Talking Scared

Send us a text Things get a little cultish this week on Talking Scared. Our guest is Craig DiLouie, author of the brand-spanking-new creepy commune novel, The Children of Red Peak – released November 18th from RedHook Books. It’s a tale of crazy goings-on in the desert, of ritual mutilation and lasting trauma. All that fun stuff! Craig immediately has me in his thrall, even without the Kool-Aid. (...

Send us a text This week Rumaan Alam presents us with a wholly ambiguous end of the world. Rumaan’s new novel, Leave the World Behind has taken the publishing landscape by storm. Reviews are everywhere and critics are shouting its name from the rooftops, with good reason. Leave the World Behind is a strange, uneasy tale of the world going wrong. What begins as a family getaway to Long Island spira...

Send us a text If you are feeling nervous today, or just want something to distract you from the doomscrolling, then welcome to our Election Day special. Our guest is Andrew Pyper whose latest novel, The Residence, is an historical tour around a White House under siege from a demon. This particular spirit is arrogant, spiteful and determined to use the Oval Office for dire purposes – but he’s not...

Send us a text It’s Halloween and in lieu of any trick and/or treating this plague year, I offer you a conversation with Colin Dickey, mystery-maestro and curator of the creepy. Colin is the author of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places (2016) and The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters and our Obsession with the Unexplained – books that plumb the depths of the human min...

Send us a text Where do you stand on horror and comedy? Can a book be too funny to be scary, or too terrifying to raise a chuckle? Our guest this week would argue not. T. Kingfisher is the author of the critically-acclaimed The Twisted Ones (2019) and her brand-new release The Hollow Places. Both are scorching horror tales, with some hideous imagery, exquisite world-building and nightmare-fuel ide...

Send us a text This week Emily Danforth takes us back to school. Her new novel, Plain Bad Heroines has a lot to say about the history of queer women, the price of fame, and whether found footage horror is any good. Plain Bad Heroines features heavily on all the best-of lists for the season, and it’s an early reputation that’s well deserved. This tricksy, twisty novel spans centuries to tell the ta...

Send us a text Kate Summerscale is our first guest working in the realms of non-fiction. Her back-catalogue proves that the real world is every bit as dark and terrifying as the inside of Stephen King’s head. She’s covered murder in the famous The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (2008) and now she’s back with a more spiritual crisis in The Haunting of Alma Fielding.  The book examines a very odd case of...

Send us a text Ahoy mateys! My guest this week is the locked-room-murder-maestro himself, Stuart Turton. In 2018 Stu burst onto the scene with his genre-splicing triumph, The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. It won awards and melted some brains with its maddening twists and turns. Stu’s follow-up is equally intricate but this time it’s also seaworthy. The Devil and the Dark Water is a murder mys...

Send us a text This week we get visceral – with the extreme body horror of Robert Jeremy Johnson and his new novel THE LOOP.  Jeremy speaks to us from Portland, Oregon, where he’s busy watching the forest fires and working on ways to weaponise his words for good. THE LOOP is a novel all about conspiracy theory, medical mishap, and a class war raging through a small town. Think your favourite 80s t...

Send us a text This week’s guest is up-and-coming horror extraordinaire, Jo Kaplan. Jo’s new haunted house novel, It Will Just Be Us is a tour-de-force of chills, thrills and things that kill. It’s got everything you could possibly want: creepy old house – check, mysterious locked room – CHECK, a witch who lurks in a swamp – CHECK!!!! It’s also got some of the best female relationships I’ve read i...

Send us a text This week we’re in conversation with Silvia Moreno-Garcia, the author of Mexican Gothic - 2020's twisted publishing phenomenon. We discuss the novel's roots in British soil, and whether a book can be considered 'too' Mexican or not Mexican enough. Along the way we also consider the classic Mexican horror cinema of Enrique Taboada, why not everything has to be magic realism, and why...

Send us a text In the second episode i'm in conversation with John Langan, contemporary literary horror superstar and all round scholar of the genre. John is the author of the Bram Stoker Award-Winning classic The Fisherman and his latest collection is Children of the Fang and Other Genealogies. We talk about great influences and literary ventriloquism, what makes a great horror title, and what it...

Send us a text In the first ever episode of Talking Scared we speak to horror megastar Paul Tremblay, author of the modern classic, A Head Full of Ghosts and this year's virus-shocker Survivor Song.  There are musings on pandemics real and imaginary, the terror of sharks, and the terrible truth at the heart of horror fiction. Books mentioned in our conversation include: The Stand – Stephen King Ra...