Talking Scared

Send us a text 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 ev...

Send us a text 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 vampi...

Send us a text 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...

Send us a text 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 no...

Send us a text 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 co...

Send us a text 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 ho...

Send us a text 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...

Send us a text 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 sewe...

Send us a text 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 underst...

Send us a text  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...

Send us a text 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 dis...

Send us a text 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...

Send us a text 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...

Send us a text 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 haunt...

Send us a text 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 f...

Send us a text 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...

Send us a text 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 vau...

Send us a text 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...

Send us a text 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 ne...

Send us a text 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. B...

Send us a text 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 m...

Send us a text 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 c...

Send us a text 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,...

Send us a text 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 Hi...

Send us a text 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 haun...