Bad Books for Bad People

Kate and Jack explore one of the creator-owned titles from the current Golden Age of Comics, the action-packed yet poignant Weird Western  Pretty Deadly . Writer Kelly Sue DeConnick, artist Emma Rios, and colorist Jordie Bellaire create an immersive new mythology around the American frontier that features characters who are under-seen in traditional Western stories. Readers who like their operatic...

Things get painful for our hosts as the results of a high-stakes book dare. Kate assigns Jack Ready Player One , the nerd nostalgia sci fi blockbuster by Ernest Cline, and Jack retaliates by assigning Kate I Hate Everyone But You , a novel co-written in text message and email form by YouTube stars Gaby Dunn and Allison Raskin. Descend into the grisly battle between geeky trivia and woke social med...

Paperbacks from Hell  by Grady Hendrix strikes the perfect balance of context, curiosity, and lurid sensationalism in its approach to the paperback horror boom of the 70s and 80s. Daring to peer beneath the gruesome (and often just plain baffling) covers, Hendrix and his colleague and researcher Will Errickson chart the trends, history, and notable figures involved in creating these once ubiquitou...

Although perhaps best known to BBfBP listeners as an author who helped redefine the horror genre in the early 1990s, Kathe Koja has written novels that span numerous genres. Her 2011 novel Under the Poppy is a romance set against the backdrop of the Franco-Prussian War, featuring a band of demimonde survivors whose activities and intrigues influence goings-on at the highest levels of society. When...

Red Spectres , translated and edited by Muireann Maguire ,  collects examples of a rarely-seen side of Gothic literature, tales produced in the early days of Communist rule in Russia. These macabre stories have many of the elements familiar to Western readers including ghosts, evil doubles, and mad science, while representing a worldview unique to the time and place in which they were created. How...

Ernest G Henham's 1898 novel Tenebrae  gets inside the mind of a morbidly-inclined young man as he spirals into madness and murder after he believes he has been betrayed by his brother. Published during the same late 19th century blossoming of the Gothic that saw the publication of books like  Dracula  and  The Picture of Dorian Gray ,  Tenebrae hearkens back to earlier manifestations of that styl...

Michael Moorcock is one of the most influential science fiction and fantasy authors of the latter half of the 20th Century. Chief among his contributions to speculative fiction is the creation of the Eternal Champion, a hero "doomed" to save the world. One such manifestation of the Eternal Champion is Jerry Cornelius, the central character of The Final Programme ,  a book deemed too psychedelic fo...

Author, activist, and academic China Miéville is a luminary in the world of fantasy fiction, creating complex and magical worlds that challenge the traditional "sword and sorcery" of years past. In his 2016 novella The Last Days of New Paris , Miéville conjures up an alternate history version of WWII Paris in which Resistance members use surrealist art to battle Nazi demonologists.  Will the autho...

Michael McDowell's Gilded Needles  is a captivating tale of two families from dramatically different circumstances, engaged in a bitter feud set against the backdrop of late 19th Century New York City. This grimy vision of the metropolis, populated by opium addicts, thieves, and lesbian brawlers, could easily have earned the moniker Fear City long before the first stag reels flickered onto the scr...

For the first mini episode, Kate and Jack tackle the book that is the origin story of the podcast. Sure, a George RR Martin novel about the dark and violent side of the 60s focusing on ritual murder and a band called the Nazgûl  sounds amazing, but is it? No. No it is not.  Armageddon Rag has taken on borderline symbolic value to your hosts as the quintessential work of wasted potential. How sad i...

Author Leanna Renee Hieber has created an alternative Victorian London that merges ghost-hunting, Jack the Ripper, capital-R Romantic love, and a healthy dose of post-Harry-Potter magic in her novel Strangely Beautiful . Originally published as two books in 2009 and 2010, Hieber's story features a beautiful, innocent young woman raised in a convent and dropped into a supernatural battle that will...

British pulp author Sax Rohmer built a career on depicting the threat posed to the Western way of life by the Demonic Other. His most famous creation, Dr. Fu Manchu, is infamous not just for the hideous violence he wreaks on his enemies, but also for being a dreadful racist caricature. This formula of depicting the horrors of the non-British enemy worked so well for Rohmer that he would revisit it...

Beginning with her smash hit debut novel, 1976's  Interview with the Vampire , Anne Rice has spent a career detailing the lives, loves, and melodramas of a sprawling cast of supernatural characters. In interviews where she's discussed 2016's Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis , Rice promised a whole new spin on her beloved Vampire Chronicles. The concept of blending gothic vampires with new...

After failing in his quest to find financing for his 18- to 24-hour-long film version of Frank Herbert's  Dune , Chilean-French filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky ( El Topo and  Santa Sangre ) partnered with French artist Moebius to create a science fiction graphic novel titled The Incal . This epic, first published between 1981 and 1988, takes its hapless hero John DiFool across strange galaxies whil...

Hanns Heinz Ewers' 1911 novel Alraune  is part horror, part science fiction, part decadent prose, and absolutely of the most extreme femme fatale stories ever written. Kate and Jack tackle Ewers' complicated personal and political history and why this German author's weird tales deserve to be read alongside the work of other horror luminaries. Kate and Jack selfishly take on the role of readers th...

In the mid-1990s, R.L. Stine's  Goosebumps series was a sensation, creeping out kids across the globe. The phenomenon of kid-friendly horror fiction is hardly a new one, so Kate and Jack tackle three Goosebumps titles and see how they stack up against the terrifying stories of their childhoods. Bring on the haunted houses, possessed dummies, and nightmarish theme parks! This month's guest reader i...

Ultra-prolific British pulp author Dennis Wheatley is best known for his occult thrillers, which combined Wheatley's fascination with magic with his conservative politics. Kate and Jack tackle his 1953 offering  To the Devil A Daughter , which involves a mystery author and her interior decorator son who get enmeshed in an occult conspiracy when they delve too deeply into the mysterious young lady...

The potboiler Gothics of V.C. Andrews were beloved by adult women... and their tween daughters. Both Jack and Kate are new to the author's infamous tales of female woe, and they discuss what it's like to read her work for the first time during this discussion of Andrews' 1982 novel My Sweet Audrina . This claustrophobic tale of a girl raised with family secrets in the shadow of her dead sister pro...

Kate and Jack discuss  Image of the Beast and its sequel  Blown by Philip José Farmer. Released in 1968 and 1969 by adult science fiction publisher Essex House, Kate describes these ultra-explicit, super-bizarre novels as "like the monster mash version of Georges Bataille's  Story of the Eye ." But that's only part of the picture as we follow private detective Herald Childe on his journey into a w...

In this episode, Kate and Jack talk about BleakWarrior ,  Alistair Rennie's 2016 novel in the New Weird genre that at least one reviewer has linked to black metal. Jack provides some far more accurate (and alluring!) descriptions: "as if SoulCalibur were a porno directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky" OR "as if you got your weirdest friend drunk on cheap tequila and asked them to describe what He-Man wo...