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.
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
107 – Zin E. Rocklyn and the Commonality of Pain
August 30, 2022 18:00 - 52 minutes - 36.3 MBSend us a Text Message. Time to get weird and wiggy and wondrous. Our guest this week is Zin E. Rocklyn, author of many short fictions, and her (very) recently award-winning novella Flowers for the Sea. It’s an afro-speculative blend of science fiction, horror, fantasy, myth, dystopia, pre-history and apocalypse – all confined to a single boat in a big, bad ocean, and all told within 100 pages. Phew – it’s dense! Zin and I cover a lot this week. We barrel through her the twin crises of ...
106 – Gwendolyn Kiste and the Madwomen Bite Back
August 23, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 47.2 MBGet your bell bottoms, your peace sign, your tie dye and your … crucifix! This week’s guest is Gwendolyn Kiste and her new novel, Reluctant Immortals, transports us to San Francisco in 1968, the summer after the Summer of Love, when the sun is setting on the hippie movement. Into this chaos comes a quarter of iconic Gothic characters, ready to fight it out all over again. Like the book, the surface of this conversation belies its inner darkness. Yes we talk hippies. Yes we talk Haunted Hol...
106 – Gwendolyn Kiste and the Madwomen Bite Back
August 23, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 47.2 MBSend us a Text Message. Get your bell bottoms, your peace sign, your tie dye and your … crucifix! This week’s guest is Gwendolyn Kiste and her new novel, Reluctant Immortals, transports us to San Francisco in 1968, the summer after the Summer of Love, when the sun is setting on the hippie movement. Into this chaos comes a quarter of iconic Gothic characters, ready to fight it out all over again. Like the book, the surface of this conversation belies its inner darkness. Yes we talk hippies...
105 – Agatha Andrews and Danger-Bangs in Haunted Houses
August 16, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 44.5 MBSend us a Text Message. This week we’re crossing the podcast streams again – and broadening our reading at the same time. Agatha Andrews is the host of She Wore Black, a Texas-based podcast of Gothic, Mystery and Horror. She’s also my horror-podcasting buddy, the romantic yin to my dark, depraved yang. And she knows a thing or two about Gothic Romance. It turns out it’s not all virgins in nightgowns (though they do make an appearance). Agatha talks me through the complex, overlapping rela...
104 – Michael J. Seidlinger and Strange Footsteps at Midnight
August 09, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 50.5 MBSend us a Text Message. Are your doors and windows locked? Good. ‘Cos this one is going to scare you! This week I’m joined by Michael J. Seidlinger, author of the new home-invasion nightmare, Anybody Home. You’ve read this scenario before – invasion, torture, death and suffering – but never like this. We talk about why home invasion is so singularly frightening, about the role of movies and lenses in our hyper-surveillant culture, we disagree on the current state of experimental fiction...
103 – Giving Kids Swords: A Middle Grade Special w/ with Ally Malinenko, Dan Poblocki & Lora Senf
August 02, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 68 MBSend us a Text Message. What scared you as a kid? Monsters? Ghosts? The thing in your closet? The perilous state of the environment and the terrible carbon footprint of children’s toys? If it’s any of the former then you’re in good company. (If it’s the latter then boy did we need you in 1987!) This week’s guests understand the fear that makes the childlike mind tick and tock, they know how to get under young skin, and they know how to inject a little hope into the horror. Ally Malinenko...
103 – Giving Kids Swords: A Middle Grade Special w/ with Ally Malinenko, Dan Poblocki & Lora Senf
August 02, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 68 MBWhat scared you as a kid? Monsters? Ghosts? The thing in your closet? The perilous state of the environment and the terrible carbon footprint of children’s toys? If it’s any of the former then you’re in good company. (If it’s the latter then boy did we need you in 1987!) This week’s guests understand the fear that makes the childlike mind tick and tock, they know how to get under young skin, and they know how to inject a little hope into the horror. Ally Malinenko, Dan Poblocki and Lora S...
102 – Nina Nesseth and How the Gross-Out Can Save Your Life
July 26, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 50.9 MBSend us a Text Message. Do you like scary movies? Yes, course you do – you’re listening to a horror podcast. Okay, cliched horror quote asides – this week is something a little different for the show. It’s been a minute since we’ve had some non-fiction, and how better to scratch that itch-for-facts than with a discussion of BRAINZZZZZ? Our guest is Nina Nesseth: scientist, researcher and author of Nightmare Fuel: The Science of Horror Films. It does what it says on the cover. Nina guides ...
101 – Nat Cassidy and Who Asked for a Body Anyway?
July 19, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 48 MBSend us a Text Message. We’re heading into largely uncharted horror waters this week with our guest Nat Cassidy. Nat’s debut horror novel, Mary: An Awakening of Terror dares to confront one of the last true taboos of horror fiction. No, it’s not cannibalism, or necrophilia, or the bowel movements of Tucker Carlson … no… it’s the menopause. That’s right. Female physiology. The horror, the terror, think of the children!!! Nat and I talk about why horror shies away from the topic of middl...
100 – Paul Tremblay and the First-Person Asshole Narrator
July 12, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 48.1 MBSend us a Text Message. DUM DUM DUM!!! 100 episodes!! We did it. We reached an utterly abstract threshold together guys and we are DELIGHTED to be here. I’m also delighted to welcome Paul Tremblay back to the show for a neat bit of circularity (as he was the one to kick things off way back in episode 1). Paul’s new novel, The Pallbearer’s Club came out just at the right time to make him the 100th guest. I’m convinced he planned it that way. It’s a tale of weird adolescence, New England...
99 – T. Kingfisher and the Fungus-Punk Epidemic
July 05, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 46.9 MBSend us a Text Message. It’s been a rough couple of weeks. So, let’s have a laugh: Poe-style! Our guest is T. Kingfisher. She’s an expert in taking dry, dark horror classics and investing them with newfound life. In What Moves the Dead she manages to find the gruesome joy in even the most dolorous of text. What Moves the Dead reconfigures and reapproaches Poe’s classic, “The Fall of the House of Usher.” It updates the year, introduces some gender fluidity, and even adds Beatrix Potter’s ...
98 – Tim McGregor and Blaming the Danish
June 28, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 48.5 MBSend us a Text Message. Things are a bit fishy this week, as I’m joined by long-time friend-of-the-show Tim McGregor (@TimMcGregor1) to talk about the long history of fish-tailed women and why we find them so frightening … and sexy! Tim’s forthcoming novella, Lure, is a mermaid story with bite! No Ariel here; Sebastian the Crab is hiding. Instead it’s about the war of attrition between a brutal patriarchal settlement and the sea-she-creature who holds them to account. (a little fitting f...
97 – A Monstrous Roundtable, with Ellen Datlow, Nathan Ballingrud, Chikodili Emelumadu & Joe R. Lansdale
June 21, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 50.1 MBSend us a Text Message. This week on Talking Scared it’s monsters all day, every day. To celebrate the release of Screams From the Dark: 29 Tales of Monsters and the Monstrous, we gather around the campfire with editor Ellen Datlow and three of her contributors – no less than Nathan Ballingrud, Chikodili Emelumadu and the great Joe R. Lansdale. As a result, this is not your average Talking Scared episode. There is interruption, overlap, argument much good humour. Amidst the chaos we st...
96 – Stephen Lloyd and Cutting the Treacle
June 14, 2022 18:00 - 58 minutes - 40.4 MBSend us a Text Message. We’re closing out our (very) loose trilogy of episodes devoted to sinister schools and magical children. This week it involves pentagrams and witch-burnings, which are always a good time. Our guest, Stephen Lloyd, is better known for his comedy than his horror. He has spent a career crafting some of the biggest sitcoms of the century (some of which helped my marriage survive lockdown). Now, he has turned his pen to something much less wholesome, in his first novel, ...
95 – J.M. Miro and Throwing Your Arms Around the Monsters
June 07, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 53.5 MBSend us a Text Message. This week we go to magic school, but there isn’t a f***ing owl or a talking hat in sight. Instead, it’s a much more macabre affair, as J. M. Miro begins his trilogy of dark sorcery with Ordinary Monsters. J. M. goes by a different name in his other, more prosaic writing life, but here, with us, in the blood and the shadows he writes as his second self. Which is a long-winded and torturous way to say this is a pseudonym. We talk about the creative and practical re...
94 – Scott Hawkins and a Dog-Eat-Lion World
May 31, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 43.6 MBSend us a Text Message. This week we go behind the curtain to look at the inner workings of a bona-fide modern classic. Our guest is Scott Hawkins, whose debut novel, The Library At Mount Char delighted genre fans back in 2015. Now, to commemorate its first UK publication, Scott joins me for a conversation about its many madcap secrets. We talk about everything from cosmic ethics to kidney stone – he gives us a little until-now-unknown backstory on some of the most mysterious characters...
93 – Kiersten White and Freedom from the Hope of Youth
May 24, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 47.6 MBSend us a Text Message. Here I come, ready or not! Our guest this week is Kiersten White. She’s the award-winning author of numerous macabre YA fictions, but now she’s making her debut in adult fiction (not that kind!) with Hide – a tale of life-or-death hide-and-seek. It’s a fantastic premise to begin with. Think The Hunger Games meets Squid Game, or any other kind of game but nastier and with more socio-political heft. Yeah, that’s right. Once again on Talking Scared the guest and I de...
92 – Anne Heltzel and a Big Pile of Dead Baby Dolls
May 17, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 47.7 MBSend us a Text Message. This week’s episode couldn’t have come at a more pertinent time. As women’s reproductive rights come under assault in the US, as Roe V Wade gets rolled back and fat, sweaty men in suits make rules they will never have to obey – I’m joined by a writer who wrote a book about the cult of having babies. Anne Heltzel is the author of Just Like Mother, a contemporary Gothic techno-thriller about fertility, pressure, choice and cults. Okay, the real-world context may be he...
91 – Jason Rekulak and Pencil Crayon Jump Scares
May 10, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 42 MBSend us a Text Message. Do think kids’ drawings are creepy? They are, right? All big smiles and suns with eyes and weird flowers the size of people… and the dead girls in the background. Right? Our guest this week has built a whole horror story around these little paper nightmares. Hidden Pictures is a novel that blends text and image in ways that I’ve never seen done before, or never as well. It’s a story of childhood imagination, suburban murder and summer terror. Think Gone Girl with...
90 – Isabel Cañas and Running Barefoot Through Books
May 03, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 54.3 MBSend us a Text Message. It’s a week of deep-dives, haunted-houses and academic horror-stories this week on Talking Scared. Our guest is Isabel Cañas. And she’s having the busiest week known to (wo)mankind. Not only is she defending her doctoral thesis on Medieval Turkish Poetry, she also has the small matter of her debut novel – a sweetly sinister piece of Latin Gothic called The Hacienda We talk about everything that could possibly have influenced the novel. From the creepy house she on...
89 – Alma Katsu and the Hatred that Never Seems to Die
April 26, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 50.1 MBSend us a Text Message. This week Alma Katsu brings her brand of immaculate historical horror to Talking Scared. After the The Hunger upped the ante on the Donner Party, and The Deep gave us a sinking feeling about the Titanic, Alma is back with The Fervor – a book too dark to write a pun about. It’s a tale of haunting and conspiracy during the years of Japanese internment in the US. Spanning multiple states, and multiple POV’s, it weaves a story of anger, prejudice and hate that seems ...
88 – V. L. Valentine and The Difficult Second Ghost Story
April 19, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 46.1 MBSend us a Text Message. After much recent politickin’ and metaphor – we’re back with a good old-fashioned, honest-to-goodness ghost story. And from a friend, no less. V. L. Valentine came on the show last year (ep.31) to talk about her debut medical horror whodunnit, The Plague Letters. Now she’s back with her sophomore novel, a ripe Gothic treat called Begars Abbey. It plays with the tropes beautifully. There are secret rooms, sinister histories, mad old relatives, torture, crypts, si...
87 – Malcolm Devlin and the Brexit Zombie Story
April 12, 2022 18:00 - 59 minutes - 40.7 MBSend us a Text Message. I promise this week isn’t a pandemic novel. I know … we all need a break. No, Malcolm Devlin’s And Then I Woke Up IS about a disease, but not one that makes you cough, vomit or melt. Instead it’s a disease (drum roll), OF THE MIND!! But even then, it’s not what you think – no rage monsters here. Well, not really. Instead, this novella is a perfect allegory of how narratives can infect, distort and corrupt. How reality is contingent, and how the truth is more elus...
87 – Malcolm Devlin and the Brexit Zombie Story
April 12, 2022 18:00 - 59 minutes - 40.7 MBI promise this week isn’t a pandemic novel. I know … we all need a break. No, Malcolm Devlin’s And Then I Woke Up IS about a disease, but not one that makes you cough, vomit or melt. Instead it’s a disease (drum roll), OF THE MIND!! But even then, it’s not what you think – no rage monsters here. Well, not really. Instead, this novella is a perfect allegory of how narratives can infect, distort and corrupt. How reality is contingent, and how the truth is more elusive by the day. All that,...
86 – Alan Baxter and a Stranger in a Strange Town
April 05, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 49 MBSend us a Text Message. Alan Baxter is the Lord of Weird Australia. I said it before, he liked it, so I’ll say it again. Alan Baxter is the Lord of Weird Australia. Perhaps nothing he has written is as weird, or as Australian as the stories set in and around the town of Gulpepper. He took us there in The Gulp and now he’s taking us back in The Fall, the second collection of linked novellas outlining the town and its weird inhabitants. Bear in mind, when I say nothing he’s written is as we...
85 – Emma Stonex and the Light That Never Goes Out
March 29, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 48.6 MBSend us a Text Message. Imagine it’s just you and two other people stuck in a single building for weeks on end. Everyone’s bad habits on display. How long would it take you to turn murderous? That’s just one of the possible questions asked in Emma Stonex’s The Lamplighters. Inspired by the real-world vanishing of the Flannan Isle Lighthouse keepers, but full of incident and weirdness all it’s own, The Lamplighters is equally poetic and paranoid, gentle and cruel, haunting and horrifying. I...
84 – Dark Stars Roundtable, with John F.D. Taff, Livia Llewellyn & Josh Malerman
March 22, 2022 19:00 - 1 hour - 62.6 MBSend us a Text Message. This week is an orgy of horror. There are four of us. That makes it an orgy right? (I’ve never been to one – never got the invitation). Ahem … sorry. I'll start again. This week I am joined by not one, but THREE guests. John F. D. Taff, Livia Llewellyn, and of course, Josh Malerman. We could call them stars from the firmament of horror. Dark Stars perhaps. That would be fitting, considering that’s what they are here to discuss (amongst many, many things). Dark ...
83 – Simone St. James and Good Time, True Crime
March 15, 2022 19:00 - 1 hour - 42.5 MBSend us a Text Message. Hey horrorfam – ready for a good ol’ murder mystery? Y’know, with ghosts… Our guest is Simone St. James, the doyenne of ‘Supernatural Suspense’ (as the marketeers love to call it). Her 2020 smash hit The Sundown Motel put her name up in lights, and her latest – The Book of Cold Cases keeps it there, shining cold and bright. It’s a tale of murder, media and misogyny – told in the classic dual-timeline manner that seems to feature in all good supernatural suspense n...
82 – Mike Meginnis and Things You Should Do Before You Die
March 08, 2022 19:00 - 1 hour - 47.2 MBSend us a Text Message. Are you ready for another apocalypse? Covid and nukes not enough for ya? Well here you go then. Something slightly different. Mike Meginnis’ Drowning Practice is an odder than usual end-of-days. It’s a book in which everyone knows that time is up, and yet they just don’t seem to care. There are few (I won’t say zero) ravening lunatics in this book – but the more chilling realisation is that even at the end of the world, you still have to go to work. Mike and I ...
81 – Tyler Jones and Old Eyes in Young Faces
March 01, 2022 19:00 - 1 hour - 47.6 MBSend us a Text Message. Tyler Jones’ Burn the Plans reminds me of the first time I picked up Stephen King’s Night Shift. I didn’t know who this King guy was, only that his stories were varied, scary, funny, awful and sweet and sweetly awful. In short, a great time. Burn the Plans is the same. The collection dashes from an ever-so-American-Gothic farm to a bloodsoaked art gallery, CIA psychic experimentation to invisible Frankensteinian limb-monsters. Tyler’s imagination runs amok and bre...
80 – Gretchen Felker-Martin and Bustin’ Everyone’s Balls
February 22, 2022 19:00 - 1 hour - 44.9 MBSend us a Text Message. Have you ever wondered what fresh testicles taste like? No? I don’t believe you. Our guest this week wants to get you thinking about it … well, that and many more important things. Gretchen Felker-Martin is the author of Manhunt – potentially the most buzzed-about horror novel of 2022. The story follows a pair of trans- protagonists through a blighted landscape of monstrous men and militant feminists – with the prized scrotal orbs being the key to continued life, an...
79 – Leon Craig and the Queerness at the Bottom of the Well
February 15, 2022 19:00 - 1 hour - 46.7 MBSend us a Text Message. February’s focus on the best new Women-in-Horror continues with Leon Craig and her debut collection, Parallel Hells. Leon is a North London writer with a globalised imagination. She’s been published all over the place, but is also a member of the Future’s in the Making, Queer writer’s collective. That perspective is inescapable in this collection. Wherever her stories take us, from an Eastern European pogrom, to a Viking settlement, or a BDSM dungeon frequented by ...
78 – Thomas Olde Heuvelt and the Mountains of (My) Madness
February 08, 2022 19:00 - 1 hour - 46.3 MBSend us a Text Message. This week is my personal Everest. Thomas Olde Heuvelt, bestselling Euro-horror whizzkid author of HEX, joins me to to talk about his newest novel – Echo. It’s a story of mountaineering, and madness, and monsters of the soul. If you follow me on any form of social media you may have seen that this book utterly distressed me. I can’t even say why myself; it just tweaked a nerve. Echo is a wonderfully easter-egg-laden novel, full of references to other horror maste...
77 – S.A. Barnes and Every Direction is Down
February 01, 2022 19:00 - 1 hour - 47.6 MBSend us a Text Message. In space no one can hear you read! This week our guest is S.A. Barnes – who’s new novel Dead Silence answers the (stupid) question, once and for all, of whether horror can take place in space. It’s a tale of a blue-collar crew, who encounter more than they reckoned for when salvaging a fabled spaceship. You think you’ve seen this play out before, I know. You haven’t. Stacey and I talk about all things “space-horror”, from the looming shadow of Alien and Event H...
76 – Ally Wilkes and Good Reasons to be Afraid of the Dark
January 25, 2022 19:00 - 1 hour - 45.5 MBIs it cold where you are? If so, do I have the book for you. Our guest is Ally Wilkes, whose debut novel, All the White Spaces was my pick for the most anticipated horror novel of early 2022. I was NOT disappointed. The book takes us to Antarctica in 1919, just months after the end of the First World War, in the dying years of the Heroic Age of Exploration. There, trapped in the frozen ‘overwinter’ the team of men are forced to confront a malignant presence that draws them out into the col...
76 – Ally Wilkes and Good Reasons to be Afraid of the Dark
January 25, 2022 19:00 - 1 hour - 45.5 MBSend us a Text Message. Is it cold where you are? If so, do I have the book for you. Our guest is Ally Wilkes, whose debut novel, All the White Spaces was my pick for the most anticipated horror novel of early 2022. I was NOT disappointed. The book takes us to Antarctica in 1919, just months after the end of the First World War, in the dying years of the Heroic Age of Exploration. There, trapped in the frozen ‘overwinter’ the team of men are forced to confront a malignant presence that dr...
75 – Kristi DeMeester and Misogynistic Little Paper Cuts
January 18, 2022 19:00 - 1 hour - 46.5 MBSend us a Text Message. This week it’s time for good girls and bad girls to unite. Our guest is Kristi DeMeester whose new novel, Such A Pretty Smile sinks its teeth deep into the raised hand of misogyny. It’s a tale of violence and viciousness and vivid nightmares – and a whole new apparatus to explore the evils that men do. At this point I assume we’ve already weeded out the guys who roll their eyes at #metoo!? That’s for the best cos this is a feminism-heavy week. We talk about how ...
74 – John Connolly and the Many Faces of Metaphysical Mystery
January 11, 2022 16:00 - 1 hour - 61.8 MBSend us a Text Message. Kicking off the New Year right, by interviewing one of my favourite living writers. John Connolly is the author of the bestselling Charlie Parker series, a 19 book odyssey that takes us from the Maine coast to the darkest corners of the USA (and elsewhere), in the process, transmuting hardboiled detective noir into cosmic horror. After two decades of reading about Parker, you can be sure I have plenty to ask John – about writing American horror as an Irishman, Ma...
73 – The Best Horror-ish Books of 2021
December 30, 2021 23:00 - 47 minutes - 32.3 MBSend us a Text Message. It’s just me this week – sneaking one last episode in to talk about my own personal top-10 horror novels (or horror-ish) from the last twelve months. It’s been a stellar year, and picking just ten books was a nightmare all of it’s own. But these things must be done. The world MUST know what one more straight, white guy thinks about culture, or society will collapse. I hope you enjoy this as I get more and more animated as things go on. It’s a good job I’m taking...
72 – State of the Horror Nation II, with Emily Hughes and Sadie Hartmann
December 28, 2021 19:00 - 1 hour - 78.2 MBSend us a Text Message. Well, we made it to the end of this nightmare of a year. And though there has been plenty of horrific stuff along the way – war, plague, corruption … literal armed insurrection, at least the fictional horror has been fun. To commemorate a special year in horror, I’m getting the band back together. Sadie Hartmann, AKA Mother Horror, and Emily Hughes of Tor Nightfire (and various other parishes) join me to talk about the stuff they have loved from the second half** ...
71 – A.J. West and Paranormal Foreplay
December 21, 2021 19:00 - 1 hour - 48.3 MBSend us a Text Message. This week I bring you a ghost story, as befitting the season. Though it’s a little more lurid than Charles Dickens would have liked. The guest is A.J. West; the book is The Spirit Engineer. It’s one of my very favourites of 2021. Set in Belfast between the sinking of the Titanic and the outbreak of war, it’s a tale of science and the supernatural. Of William Crawford, a man who wants proof of the beyond, and will risk everything to grasp it. It’s actually based ...
70 – Ross Jeffery and Disturbing the Comfortable
December 14, 2021 19:00 - 1 hour - 46.5 MBSend us a Text Message. This week I am going to utterly ruin your festive mood! My guest is Ross Jeffery – author of Juniper, Tome (for which he was Bram Stoker nominated) and numerous short stories. His work is grim, gritty, gory and other words beginning with G - but they are nothing compared to the sheer horror of his latest work, Only the Stains Remain. Yeah, this is one of those special episodes in which I feel duty-bound to roll out the trigger warnings. Only the Stains Remain is ab...
Wendy N. Wagner and Nasty Shenanigans
December 07, 2021 19:00 - 1 hour - 46.4 MBI know it’s the middle of winter but this week the book in question is taking us back to summer. And not our current plague-summer – but the halcyon days of 1989. Think kids on bikes, running wild, fights and first loves, demonic deer gods … wait … what? Our guest, Wendy N. Wagner is the editor-in-chief of the prestigious Nightmare Magazine, and the author of epic coming-of-age horror The Deer Kings, as well as the ‘Sawmill Gothic’, The Secret Skin. We talk about both books and how Wendy ha...
69 – Wendy N. Wagner and Nasty Shenanigans
December 07, 2021 19:00 - 1 hour - 46.4 MBSend us a Text Message. I know it’s the middle of winter but this week the book in question is taking us back to summer. And not our current plague-summer – but the halcyon days of 1989. Think kids on bikes, running wild, fights and first loves, demonic deer gods … wait … what? Our guest, Wendy N. Wagner is the editor-in-chief of the prestigious Nightmare Magazine, and the author of epic coming-of-age horror The Deer Kings, as well as the ‘Sawmill Gothic’, The Secret Skin. We talk about bo...
68 – Josh Malerman and Putting the Awe in Awful Things
November 30, 2021 19:00 - 1 hour - 49.5 MBSend us a Text Message. If you are feeling depressed, what with OMICRON emerging like the worst villain in some direct-to-streaming video game adaptation, then do I have the tonic for you. Josh Malerman is back for his second bout of Talking Scared, only 6 months after he was last here. This time, more than ever, he brings joy, wonder, inspiration and a 700 page book that will work your triceps as well as your mind and soul. Ghoul n’ the Cape is Josh’s magnum opus, so far. So far! It’s ...
68 – Josh Malerman and Putting the Awe in Awful Things
November 30, 2021 19:00 - 1 hour - 49.5 MBIf you are feeling depressed, what with OMICRON emerging like the worst villain in some direct-to-streaming video game adaptation, then do I have the tonic for you. Josh Malerman is back for his second bout of Talking Scared, only 6 months after he was last here. This time, more than ever, he brings joy, wonder, inspiration and a 700 page book that will work your triceps as well as your mind and soul. Ghoul n’ the Cape is Josh’s magnum opus, so far. So far! It’s the truly epic tale of tw...
67 – Richard Maclean Smith and the Ledge of Reason
November 23, 2021 19:00 - 1 hour - 52.5 MBSend us a Text Message. And now for something a little different. This is a show about scary stories and writing horror… but that doesn’t mean everything has to be on the page. Our guest this week is Richard Maclean Smith, host and producer of Unexplained Podcast, the best show out there on the creepy, mysterious and mystifying events that people like me spend hours reading about on Wikipedia. There is everything from true crime to strange disappearances, ghosts and demons, monsters and ...
66 – Ellen Datlow and What Does ‘Scared’ Mean Anyhow?
November 16, 2021 19:00 - 1 hour - 48.2 MBSend us a Text Message. For over three decades Ellen Datlow has been at the centre of the horror community. She is the queen of editors, the doyenne of anthologisers, the person who gets to declare what is the Best Horror of the Year. And she has come back to talk to me after I lost the conversation file the first time around…! That major mishap may have been a blessing in disguise, as since then she has published two standout anthologies, dealing with very different branches of horror. B...
65 – Mark Stay and Cosy Pagan Dread
November 09, 2021 19:00 - 1 hour - 46.4 MBSend us a Text Message. This week I’m feeling warm and fuzzy (don’t worry it won’t last). Halloween is over, the weather has turned dark, we’ve all got the central heating on and are hunkering down for the end of the year. What better time for a slightly more cosy read? Our guest this week is Mark Stay, author, screenwriter, and one half of the quite wonderful Bestseller Experiment podcast. Usually Mark is in my chair, asking author’s all about how to be a successful writer – but this week...
64 – Kim Newman and Truly Universal Monsters
November 02, 2021 19:00 - 1 hour - 50.4 MBSend us a Text Message. Halloween is over for another year but there are still plenty of monsters to go around. Our guest this week is Kim Newman, the writer, critic and encyclopaedic authority on horror, pulp and the dark recesses of cinematic history. You may know him as the author of the Anno Dracula series, but that’s only the tip of his imaginative iceberg. Kim’s new novel, Something More than Night, takes all of that arcane knowledge and puts it to use – transporting us back to the ...