Talking Scared

Send us a text This week the Queen of black horror is Talking Scared. Tananarive Due is bestowing her patronage on little ol’ me and I’m not quite sure what to do with myself. Tananarive ranks amongst the most respected horror writers of the 21st Century, from her breakout effort, The Between, to her British Fantasy Award winning collection, Ghost Summer and her magnum opus (so far at least) The G...

Send us a text Do you ever feel you’re being watched? Ever caught a flicker from the corner of your eye that you can’t explain? Do you run out of milk more than you think you should? Maybe, just maybe, there is someone living in your house. It’s a worldwide phenomenon (just check google) and this week’s guest has turned it into a genre-bending novel that’s tipped as one of THE Gothic reads of 2021...

Send us a text Jeff VanderMeer is our guest. Need I say more? First things first though, rest easy, the episode title doesn’t refer to either me or Jeff. We both make it out alive. Not everything does though. Listen on for the most on-the-nose display of savage nature, so perfect a backdrop to a conversation about animals, ecological crisis and the horror of extinction. What starts with the brave...

Send us a text This week, I bring you MOAR monsters!!!  Our guest is Christina Henry, whose new novel, Near the Bone fits so nicely as the unofficial second part to a cryptozoology-inflected series that began with Danielle Trussoni last week. Don’t worry, I’m not talking about the Loch Ness Monster for an hour, but the novel does feature a monster, some cryptid hunters and the very violent evils o...

Send us a text When was the last time a story took you completely by surprise? Danielle Trussoni’s The Ancestor ambushed me into loving it. What seems a standard Gothic fiction turns into something wholly weirder … and wilder … as a young American woman inherits a creaky European castle, and the monstrous baggage that comes with it. Dani came on the show – somehow finding time between writing her...

Send us a text Welcome to the Green Mountain State, lovely, liberal . . . haunted!! Our guest is to ghost-stories what Ben and Jerry are to ice cream – Vermont’s resident ghost-writer-in-chief, Jennifer McMahon. Her new novel, The Drowning Kind takes us back to the small towns, local stores and eerie histories typical of her fiction, but with an added turning of the screw – it’s not the house that...

Send us a text Does your child draw pentagrams? Have you noticed the neighbours hanging their robes over the washing line? Worst of all, have they started listening to …. HEAVY METAL?? You may be experiencing a satanic panic. Worry not, our guest, Clay McLeod Chapman can diagnose this for you. Clay’s new novel, Whisper Down the Lane is both a homage to the horror of the 80s, and an exploration of...

Send us a text We’ve covered our share of plagues on this show during our all-too-real year of sitting indoors and waiting for the pandemic to sod off. Do you have the guts for one more? You should, but you may empty them. Our guest is V.L. Valentine and her debut novel The Plague Letters transports us to London in 1665. The Great Plague is scouring the population, with only the barest medical exp...

Send us a text This is a big one.  The Last House on Needless Street may be the best pure horror novel I’ve read this decade. Okay, the decade is only 3 months old, but check back with me in 9 years and I may still be saying the same. I’m delighted to speak to the author of this latter-day classic, Catriona Ward, about secrets and lies and how the hell you begin to describe a book that is one big...

Send us a text Once upon a time in a land far, far away, there was a young woman, bad men, and some homicidal mermaids. It’s fairy tale time. Our guest is Angela Slatter, who’s new novel All the Murmuring Bones turns the fairy stories that comforted you as a child, into a horrid tale of murder, inheritance, death, sex and entrapment. In this world Hansel and Gretel would be a very tasty pie-fillin...

Send us a text Isolation is a bitch, but it could be worse! Our guest is Bethany Clift and her debut novel is  Last One at the Party – a pandemic novel that reminds you that at least we have Netflix, facetime and the chance to call our friends.  Beth’s novel follows an unnamed woman, the last survivor of a global plague that has emptied out the world in just a few weeks. As she struggles through t...

Send us a text If you’ve been homeschooling, in labour, or generally responsible for the life of a small human during lockdown, then this episode is for you. There are people out there, writers with great skill and empathy, who share your pain, and know how you feel. This week’s guest is Julia Fine, the author of Bram Stoker Award Nominated What Should Be Wild, and now the postpartum nightmare, Th...

Send us a text Hands up who wants a holiday!  Sarah Pearse’s The Sanatorium could be just the thing to purge your lockdown travel desires. It will either transport you to the ice-white peaks of the Swiss Alps, to luxuriate in the views inside your mind. Or, it’ll make you never ever want to stay in a hotel again. The Sanatorium is Sarah’s debut thriller, a novel that sits uncomfortably (in the bes...

Send us a text Have you ever had a book scare you so much that part of you wishes you hadn’t read it? That’s the experience I had reading Gemma Files’ latest collection, In That Endlessness, Our End. I don’t know how Gemma does it, but with each story she finds a psychological pressure point that feels specifically mine, and the presses down on it hard with her pen.  On more than one occasion I ha...

Send us a text When your guest calls herself the “Master of the Bitch” you do wonder what you’re getting into. Courtney Summers, by her own admission, wants to upset people.  Yet she’s a delight! To kick of Women in Horror week we discuss her new novel, The Project, which follows a young woman as she investigates the New York based cult that has swallowed up her sister.  This is FAR from your stan...

Send us a text Let’s get Gothic! Our guest this week is Laura Purcell, doyenne of the dark, heiress of historical fiction (and other alliterative titles). Laura blew away the cobwebs wrapped around spooky period fiction with her breakout smash, The Silent Companions in 2017. She followed up with The Corset and Bone China and now she’s back with her newest Gothic novel, The Shape of Darkness.   The...

Send us a text In a week in which the White House becomes a little less orange, it’s hard to dwell on the nasty side of life. But this is Talking Scared and we can find the grim and creepy on even the most optimistic days. Our guest is C.J. Tudor – the current queen of the British thriller. She sits quite comfortably on the cusp of horror and crime, and we get into the subject of exactly where tha...

Send us a text Ready for the first GREAT book you’ll read this year? Our guest this week is Will Dean, calling all the way from the middle of a Scandinavian forest to talk about his new novel, The Last Thing To Burn. I’ve been banging on about this book since I read it in December. It’s a latter-day masterpiece, a read-in-one-sitting, this-has-to-be-a-movie kind of book. Think Misery, think Room a...

Send us a text I like this year better than last year already. Ok, we may be plunged back into lockdown 3.0 and it may be cold, and the cinemas may still be shut. But we have a vaccine, Trump looks like he’s got nappy rash … and there’s a whole year of horror fiction to look forward to.  Unfortunately for you, there’s no guest this week. Instead, you’re stuck with me as I talk you through the high...

Send us a text 2020 is nearly behind us (woohoo!) but we have time for one more interview with a master of horror. Our guest this week is Michael Marshall Smith the genre polymath and man of a thousand pseudonyms (all of them involving ‘Michael’.) He is joining me to discuss his new career retrospective, The Best of Michael Marshall Smith, published in a beautiful volume by Subterranean Press. It’...

Send us a text Merry Christmas and/or time-off-work-week! For all of you currently freezing your asses off in cold climes, this week’s episode may make you feel a little too warm under the collar. Our guest is Gabriel Bergmoser, an author who exploded onto the horror scene in early 2020 with The Hunted, a pulpy, violent, visceral hell ride through the Australian wilderness in the company of very h...

Send us a text This late into 2020 we are all craving a) a holiday and b) time with friends. Our guest this week may cast a slightly different perspective on both.   Rachel Harrison is the author of The Return, a novel that looks into the dark heart of friendship and asks “do you REALLY know who your friends are?” The book was published all the way back in March, by Berkley in the US and Hodder in...

Send us a text Stand back! Our Guest this week is Christopher Golden, author of all manner of horror, adventure and generally freaky fiction. His latest book is Red Hands, the third featuring Ben Walker, action-hero and expert in the batsh*t weird!  I have used the words ‘relevant’ and ‘prescient’ more than ever in 2020 – this being, after all, the year that all our horror stories became true. Eve...

Send us a text This week our guest is Sam J. Miller, author of The Blade Between - a novel for anyone who  loves or loathes their hometown.  It’s a story of small-town ghosts, hidden hatreds and sudden violence. And behind it all looms the issue of gentrification, in all its ugliness and beauty. Listening to Sam talk, you may think differently about that cute little bistro that’s opened down the s...

Send us a text If you’re a fan of podcasts and horror (and of course you are!) then chances are you’ll recognise our guest. Jonathan Sims is the author of Thirteen Storeys, but you may know him (or his voice) as the creator and narrator of The Magnus Archives. Yep, that’s right, I’m interviewing The Archivist himself.   Thirteen Storeys takes a lot of what makes The Magnus Archives great, and blen...