Middle Ground Books: After Hours

Megan, Debra, and Lance take on The Juniper Tree , a Brothers Grimm fairy tale with a long history of being retold, edited, and softened for younger audiences. Before the performance, they look at where the story came from and why some versions chose to remove its harsher material. Listen along as they give the tale the full reader’s theater treatment for Halloween. ⚠️ Content Warning This episode...

An ACOTAR Series Recap Megan, Debra, and Lance attempt the questionable task of explaining ACOTAR in one episode, with Megan doing most of the actual explaining while the other two try to keep up. With Middle Ground Books preparing for its midnight release party on Monday, October 26 , they work through the world, the lore, and why Sarah J. Maas’s fantasy series has readers so invested. Join them...

Megan, Debra, and Lance get into the Halloween spirit with books that still unsettle them just talking about them. They break down what they like about each story’s structure and how each one finds its own way to deliver a scare. 📖 Question of the Chapter What is the scariest thing you’ve ever read or watched? 📚 Covered Pages “It Could Have Been Her” by Lisa Jewell “The Book of Night” and “The T...

Megan, Debra, and Lance head into Halloween with childhood costumes, trick-or-treating memories, old-school spooky movies, and the strange ways being a nerd in October has changed from hiding it to building an entire community around it. 📖 Question of the Chapter: What Halloween tradition from your childhood do you still miss? 📚 Covered Pages “Dreamland” by Olive Blake “The Book of Night” by Hol...

Some books are a Snickers bar. Others deserve the full fine-dining treatment. Megan, Debra, and Lance turn the focus from what we read to how we read, digging into attention, reading habits, and whether every book deserves the same kind of time and thought. 📖 Question of the Chapter: How do you read when you really want a book to stick with you? 📚 Covered Pages “Proust and the Squid” and “Reader...

📖 Question of the Chapter: When fall hits, what kind of book do you reach for first: something spooky, something cozy, a classic, or something completely different? The possibility, the rumor of fall. Megan, Debra, and Lance settle into fall reading season and the shift in what sounds good once the weather starts to turn. Some readers lean spooky, some want something cozy, and some finally reach...

Take a seat as Middle Ground Books After Hours tests the old line: “the book was better.” Megan, Debra, and Lance look at what books can hold that screen versions often lose, from internal character work to narrator voice, then turn toward the rare cases where another format may understand the story better. Percy Jackson missed the point. The Princess Bride may have improved the source. Winnie-the...

💬 Comment Question: What book would you defend even if everyone else calls it strange? Descend into madness with Middle Ground Books: After Hours as Chapter Forty-Five slips between mad science, cosmic horror, octopus intelligence, and fiction that eats away at memory. Kate McKinnon’s "The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science" with weird kids, theatrical audiobook n...

Middle Ground Books After Hours introduces Readers Theater, a new audio narrative format where the hosts read a selected portion of a story and the production turns it into a theater-of-the-mind experience. For this first installment, Megan, Debra, and Lance read from Nephilim X Russia, an unpublished story presented as a first look with the author redacted for now. Chapter Forty-Five: Readers The...

Middle Ground Books After Hours checks in with a short episode while “Cosmic” Ron, the show’s producer and audio engineer, works on something much bigger for next week. Megan, Debra, and Lance use the quick episode to catch up on store news, listener comments, and the events coming up before the next full chapter. There is also a very direct reminder that the website and newsletter exist for a rea...

Sammy Davis Jr. and H. P. Lovecraft make a strange pairing, but the conversation gets to the same question from two very different directions. Megan, Debra, and Lance talk about Lovecraft’s influence, his racism, and whether his writing still earns the reputation people give it. Then Yes I Can brings the episode somewhere much more human, following Sammy Davis Jr. from Vaudeville into the Army and...

Middle Ground Books passed 1,000 subscribers, and the hosts are still figuring out what it means to talk like people are actually listening. Megan, Debra, and Lance settle into a loose host blurbs episode about bookstore life, community, folklore, dragons, Egyptian mythology, and the strange things people believe when stories travel across cultures. It is part milestone episode, part after-hours c...

Wine night comes to Middle Ground Books, and nobody is spitting. Megan, Debra, and Lance use Tom Gilby’s Thirsty as their guide through a tasting episode where wine becomes less about knowing the right words and more about figuring out what anyone actually tastes in the glass. The Vine Witch brings the bookish side of the night, with a cursed vineyard, old magic, and the kind of fantasy premise th...

Douglas Adams built one of science fiction’s strangest comic universes, but what happens when someone else tries to hitch a ride? Megan, Debra, and Lance return to "The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy," then follow the series into "And Another Thing" by Eoin Colfer to see what happens when a beloved universe keeps going without the original voice behind it. The episode asks whether the sequel is...

>>>>Viewer discretion advised <<<< After promising to read a Harlequin romance if the channel reached 500 subscribers, Lance sits down with Hot Sheets by Jeannie London for a special episode outside the usual Middle Ground Books lane. Megan, Debra, and Lance bring their bookstore instincts to a romance novel full of innuendo, satin bedsheet logistics, questionable bad-boy b...

Megan, Debra, and Lance revisit the animal stories that shaped generations, from Peter Rabbit and Charlotte’s Web to Stuart Little, The Trumpet of the Swan, and The Tale of Samuel Whiskers. A July birthday episode for Beatrix Potter and E. B. White opens the door to rabbits, spiders, mice, swans, banned book debates, danger, talking animals, one extremely cursed pudding scene, and why some childho...

After a round of villain laughs, Megan, Debra, and Lance try to decide what makes a villain when the obvious answer keeps falling apart. Some monsters are not as dangerous as they look. Some heroes are dangerous because everyone trusts them. And some villains never need to enter the room at all. By the end, the question is not just who the villain is, but who gets believed when everyone is telling...

Megan, Debra, and Lance bring Page Turners into the Fourth of July with summer reads, shop updates, July book clubs, listener shout outs, and the kind of American holiday traditions that only sound normal until someone asks you to explain them. Chapter Thirty Five: Page Turners Pt. 6 Red, White, and Books This chapter moves from Independence Day conversations into what everyone has been reading, w...

Megan, Debra, and Lance talk Cory Doctorow’s The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI , the AI bubble, copyright, data centers, customer service dead ends, and the uneasy and frustrating feeling that technology is getting better at using people than helping them. Support Middle Ground Books wherever you are. Physical books and ebooks are available worldwide through the shop’s Bookshop page, an...

Megan, Debra, and Lance sit down for a casual get-to-know-us episode about the choices, accidents, and small acts of welcome that helped shape Middle Ground Books into more than just a shop over the past two years. In this chapter, the hosts celebrate two years of Middle Ground Books and the unexpected moments in their lives that have stuck with them to this day. They talk small business, communit...

A dead author’s unfinished book. Children forced into someone else’s plan. An ancient soul weighing. A flock of sheep solving a murder. Megan, Debra, and Lance talk about the stories people leave behind, who gets control of them, and why scotch may or may not count as soup. Support Middle Ground Books wherever you are. Physical books and ebooks are available worldwide through the shop’s Bookshop p...

June is packed, and so is this episode. Megan, Debra, and Lance break down the biggest new releases hitting the shelves, including Ann Patchett’s quietly unsettling Whistler , Melissa Albert’s dark fairy tale adult fiction The Children , Isabel J. Kim’s buzzy sci fi thriller Sublimation , and Marion , a feminist Psycho retelling where this time, the knife is in her hands. Then a customer asks for...

Summer reads, childhood memories, and a whole lot of books. Megan, Debra, and Lance talk public pools, farm work, county fairs, and the stories they snuck in after dark. Plus June book club picks, a store birthday, discounts, and what is on their reading lists for the season. What childhood book still feels tied to summer in your memory? Support Middle Ground Books wherever you are. Physical books...

Megan, Debra, and Lance celebrate crossing 100 YouTube subscribers with viewer shoutouts, comment responses, and a little appreciation for the people helping the podcast grow. Then science fiction takes over the shop, asking how much of the genre belongs to real science, how much belongs to imagination, and how much comes from the fears people are carrying at the time. H. G. Wells’ The Invisible M...

An episode recorded near Christmas 2025, sent forward like a bookstore time capsule. Megan, Debra, and Lance have a conversation that somehow involves a naked detective over Los Angeles, imprisoned gods, betrayal, lost Narnia doors, and food comparisons that we have now grown accustomed to. Support Middle Ground Books wherever you are. Physical books and ebooks are available worldwide through the...