
March 07, 2023 19:00 - 1 hour - 47.1 MBSend us a Text Message. Vampires, finally! After years of recording a horror podcast, I’ve finally recorded a conversation about the first thing you all probably think of if I said “horror monster.” Actually, at this very moment, maybe you’d name a Floridian politician but you get my drift… I’m delighted to be joined by Jacqueline Holland, to talk about her new novel of bloodsucking and cursed immortality, The God of Endings. As with so many books featured on this show, it’s an offbeat loo...
132 – Matt Ruff & A Hostile Universe Here on Earth
February 28, 2023 19:00 - 1 hour - 49.4 MBSend us a Text Message. This week I take a road trip with Matt Ruff, into the more monstrous corners of the universe. Sure, some of them are alien planets… but some are here on earth, with the racists! Matt is best known as the author of 2016’s Lovecraft Country. He never planned to write a sequel, yet here it is. The Destroyer of Worlds picks up several years later, when Atticus, Letetia, Montrose and Hipolyta et al are still battling malign forces both human and otherworldly. I went in...
131 – Johnny Compton & A Pyroclastic Flow of Negative Energy
February 21, 2023 19:00 - 1 hour - 55.5 MBSend us a Text Message. I like my ghosts like I like my podcasts – weird and slightly furious. Thankfully, this week delivers on both counts – with Johnny Compton’s The Spite House delivering more ghosts than you think you could fit into 250-pages … and none of them are anything less than fuming! Johnny talks us through the odd, off-kilter history of spite houses, we trace the legacy of the American haunted house novel, discuss ghost lore and dismiss orbs. We talk about complex father f...
130 – Mariana Enriquez & This Cruelty is Justified
February 14, 2023 19:00 - 1 hour - 63.2 MBSend us a Text Message. It’s a Valentine’s day episode and what better to celebrate today than a conversation about cruelty, brutal folklore, political terror and black magic? Don’t tell me I don’t understand my audience. I’m beyond delighted to welcome Mariana Enriquez to the show to talk about her massive novel, Our Share of Night. It features all of the above ingredients, in a 700+ page roam through decades of Argentinian history, demonic misconduct. This ranks amongst the most unstruc...
129 – Stephen Graham Jones & Slashers Can Save the World
February 07, 2023 19:00 - 1 hour - 54.1 MBSend us a Text Message. Are you ready for another bloody confrontation? Same rules, different setting (actually still my attic bedroom) and more gore? Stephen Graham Jones AKA Professor Slasher, returns to Talking Scared to discuss Don’t Fear the Reaper, the sequel to his zeitgeist-blasting slasher-ode, My Heart is a Chainsaw. Reaper takes us back to Proofrock, Idaho for a freezing night of rage and bloodshed, with returning favourites and a whole new killer who reads like the distillation...
128 – C.J. Tudor & Locked Rooms at the End of the World
January 31, 2023 19:00 - 1 hour - 45.6 MBSend us a Text Message. It’s not even the end of January and we’re already dealing with the second apocalypse of the year. This one is written by CJ Tudor, whose new novel, The Drift, moves her out of the crime chillers she is best-known for, into a whole other world of horror. It’s a series of locked room mysteries, occurring in the hideous aftermath of global pandemic. And if you are a little sick of global pandemics (who isn’t?) then at least this one has rage zombies and lots of murde...
127 – Grady Hendrix and the Radical Puppet Collective
January 24, 2023 19:00 - 57 minutes - 39.8 MBSend us a Text Message. When it comes to stress, they say selling a house is up there with divorce and death. Now imagine that house is haunted… by demonic puppets. Yeah – that’s the premise of Grady Hendrix’s brand-new horror novel, How to Sell a Haunted House. It combines Grady’s trademark humour, genre-knowledge and playfulness, with a genuinely frightening story about homes, and all the things they contain, both comforting and downright nasty. Grady and I dive into the economics of h...
126 – Stephen Markley & A Guided Tour To Our Future Hell
January 17, 2023 19:00 - 1 hour - 51.8 MBSend us a Text Message. …AAAND WE’RE BACK! I hope you’re slipping into 2023 like it’s a warm bath, but either way this week’s episode will be a cold, sharp system shock. The guest is Stephen Markley; the book is The Deluge – a 900-page beast of ecological and societal disintegration, and the best book I have read in decades. Imagine The Stand was based on rigorous scientific research and was, y’know, about to happen to us all for real. Yeah! This is a scary one, even if it would never...
125 – The Best Horror Books of 2022
December 30, 2022 22:00 - 54 minutes - 37.4 MBSend us a Text Message. The year is almost over. What is left to do except offer you my last-minute ranking of the best books I’ve read and enjoyed in 2022. I will warn you – I am poorly and my voice sounds like ten miles of bad gravel. This sounds like the Reba McIntyre book club. I am HUSKY!! Hang around for the afterword when my voice finally gives out as I labour over a long and elaborate thank-you for listening and supporting the show this year. At times 2022 has felt like a waking n...
124 – State of the Horror Nation 2022, with Emily Hughes & Janelle Janson
December 27, 2022 00:00 - 1 hour - 81.6 MBSend us a Text Message. It’s that time of year again. A time to reflect, to look back over a tumultuous twelve months, and to talk about the horror books that helped us survive them. 2022 has been a helluva year for the good kind of horror. Far too much for one man to cover. So I’ve drafted in some highly qualified friends – Emily Hughes and Janelle Janson. They have their fingers right on the arterial spurt of the genre – and they have each read far more than me. Together we deliver this...
123 – Rachel Harrison, Josh Malerman & A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Self-Indulgence
December 20, 2022 19:00 - 1 hour - 66.7 MBSend us a Text Message. It’s the Christmas Special and with the obligatory requirement to do something different – we’re turning the tables. Yes, I’m the one being interviewed this week. To make that a palatable offering for listeners, the guest interviewers are none other than Rachel Harrison and Josh Malerman. Friends of the show and horror superstars who, out of the goodness of their hearts, devoted an evening to asking me questions. Don’t listen for me; listen for them. Amongst othe...
122 – A History of Gothic Horror, with Professor Roger Luckhurst
December 13, 2022 19:00 - 2 hours - 84.2 MBSend us a Text Message. Are you ready for some learnin’? This week rather than focusing on any single book, or any single author – I thought we’d have a little look at … y’know … the entire friggin’ history of Horror and Gothic across the centuries. After all, what’s a Christmas break from podcasting if you aren’t doubling the length of your episodes and making the scope infinite? Thankfully, I’m joined by a bona fide expert. Professor Roger Luckhurst, from Birkbeck College, London comes...
121 – Craig Engler & What Makes a Shudder Movie?
December 06, 2022 19:00 - 1 hour - 44.5 MBSend us a Text Message. This week I’m beginning my supposed ‘break’ from reading. There is still an episode, however, and it’s a doozy. You may be glad to hear I’ve put down the books for a short while, ‘cos my guest is a huge name from the cinematic aisle of the horror world – Craig Engler, GM of Shudder is in the house!! He joined me for a conversation back in October, when we were both in the throes of the Halloween build up. Now, listening to this weeks later, you can hardly hear the ...
120 – Philip Fracassi & A Screaming Inferno of Chaos and Emotion
November 29, 2022 19:00 - 1 hour - 50.3 MBSend us a Text Message. Get ready to be sickened by my praise. My guest this week is Philip Fracassi. Last year his historical horror, The Boys in the Valley got the Stephen King endorsement. He’s already following up with A Child Alone With Strangers - his second novel (or is it his first, or his third – as you’ll hear it’s complicated). This book is an all-timer. It blends the relaxed, character driven storytelling of the best 80s horror, with a contemporary cross-genre style that keeps...
119 – Charlotte Northedge & Houses Full of Haunted People
November 22, 2022 19:00 - 1 hour - 42.5 MBSend us a Text Message. Are you a city mouse or a country mouse? That’s the question at the heart of my conversation with Charlotte Northedge. Her new novel, The People Before argues that though the city may be a hassle, it’s a lot less scary than what waits out there in the fields and farmhouses of this pleasant land. Charlotte is very much a city mouse. She’s also the Head of Books for The Guardian Newspaper, which makes her superbly well-euipped to talk about fiction in general, and ...
118 – Fiona Barnett & If You Go Down to the Woods Today
November 15, 2022 19:00 - 1 hour - 45 MBSend us a Text Message. It’s coming home, it’s coming … horror’s coming home! Alright, no one panic – this isn’t about football. We’ll avoid that particular nightmare of human corruption and talk about something much more nourishing – the delights of British Folk Horror. Our guest is Fiona Barnett, and these days it’s seems like a mini-celebration everytime I have a fellow Brit on the show. Her debut novel The Dark Between the Trees is also quintessentially British, mired in the myth and ...
117 – Erika T. Wurth & Bigfoot in Your Dreams
November 08, 2022 19:00 - 1 hour - 46.6 MBSend us a Text Message. I don’t always talk about Bigfoot … but when I do it’s with the BEST people. Our guest this week is Erika T. Wurth, author, narrative artist and creative writing guru. She is of Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee descent and she pours all of that skill and heritage into her new novel White Horse. It’s a tale of haunting, hard-living and violence, with a certain hairy indigenous monster that pops up in your dreams. This is NOT the Bigfoot that you expect, or want to meet. ...
116 – Brian McAuley & The Delights of Human Evisceration
November 01, 2022 19:00 - 1 hour - 46.9 MBSend us a Text Message. Halloween may be over but I trust you aren’t tired of horror? No? Good. ‘Cos this week’s guest packs a double-whammy – horror novels and horror movies all in one. Brian McAuley is a screenwriter and debut novelist. His first book, Curse of the Reaper is a behind-the-scenes look at how the horror movie sausage gets made, featuring the greatest slasher icon never to actually exist, and some of the best ‘bad’ scriptwriting you’ll ever read. Brian and I talk about Hol...
115 – Andy Davidson & Ornate Maps of Hell
October 25, 2022 17:00 - 1 hour - 50.3 MBSend us a Text Message. The last episode before Halloween and it’s suitably about my favourite book of the year: Andy Davidson’s The Hollow Kind Andy is the Stoker-nominated author of In the Valley of the Sun and The Boatman’s Daughter. The Hollow Kind is his third book and it packs a lot into its 400 pages. It’s as dense and weighty as an imploding paper star. It’s a haunted house story (of sorts), a creature feature (of sorts) and a whole lot of Southern Gothic of many kinds. The prose...
114 – Erin E. Adams & Monsters in the Rust Belt
October 18, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 43.9 MBSend us a Text Message. It was Thomas Wolfe who wrote “you can never go home again.” Huh, what did he know? (yes, I understand the metaphor – move on!) This week’s guest proves that whilst you can go home, you may not want to. Erin E. Adams is an actor, playwright and now the debut author of JACKAL, a novel of homecomings horrid and awful. Each year, in the small Pennsylvania town of Johnstown, a young Black girl goes missing, taken by whatever lurks in the woods surrounding the town. He...
114 – Erin E. Adams & Monsters in the Rust Belt
October 18, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 43.9 MBIt was Thomas Wolfe who wrote “you can never go home again.” Huh, what did he know? (yes, I understand the metaphor – move on!) This week’s guest proves that whilst you can go home, you may not want to. Erin E. Adams is an actor, playwright and now the debut author of JACKAL, a novel of homecomings horrid and awful. Each year, in the small Pennsylvania town of Johnstown, a young Black girl goes missing, taken by whatever lurks in the woods surrounding the town. Helluva premise!! Erin tak...
113 – Rachel Harrison & Teeth, Needles & Gnomes
October 11, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 43.3 MBSend us a Text Message. Do you know anyone with hairy palms? Weird question, but as this week’s novel-in-question will convince you, it’s best to be careful around the hirsute. Our guest is Rachel Harrison, returning to Talking Scared with her brand new SUCH SHARP TEETH. It’s a tale of small-town relationships, female transformation, love and … werewolves. Anyone who has read either of Rachel’s previous novels, The Return or Cackle, will know that she has a knack for reinventing horror ...
112 – Jamie Flanagan & Stories as Companions for Loneliness
October 04, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 45.1 MBSend us a Text Message. The best and spookiest season starts in earnest, this year on Talking Scared. Our guest is Jamie Flanagan, actor, screenwriter, and part of the team who delivered such televisual delights as The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass and now, The Midnight Club. With The Midnight Club due to land on Netflix worldwide this Friday – I rejigged the schedule to sneak in a chat with Jamie about his work on the show, his relationship with horror-maestro director, Mike Flan...
111 – Alexis Henderson and Hot Marxist Bloodletting
September 27, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 46.6 MBSend us a Text Message. It’s not only vampires that drink blood. That’s what we find out on this week’s episode. Our guest is Alexis Henderson – author of The Year of the Witching and now, her sophomore novel, House of Hunger. It’s a luscious, lurid tale of dark fantasy, blood and sex. Y’know … all the good stuff. Oh, and it’s one of my favourite books of the year. Alexis and I discuss the collision of horror and fantasy, the erotics and politics of blood, and the double standards when ...
110 – Clay McLeod Chapman and Unhealthy Obsession with Clear Plastic Tarps
September 20, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 51 MBSend us a Text Message. Wanna get haunted? That’s the delightful proposition offered by Clay McLeod Chapman’s Ghost Eaters – a novel of ghosts, grief and ghastly narcotics. Just take one pill and you can sell all the phantoms that surround you. What a premise! It’s Clay’s second time on Talking Scared and he’s always welcome. There are few more honest, open, and thoughtful writers out there. This time around we go deep, into the real emotional core of Ghost Eaters, talking about lost fri...
110 – Clay McLeod Chapman and Unhealthy Obsession with Clear Plastic Tarps
September 20, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 51 MBWanna get haunted? That’s the delightful proposition offered by Clay McLeod Chapman’s Ghost Eaters – a novel of ghosts, grief and ghastly narcotics. Just take one pill and you can sell all the phantoms that surround you. What a premise! It’s Clay’s second time on Talking Scared and he’s always welcome. There are few more honest, open, and thoughtful writers out there. This time around we go deep, into the real emotional core of Ghost Eaters, talking about lost friends and long-ago dreams....
109 – Gemma Amor and The Big Mental Health in Horror Bonanza
September 13, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 79.3 MBSend us a Text Message. The time has finally come to go to the scariest place imaginable – the inside of the human mind. Thankfully, we have a friend to accompany us on this most hideous of trips. I’m joined this week by Gemma Amor, author of the brand-new techno-horror FULL IMMERSION. It’s a book that deals with trauma, psychosis and experimental treatment, and it’s the perfect springboard for an epic conversation about mental health in horror. Gemma and I cover the autobiographical ele...
108 – Hailey Piper and Ambulatory Brain Monsters
September 06, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 44.4 MBSend us a Text Message. Finally, she’s here! After months of waiting for schedules and book releases to align, Hailey Piper is on the show. She’s here to talk about both of her 2022 releases – each is a kidnapping experience. The novella Your Mind is a Terrible Thing takes us up into the void and into creepy inner space. Her forthcoming novel No Gods for Drowning transports us somewhere else entirely. Hailey lets me blather on about social commentary and metaphor before reminding me ge...