Talking Scared

Send us a text Normally we talk books - but horror movies are a Hallowe’en staple. Turn the lights down, wrap yourself in a blanket, choose your snack of choice and then torment yourself terribly. It’s what we do. Now, Mark Kermode knows a thing or two about scary movies. The UK’s most prominent film critic has a special fondness for horror movies, as well as a grounding in the books that inspired...

Send us a text Perfect places breed hideous crimes – that’s my understanding at least.  If you like The Twilight Zone, Black Mirror, or Twin Peaks (or anything by David Lynch) then you’ll get a kick out of Catherynne M. Valente’s Comfort Me with Apples. Despite being a novella of less than 130 pages, it crams in everything from the whole rotten tradition of awful things – from the book of Genesis,...

Send us a text I’m on holiday but I still give you goodies. ‘Cos that’s the kind of all-round good guy that I am. And what a dark treat of a trick we have this week. The guest is Cassandra Khaw and their novella Nothing But Blackened Teeth will use it’s liquorice-stained smile to chew you up. The book transports us to a crumbling mansion in Japan, where a hideous spectre haunts a group of utterly...

Send us a text Hello kids. Wanna see a magic trick?  Rather than pulling a rabbit from a hat, I offer you Caitlin Starling, author of The Luminous Dead and her new Gothic chiller, The Death of Jane Lawrence.  Caitlin’s novel takes a familiar Gothic set-up and kicks it around until it is only recognisable from the colour of its blood. Dilapidated house – check. Deceitful husband – check. Magical ri...

Send us a text Welcome to Hallowe’en ’21. If ever a year required us to find the fun in all things grim, dark and depressing then this is the absolute best year since last year.  Appropriately for the lead-in to Spooky Season, our guest this week wrote a book all about fear as an attraction. James Han Mattson is the author of Reprieve – a mouthwatering prospect of a novel set in an extreme, full-c...

Send us a text Vroom vroom! This week’s book is automatic, systematic, highly dramatic … it’s G…G…G…G… Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo. That painful Grease reference is due to the fact that this book marries teenage angst with fast cars and hot boys – with or without the quiffs. In reality though, it’s closer to a Springsteen Song – all tortured youth, broken hearts, racing the in the street and darkne...

Send us a text Oh eck! This week I get very northern and my working class roots come to the fore. It’s all my guest’s fault. Tina Baker, the author of Call Me Mummy, is an infectious presence. My typical transatlantic restraint falls away and I follow Tina down endless rabbit-holes – her time as a TV presenter, her childhood mishaps, her cats! Thankfully, her book is fantastic, and gives us someth...

Send us a text Growth is good, right? That’s what they tell us. Our guest this week might have other ideas. Aliya Whiteley’s is a novelist, short story writer and poet, whose writing is all about growth. In her strange worlds people, plants, entire worlds sprawl and mutate, but often the change is anything but wholesome.  In her new collection, From the Neck Up she introduces us to disembodied hea...

Send us a text Our show this week is part interview, part homage, all zombie! Daniel Kraus, the author of zombie magnum opus, The Living Dead is in the hotseat. But he isn’t alone. Both he and his novel are accompanied by the spectral presence of the master himself, George Romero.  When Romero passed in 2017, he left behind years of work and ambition in telling the whole story of his zombie uprisi...

Send us a text Talking Scared is a whole year old today, and to celebrate I’ve brought you one of the brightest stars in the horror sky, someone who is getting bigger, better and badder with each book he releases.  It’s Stephen Graham Jones! Stephen is here to discuss My Heart is a Chainsaw – his oh-so-meta revision of the slasher movie and the final girl. The book starts dark and gets darker, wit...

Send us a text Morning campers!  This week we’re off to the great outdoors for a hike, a night under the stars and a spot of psychological terror.  Our guest is Zoje Stage. In her previous novels, Babyteeth and Wonderland she took us to dark houses and interior spaces. Her new novel, Getaway, does the opposite, dragging us   on the adventure of a lifetime. A week hiking in the Grand Canyon. Just t...

Send us a text This week the walls between reality and fiction begin to break down. What is truth, what is a lie? Can a story be both? These are the kinds of questions my guest, Richard Chizmar, has become an expert at answering. His new novel (if we can call it that) is Chasing the Boogeyman and it’s a unique beast. Part memoir, part true-crime, part horror fiction – it takes the streets of Rich’...

Send us a text This week’s guest couldn’t be better timed. In a week when we find out the world is not only screwed, it’s REALLY screwed, our guest is Brian Evenson, with his new collection, The Glassy Burning Floor of Hell – which could be a description of many places on the globe right now. These stories transport the reader to strange, deformed, blasted landscapes. Like the worlds they depict,...

Send us a text Sisters are doing it for themselves – literally!  Our guest this week is Sara Flannery Murphy, author of Girl One – which is either a feminist dystopian nightmare or a superhero origin story, or both. It is an alternative history of genetic science that asks the question of what would happen if women no longer needed men to conceive a child. The answer is simultaneously complex and...

Send us a text Why isn’t there more horror about marriage? Think about it. You marry someone. Spend your life with them. But do you really know them, or what they are capable of.   Ronald Malfi’s Come With Me pries open these secrets, sending the protagonist on a tailspinning road trip in pursuit of the truth about the woman he has loved and lost. It’s a big, satisfying, chunky summer novel packed...

Send us a text Weather this hot demands the cool balm of a book, and do I have one for you. The Book of Accidents is the latest horror-epic from Chuck Wendig – the seeming literary successor to King, Straub, McCammon and Barker. Wendig’s books take you in their embrace and say “you’re mine now” or maybe “we all float down here.” Here, in this case, being a mineshaft in the rural vacancy of Pennsyl...

Send us a text Hello fellow horror-fiends. This week we’re going retro, to the heyday of horror, when men wore masks and women checked basements in their negligee.  Our guest is Grady Hendrix, a writer perpetually interested in taking tropes, only to stab them, kill them, and resurrect them as something new. He’s done it with exorcisms, vampires, the devil and … erm .. IKEA. Now he’s taking on the...

Send us a text This week we’re doing something different. No author and no single book. Instead it’s a roundtable discussion, with Sadie Hartmann (AKA Mother Horror) and Emily Hughes, the genius loci behind Tor Nightfire. Together we look back over the last six months – the highs, the not-so-many-lows and all the endless twitter controversies – to address the state of the horror nation at the midp...

Send us a text This week I have been forced to up my game.   Our guest is Carmen Maria Machado, and her works is not for the lazy or faint-hearted. From her dizzying collection of short fiction, Her Body and Other Parties, to her one-of-a-kind memoir, In the Dream House, Carmen’s writing forces a humble interviewer such as me, to question how we talk about books, author, character, truth, fiction...

Send us a text It’s a dirty, grim, glorious time on Talking Scared this week. After a last-minute schedule reshuffle we have Eric LaRocca, here to talk about his word-of-mouth sensation of a novella – Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke.  Gotten worse is quite the understatement. This book goes so far beyond the pale in terms of horror’s usual comfort level these days. It’s a simple tale...

Send us a text Pour yourself a whisky, grab a seat and listen to the best voice in dark fiction tell you some stories.  Our guest is Joe Lansdale author of so many books I can’t even begin to list them. Oh, ok, I will. Edge of Dark Water, Paradise Sky, The Bottoms, The Thicket, Fender Lizard … “Bubba Ho Tep”, Cold in July … the entire Hap and Leonard series.  And he joins me to talk about his newe...

Send us a text Maybe it’s the heat but this week we’re getting angry on Talking Scared. Our guest is V. Castro – author of Goddess of Filth and her newest, Queen of the Cicadas – and she’s full of rage. Thankfully, it’s not directed at me, despite my hideous attempts at Spanish pronunciation.  Queen of the Cicadas is about identity, folklore and the residue of a decades-old crime that stands as re...

Send us a text It’s not often you speak to the author of a book that EVERYONE has heard of. This week I got the chance.  Max Brooks. Max-freaking-Brooks, author of global bestseller World War Z is here. But rather than the undead, we’re talking hairy things in the woods, technological dependence and woke hipsters being eaten. Max’s latest novel, Devolution, regales us with the lives (and deaths) o...

Send us a text If you’re returning to the office any time soon and you’re really bummed about it – this week’s guest will make you feel better …. cos it could be so much worse. Zakiya Dalila Harris is the author of the much-anticipated debut, The Other Black Girl. It’s been touted as Jordan Peele’s Get Out meets The Devil Wears Prada and that’s true, there is white conspiracy and awful bosses aple...

Send us a text Josh Malerman, bestselling wunderkinder of horror, author of Birdbox, Malorie, Unbury Carol and now Goblin, has graced Talking Scared with his presence. We’re talking about Goblin specifically, his new ‘novel in six novellas’ detailing the lives and losses of people in the weirdest small-town west of Castle Rock.  It’s got monstrous owls and more monstrous police, an impossible hedg...