Talking Scared

Let’s get grim and dark with Lord Grimdark!   Perhaps the greatest benefit of having a book podcast like mine is the opportunity to speak to my very favourite authors. I’ve been reading Joe Abercrombie’s violent, world-weary dark fantasy for TWENTY years! And now he’s on the show.   Consider me excited.   His new book may be called The Devils, and it may contain werewolves, vampires, necromancers...

Brian Keene has written so many damn books! …and I had never read any of them.   This absolute horror faux-pas (and my embarrassment) is the reason that it’s taken so long to get Brian on the show. But I set a week aside and read as many Keene books as I could and here we are… on a leisurely stroll through Brian’s life and career,both of which he has devoted to stories of really nasty s*** happeni...

I’ve been looking forward to releasing this one…   Nat Cassidy comes to Talk Scared about When the Wolf Comes Home, his new novel that I –and people like me – are already calling out as one of the Best Books of the Year™.   It’s a shaggy, undisciplined, sprinting beast of a book that obeys no rules. You may think it’s a werewolf novel, and you may be right... but also very wrong. It’s a book about...

Back to the 80s this week for one of the most singular horror movies of the year – now streaming on Shudder. Dead Mail is an ode to the era, but there are no neon fonts or leg warmers (or Olivia Newton Johns) here. Instead we’re in the drear of the decade, for a story about a synth-obsessed man who keeps his business partner captive in his flock-wallpapered bathroom. The poor victim’s only hope is...

In the week that the world changed, we’re talking about the last time things got this crazy.   Katherine Arden is the author of The Warm Hands of Ghosts — a novel set in the trenches of the First World War and on the borderline between horror and fantasy. It’s a Faustian pact made in No-Man’s Land, where our memories are the price we pay for keeping ourselves alive.   In this episode we talk a lot...

This week we go from Edinburgh, Scotland to Nashville, Tennessee, in the company of crime author Tariq Ashkanani.   Tariq’s The Midnight King is a tricky, quasi-metafictional murder mystery about cursed manuscripts, familial secrets and the most heinous murders. It’s also a love letter to the kind of occult-tinged American crime epics that both he and I grew up loving.   We talk about the challeng...

Time to throw ourselves around. We’re covering Punk Goes Horror.   The anthology of stories inspired by punk and alternative rock songs came out just a few weeks back. It brings together a mosh-pit full of authors, both new and established, to transmute their favourite songs into nasty little stories.   I invited the anthology editor, William Sterling, and two of his contributors, Wendy Dalrymple...

The second Let Us Palaver minisode – in which Nat Cassidy dig into the things we couldn't say about The Drawing of the Three, and give MAJOR SPOILERS about whole Dark Tower series. We're really start to wonder if Chris is punking us.   Support Talking Scared on Patreon Check out the Talking Scared Merch line – at VoidMerch Come talk books on Bluesky @talkscaredpod.bsky.social  on Instagram/Threads...

The Ka-tet picks up exactly where we left off: on the beaches of Midworld, with Roland Deschain. (If none of that makes any sense to you, go listen to episode one of the Dark Tower Deep Dive immediately) Nat Cassidy, Chris Panatier and I gather for a long, philosophical, expletive-littered conversation about Book 2: The Drawing of the Three. We get further into the character of Roland and his ques...

It’s always great when Stephen Graham Jones comes to Talk Scared with us – but for once we aren’t talking about slashers!   No, this time, we’re talking vampires! Or are we?   Stephen’s new novel, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, is his best yet. Or at least the one that I love the most. It’s an epic and brutal saga of American history and shame, told through three very distinctive voices, speaking acro...

Saddle up for a weird west week on Talking Scared. The start of a loose trilogy of sorts.   This first instalment features Alex Grecian, talking about his fantastical vision of the Old West (and East) in 2023’s Red Rabbit and the brand-new follow-up, Rose of Jericho.   We cover western inspirations, the melancholia of ghosts, Kansas legends and surprising witches. There’s also a nerdy little crypt...

No one is doing dystopia right now like Agustina Bazterrica.   After Tender is the Flesh made us all consider vegetarianism, now she’s back for a long hard look at patriarchy, religion and populism in The Unworthy.   It’s a quiet end of the world, set almost entirely in the confines of a strange convent, and the cult who will do anything to maintain their power.   We talk about how Agustina finds...

The latest Off Book episode has me facing my demons. My guest is Scott Derrickson, one of the best horror movie makers to ever do it. He scared us with Sinister, moved us with The Black Phone, marvelled us with Doctor Strange, and ruined my life with The Exorcism of Emily Rose. He’s back with The Gorge, a mad genre mashup, starring Anya-Taylor Joy and Miles Teller,  currently streaming on Apple+....

Ready to hear a conversation about some devastatingly dark things?   Sophie White and I have got you covered!   In this expansive chat, we talk about her calculatingly distressing novel, Where I End – in which an isolated island community plays host to the worst, cruellest kind of loneliness. And that books is a springboard for others things, psychosis, weaponised empathy, real-life atrocity and t...

The title speaks volumes this week. It’s a mission statement.   Kirsty Logan is the master of certain kind of edgy, on-the-margins fiction, Queer in every meaning of the word. She can be witchy and folkloric, or contemporary and cutting edge – and all of that range is showcased in her new collection, No & Other Love Stories.   We talk about female desire and monstrous fantasy, formal experimentati...

Time to misbehave.   Virginia Feito’s new novel, Victorian Psycho, is all about good behaviour, positive standards and polite conduct…and what happens when you flout all that, by – I dunno – slaughtering a houseload of people.   It’s a much buzzed about book that takes the psychopathy of American Psycho back to the straightlaced, be-corseted world of the 19th Century, then let’s rip. We talk about...

Are you hungry?   Depending on your…erm… tastes, the next hour of conversation will do strange things to your appetite. Our guest is Lucy Rose, whose debut novel, The Lamb renders muscle and fat and sorrow down into a rich stew of cannibalism and rural Gothic.   We talk about how rooted this book is in the landscape, history and folklore of Northern England – and we also talk a lot about eating pe...

Here is the first Let Us Palaver minisode – in which Nat Cassidy and I kick Chris off the call, and get to grips with the inner workings of The Dark Tower, without spoiling anything for him, or any of you on your first trip through these books. If you still listen after this spoiler warning and the two I give in the first few minutes of the episode… well, you only have yourself to blame. But for s...

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the podcaster followed…”   Welcome to the start of what is sure to be an epic journey. Step by step, over more than a dozen episodes, Talking Scared will be following the beam all the way to the Dark Tower – that mad edifice at the heart of Stephen King’s opus. Maybe it’s the heart of every story ever told… time will tell.   Unlike Roland Deschain, I d...

The latest Off Book episode takes you out to the American desert and leaves you there, cold, alone and confused. We’re speaking with Dutch Marich, the surprisingly lovely mind behind the most terrifying found footage I’ve seen in years – The Horror in the High Desert series. These films are full of a particular kind of fear. Never obscure, but always hidden – leaving you as fascinated as you are s...

Tyranny is the key this week on Talking Scared this week. How fitting.   Susan Barker’s Old Soul is a globe-trotting, decade-spanning supernatural tour of autocracies, from behind the Iron Curtain to contemporary China. If that isn’t frightening enough, it also features an ageless woman who curses anyone she meets, a grand cosmic entity, and the exhilaration and terror of deep time.    Heady stuff...

It’s a collegial week on Talking Scared. ‘Cos I’m talking dark, occult academia with someone very local to me.   Kate van der Borgh’s debut, And He Shall Appear is basically a sinister version of my own life. It’s about a young working class lad, like me, who goes to a prestigious university, like me… but there ours paths diverge, as he meets a fellow student who perhaps has diabolical powers.   I...

Welcome back and Happy New Year. 2025 looms ahead. Frightening. Uncertain. Crazy!!   Our first guest of the year has written the book that best captures this mad future we’re living in. Clay McLeod Chapman returns to Talking Scared, to talk about Wake Up And Open Your Eyes – his new novel of mass demonic possession, transmitted through poisonous media, and the destruction of families and communiti...

Send us a text How else to end 2024 than with an entirely subjective list of the best things I’ve read over the year?   How many of you will guess the number one spot? I bet none of you will guess the number two?    Let me know your thoughts – what you loved, and what you think I missed   Enjoy!   Support Talking Scared on Patreon   Come talk books on Twitter @talkscaredpod, on Instagram, or email...

Send us a text It’s that time of year again. When I celebrate the winter solstice by getting some horror authors to come and talk in deep, emotional detail about a scary book that we like.   This time the Christmas Special Deep Dive kicks the tires and looks under the hood of Stephen King’s most underrated novel: From a Buick 8. My friends on this weird-ass-road trip are Ally Malinenko and Nat Cas...