Talking Scared

Send us a text 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 b...

Send us a text 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 (thoug...

Send us a text 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...

Send us a text 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 yo...

Send us a text 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 Nightmar...

Send us a text 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...

Send us a text 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....

Send us a text 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.” I...

Send us a text 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 patriarcha...

Send us a text 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....

Send us a text 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 lockdow...

Send us a text 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 to...

Send us a text 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 giv...

Send us a text 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-...

Send us a text 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-thrille...

Send us a text 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 sto...

Send us a text 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 ev...

Send us a text 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 st...

Send us a text 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....

Send us a text 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 inf...

Send us a text 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 to...

Send us a text 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 Lamp...

Send us a text 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, c...

Send us a text 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 cl...

Send us a text 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 realisat...