Talking Scared

Send us a text Yes I put sex in the title to make you download it. Did it work?   It shouldn’t be necessary, ‘cos this week’s guest is an absolute literary icon. Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, Haunted, Lullaby, Choke, and last year’s Not Forever, But For Now – a writer who helped shape the nihilism and extremity of 90s and noughties fiction. The man who makes people faint with his short st...

Send us a text Are you hungry?    If so we have a chewy, salty, deeply flavoured feast for you this week. Ally Wilkes returns to Talking Scared to discuss the icebound horrors of her new novel, Where the Dead Wait. It’s a tale of Arctic exploration gone very wrong, complete with haunting, human suffering and the morbid fascination of cannibalism!   Don’t pretend that hasn’t whet your appetite.   A...

Send us a text The first new book coverage of 2024 – and it starts us off on suitably horrific footing.   Jenny Kiefer’s debut novel, This Wretched Valley, has been getting a huge amount of early buzz in horror circles. It’s the story of four unlucky adventurers, who head into the Kentucky woods and meet all manner of nasty sh*t.    It’s a tightly wound tale of misadventure, that takes at least so...

Send us a text To kick off a new year of Talking Scared, I’ve gone and hooked us a big guest, with a whopper of a story.   John Langan is the author of The Fisherman. It’s one of the great works of supernatural fiction written this century, but its story doesn’t end at its back-cover. The strange mythology of The Fisherman extends beyond, swimming further downstream, to pop its monstrous head abov...

Send us a text Another year done. We squeaked through without another plague or a nuclear apocalypse (don’t tempt fate Neil!!) and along the way, oh the stories we read!    The only thing left to do after mopping away the chalk pentagrams, is to run you through my very favourite books of the year. The so-called Best Horror Novels of 2023, as chosen by me. Ten of them to be precise, cos humans are...

Send us a text Dickens said that Christmas Eve was a time for ghost stories, and who am I to argue?   It is my show though, so I get to pick the ghost story – and I picked Peter Straub’s classic novel of the name. A tale of old men with horror in their youths, seductive evil and a town besieged by winter and… worse things.   It’s a slippery beast though, this novel. So to really help pin it down,...

Send us a text And so we come to the end of another year in horror. Time to look back at the best that 2023 has had to offer, as determined by three of the best in the business. My trusted horror chancellor, Emily Hughes joins me ­– alongside C.J. Leede, the author of this year’s gloriously transgressive Maeve Fly, and the maestro of the macabre himself, Victor Lavalle. Together we cover the year’...

Send us a text We’re going up in the world this week – longitudinally and latitudinally, with the GOAT of endurance, adventure Gothic, Michelle Paver.   Michelle joins me for a big conversation about her novels Dark Matter and Thin Air – two of the most effective ghost stories of the 21st century. One takes us to the Arctic, the other to a Himalayan peak, both places littered with the dead… who ma...

Send us a text Last time Gemma Amor came on the show we had a good ol’ chinwag about our haunted brains. This time around we get to some other ghosts, in her new novel, The Folly.   It’s a sharp slice of coastal Gothic; Cornwall’s answer to The Shining if you will. The story follows Morgan and her aging father to the weird structure of the tital, where they find hauntings of many stripes, some unc...

Send us a text We’ve had Cowboys versus Aliens but have you ever considered a threeway fight between gunslingers, vampires and weird cosmic cultists to an Elder God?    If not why not? What do you even think about when you are washing the dishes? But fear not, C.S. Humble has you covered. His weird western trilogy, That Light Sublime is packed with all of the above and more. In The Massacre at Yel...

Send us a text Sometimes two words can make a jaded horror reader sit up straight.    Ghost is one, Dinosaur is another.   Ghost. Dinosaur.   Have you ever heard a more beautiful combination, a sweeter symphony of syllables.   If “Ghost Dinosaur” doesn’t make you go squeeee and shake your fists in excitement, I don’t know how to help you.   Anyway, that’s the focus of Luke Dumas delightful new nov...

Send us a text Horror is about finding light in darkness.   That’s the mission statement of this podcast, at least. And it’s never been truer than in this week’s episode. Tyler Jones re-joins us on Talking Scared to talk about his new novel, Midas. We cover its original mix of western tropes, Gothic fantasy and cult horror, but it’s family that lies at the heart of both the book and the conversati...

Send us a text History is haunted. Ghosts are injustice persevering.   So many horror stories hinge on that idea, but for Tananarive Due it’s more personal than that. Her new novel, The Reformatory, is borne from the ghosts hidden in her own family history.    The story takes place in a hideously cruel juvenile correction facility, in a racist town, in the 1950s. As you can imagine, very few good...

Send us a text Sometimes when you’re doing something scary good company can be a blessing.    Nat Cassidy is good company. And this week he talks me through the haunted hallways and avenues of his New York horror ode, Nestlings – but he also helps me tackle the very real world horror that is turning our newspapers into nightmare-fodder and the Middle East into a tinderbox.   But have no fear (well...

Send us a text Some stories are just too big for one podcast. Some stories should be too big for one book.    Sam Rebelein’s Edenville is one such story. This 300-something page novel has more crammed into it than your average fantasy trilogy. There is backstory upon backstory, a cosmic framework, and enough different monsters to fill Guillermo del Toro’s minibus. Yet somehow Sam corrals it all in...

Send us a text Some stories are too short, some are too long, but some stories are just right. It’s the Goldilocks zone: the novella. What is the secret to crafting a longer story but not letting it run away from you? How do you sustain the terror beyond the shortest form? How do you know what to keep in and what to cut out? This is the art of the novella, and I’m joined by a pair of expert practi...

Send us a text This week is a special roundtable episode. An exciting, challenging and very very thought-provoking tour of contemporary Black horror, in the company of three writers at the bleeding edge.    Nnedi Okorafor, Maurice Broaddus and Lesley Nneka Arimah are just three of the contributors to Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror. It’s curated by Jordan Peele, who knows a t...

Send us a text Come home!! We have to come home!! The House is calling us.  Yep, this week we are going back to the most haunted house of all. Hill House. Shirley Jackson’s classic bad place. And we’re going in the company of three-time Shirley Jackson Award Winner, Elizabeth Hand, whose new novel is the first ever sanctioned sequel to Jackson’s classic.   A Haunting on the Hill submits four new u...

Send us a text This week on Talking Scared we are joining hands with Chuck Wendig to take the fight to Big Fruit. They have been lying to us about apples all our lives.   Chuck’s new novel, Black River Orchard is all about apples. Tasty, evil, corruptive. The book grows from the fertile soil of American small-town horror, and we talk about some texts in that storytelling style, as well as how Chuc...

Send us a text Clay McLeod Chapman returns to Talking Scared to answer some serious questions, the first being what the holy f**k Clay?!   Clay has never been a writer to shy away from a high concept challenge (haunted mushrooms, anyone?) but his latest novel, What Kind of Mother goes into the uncharted regions of the mind and soul, dredging the craziest of horrors from the murky waters of his nat...

Send us a text I’m back, partially rested and with some romance lingering in my soul. Good timing, cos this week’s episode focuses on the heart as well as the blood that it pumps.    Isabel Cañas returns to the show to talk about her second novel, Vampires of El Norte – a sweeping historical love-story set against a backdrop of class tumult, war and … yeah… vampires. It’s not a spoiler guys – it’s...

Send us a text Why do we keep heading back to the woods? WHY?? Nothing good ever happens there. Alexander James would argue otherwise, but he’s clearly made of sterner stuff than me. In his debut novel, The Woodkin, Alex parlays his love of the wild outdoors into a story that heads toward a familiar backwoods nightmares, before veering far off the beaten trail into something stranger and even scar...

Send us a text If you thought The Last House on Needless Street was tricksy, just wait until you hear about Looking Glass Sound. This is Cat’s ode to the Maine of Stephen King, the enigmatic narrators of Shirley Jackson and… well, a host of other comparisons that I foist upon her in the next hour. Above all that though – the book is so typically, inimitably Catriona Ward. It’s a destined Gothic cl...

Send us a text We’re off to La La Land this week, to talk cursed films, 90s horror nostalgia and Winona Ryder(!!)  Our guest is Josh Winning – who has parlayed his years of writing from and about film sets into a horror novel. Burn the Negative is set in the backlots, soundstages, cutting rooms and dank motel rooms of Hollywood. It features a film with a fatal jinx and a whole lotta love for the 9...

Send us a text Sorry not sorry this week. Yes I’m going to destroy your wallet and your bookshelves…but you LOVE IT!! Our guest is Sadie Hartmann, AKA Mother Horror to the likes of us. One of the most influential horror reviewers in the world. The editor in chief of Dark Hart Books and the co-owner of the Night Worms horror subscription service. She knows a thing or two about this haunted library....