Talking Scared

Send us a text Do you know anyone with hairy palms?  Weird question, but as this week’s novel-in-question will convince you, it’s best to be careful around the hirsute. Our guest is Rachel Harrison, returning to Talking Scared with her brand new SUCH SHARP TEETH. It’s a tale of small-town relationships, female transformation, love and … werewolves. Anyone who has read either of Rachel’s previous n...

Send us a text The best and spookiest season starts in earnest, this year on Talking Scared.  Our guest is Jamie Flanagan, actor, screenwriter, and part of the team who delivered such televisual delights as The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass and now, The Midnight Club. With The Midnight Club due to land on Netflix worldwide this Friday – I rejigged the schedule to sneak in a chat with Jamie...

Send us a text It’s not only vampires that drink blood. That’s what we find out on this week’s episode.  Our guest is Alexis Henderson – author of The Year of the Witching and now, her sophomore novel, House of Hunger. It’s a luscious, lurid tale of dark fantasy, blood and sex. Y’know … all the good stuff. Oh, and it’s one of my favourite books of the year. Alexis and I discuss the collision of ho...

Send us a text Wanna get haunted? That’s the delightful proposition offered by Clay McLeod Chapman’s Ghost Eaters – a novel of ghosts, grief and ghastly narcotics. Just take one pill and you can sell all the phantoms that surround you. What a premise!  It’s Clay’s second time on Talking Scared and he’s always welcome. There are few more honest, open, and thoughtful writers out there. This time aro...

Send us a text The time has finally come to go to the scariest place imaginable – the inside of the human mind.  Thankfully, we have a friend to accompany us on this most hideous of trips. I’m joined this week by Gemma Amor, author of the brand-new techno-horror FULL IMMERSION. It’s a book that deals with trauma, psychosis and experimental treatment, and it’s the perfect springboard for an epic co...

Send us a text Finally, she’s here! After months of waiting for schedules and book releases to align, Hailey Piper is on the show. She’s here to talk about both of her 2022 releases – each is a kidnapping experience.  The novella Your Mind is a Terrible Thing takes us up into the void and into creepy inner space. Her forthcoming novel No Gods for Drowning transports us somewhere else entirely.  Ha...

Send us a text Time to get weird and wiggy and wondrous. Our guest this week is Zin E. Rocklyn, author of many short fictions, and her (very) recently award-winning novella Flowers for the Sea. It’s an afro-speculative blend of science fiction, horror, fantasy, myth, dystopia, pre-history and apocalypse – all confined to a single boat in a big, bad ocean, and all told within 100 pages. Phew – it’s...

Send us a text Get your bell bottoms, your peace sign, your tie dye and your … crucifix! This week’s guest is Gwendolyn Kiste and her new novel, Reluctant Immortals, transports us to San Francisco in 1968, the summer after the Summer of Love, when the sun is setting on the hippie movement. Into this chaos comes a quarter of iconic Gothic characters, ready to fight it out all over again. Like the b...

Send us a text This week we’re crossing the podcast streams again – and broadening our reading at the same time. Agatha Andrews is the host of She Wore Black, a Texas-based podcast of Gothic, Mystery and Horror. She’s also my horror-podcasting buddy, the romantic yin to my dark, depraved yang. And she knows a thing or two about Gothic Romance. It turns out it’s not all virgins in nightgowns (thoug...

Send us a text Are your doors and windows locked? Good. ‘Cos this one is going to scare you! This week I’m joined by Michael J. Seidlinger, author of the new home-invasion nightmare, Anybody Home. You’ve read this scenario before – invasion, torture, death and suffering – but never like this.   We talk about why home invasion is so singularly frightening, about the role of movies and lenses in our...

Send us a text What scared you as a kid? Monsters? Ghosts? The thing in your closet? The perilous state of the environment and the terrible carbon footprint of children’s toys? If it’s any of the former then you’re in good company. (If it’s the latter then boy did we need you in 1987!) This week’s guests understand the fear that makes the childlike mind tick and tock, they know how to get under yo...

Send us a text Do you like scary movies? Yes, course you do – you’re listening to a horror podcast. Okay, cliched horror quote asides – this week is something a little different for the show. It’s been a minute since we’ve had some non-fiction, and how better to scratch that itch-for-facts than with a discussion of BRAINZZZZZ? Our guest is Nina Nesseth: scientist, researcher and author of Nightmar...

Send us a text We’re heading into largely uncharted horror waters this week with our guest Nat Cassidy.  Nat’s debut horror novel, Mary: An Awakening of Terror dares to confront one of the last true taboos of horror fiction. No, it’s not cannibalism, or necrophilia, or the bowel movements of Tucker Carlson … no… it’s the menopause.  That’s right. Female physiology. The horror, the terror, think of...

Send us a text DUM DUM DUM!!! 100 episodes!!  We did it. We reached an utterly abstract threshold together guys and we are DELIGHTED to be here.  I’m also delighted to welcome Paul Tremblay back to the show for a neat bit of circularity (as he was the one to kick things off way back in episode 1). Paul’s new novel, The Pallbearer’s Club came out just at the right time to make him the 100th guest....

Send us a text It’s been a rough couple of weeks. So, let’s have a laugh: Poe-style! Our guest is T. Kingfisher. She’s an expert in taking dry, dark horror classics and investing them with newfound life. In What Moves the Dead she manages to find the gruesome joy in even the most dolorous of text.  What Moves the Dead reconfigures and reapproaches Poe’s classic, “The Fall of the House of Usher.” I...

Send us a text Things are a bit fishy this week, as I’m joined by long-time friend-of-the-show Tim McGregor (@TimMcGregor1) to talk about the long history of fish-tailed women and why we find them so frightening … and sexy!  Tim’s forthcoming novella, Lure, is a mermaid story with bite! No Ariel here; Sebastian the Crab is hiding. Instead it’s about the war of attrition between a brutal patriarcha...

Send us a text This week on Talking Scared it’s monsters all day, every day.  To celebrate the release of Screams From the Dark: 29 Tales of Monsters and the Monstrous, we gather around the campfire with editor Ellen Datlow and three of her contributors – no less than Nathan Ballingrud, Chikodili Emelumadu and the great Joe R. Lansdale. As a result, this is not your average Talking Scared episode....

Send us a text We’re closing out our (very) loose trilogy of episodes devoted to sinister schools and magical children. This week it involves pentagrams and witch-burnings, which are always a good time. Our guest, Stephen Lloyd, is better known for his comedy than his horror. He has spent a career crafting some of the biggest sitcoms of the century (some of which helped my marriage survive lockdow...

Send us a text This week we go to magic school, but there isn’t a f***ing owl or a talking hat in sight. Instead, it’s a much more macabre affair, as J. M. Miro begins his trilogy of dark sorcery with Ordinary Monsters.  J. M. goes by a different name in his other, more prosaic writing life, but here, with us, in the blood and the shadows he writes as his second self. Which is a long-winded and to...

Send us a text This week we go behind the curtain to look at the inner workings of a bona-fide modern classic.  Our guest is Scott Hawkins, whose debut novel, The Library At Mount Char delighted genre fans back in 2015. Now, to commemorate its first UK publication, Scott joins me for a conversation about its many madcap secrets. We talk about everything from cosmic ethics to kidney stone –  he giv...

Send us a text Here I come, ready or not! Our guest this week is Kiersten White. She’s the award-winning author of numerous macabre YA fictions, but now she’s making her debut in adult fiction (not that kind!) with Hide – a tale of life-or-death hide-and-seek. It’s a fantastic premise to begin with. Think The Hunger Games meets Squid Game, or any other kind of game but nastier and with more socio-...

Send us a text This week’s episode couldn’t have come at a more pertinent time. As women’s reproductive rights come under assault in the US, as Roe V Wade gets rolled back and fat, sweaty men in suits make rules they will never have to obey – I’m joined by a writer who wrote a book about the cult of having babies. Anne Heltzel is the author of Just Like Mother, a contemporary Gothic techno-thrille...

Send us a text Do think kids’ drawings are creepy? They are, right? All big smiles and suns with eyes and weird flowers the size of people… and the dead girls in the background. Right?  Our guest this week has built a whole horror story around these little paper nightmares.  Hidden Pictures is a novel that blends text and image in ways that I’ve never seen done before, or never as well. It’s a sto...

Send us a text It’s a week of deep-dives, haunted-houses and academic horror-stories this week on Talking Scared. Our guest is Isabel Cañas. And she’s having the busiest week known to (wo)mankind. Not only is she defending her doctoral thesis on Medieval Turkish Poetry, she also has the small matter of her debut novel – a sweetly sinister piece of Latin Gothic called The Hacienda  We talk about ev...

Send us a text This week Alma Katsu brings her brand of immaculate historical horror to Talking Scared. After the The Hunger upped the ante on the Donner Party, and The Deep gave us a sinking feeling about the Titanic, Alma is back with The Fervor – a book too dark to write a pun about. It’s a tale of haunting and conspiracy during   the years of Japanese internment in the US. Spanning multiple st...