Talking Scared

Off to Old Dublin Town to have creepy tales pumped direct into our earholes this week. I’m joined by Peter Dunne, the writer and director of Petrified — Ireland’s premier horror drama podcast.   It’s a horror show with a vein of Irish humour, but it’s not afraid to get really nasty when the chance arises. Across dozens of episodes, Peter and the team have offered serial killing parents, haunted li...

Disgust, despair and belly laughs on the show this week – with Neena Viel and her new novel, I’ll Watch Your Baby.   It’s a dense, troubling tale of child theft, social horror and demons, with plenty of putrid feet to give you a summertime ick! But if the book is a sickener, the author is a delight. Neena makes me do a proper full-on guffaw (has anyone EVER guffawed?), whilst we talk about urban-v...

A little more chat as the last of the starkblast fades.   In this bonus Palaver episode, Nat and I stick around to dissect Chris’s disproportionate love for The Wind Through the Keyhole. We talk about what, if any conclusions can be drawn from this book, and then we get onto King’s intersections with Lovecraft and Tolkien – and some deep cut Dark Tower references elsewhere in the canon.   Enjoy. B...

Whilst the wind and world howls outside, we can all hunker indoors for the latest Dark Tower Deep Dive into King’s 2012 novel-of-stories, The Wind Through the Keyhole.   To some, this could be an inessential pitstop, a mere nostalgic coda, written long after the climax of the main saga. To others it’s a testament to Stephen King’s raw storytelling chops, which shed a little more purpling light on...

Trad wives are taking over horror in 2026 – but I predict none will be more frightening and more gorgeously WEIRD than Sarah Langan’s novel.   It’s the tale of a young woman in the dying era of journalism and the YouTube influencer who offers her hope, and much worse things…. I absolutely loved it.   Sarah and I talk about the trad wife phenomenon, where it comes from, what it means, and how it’s...

Kaelyn Moore returns to talk scared, straight from the helm of Heart Starts Pounding – her mega podcast of mysteries, murder and the macabre.   She watches a lot of dark documentaries for research. I asked her to come talk about a few that recently inspired her (or disturbed her). We cover serial killers, cursed objects and a relationship that will give you serious ICK! But of course, this being T...

This week is full of muck and murk and mushrooms. We flit amongst the trees, we bed on moss, we howl at the moon. Daisy Pearce is entering her bog witch era! The author takes us to her native Cornwall, for a story of haunting and imprisonment, small town baggage and creepy houses in the woods. We talk about the oppressive landscape and the mythical texture of the place. We ask whether anyone in a...

This week we host one of the most exciting horror filmmakers of the decade – Damian McCarthy, the twisted mind behind Caveat, Oddity and now, Hokum.   It’s the biggest film in Damian’s career so far, with his biggest star, Adam Scott playing Ohm, a deeply flawed American writer who travels to Ireland, to spread his parent’s ashes. Whilst staying in a creaky old hotel, he stumbled across dark human...

Cognitohazards abound this week, as Marcus Kliewer joins me for a conversation about the reality-shredding We Used to Live Here and his new novel of obsessional rules, The Caretaker.   In both books, there are things that should not be known, and certainly not questioned. Yet questioning is my job – so we get into the expansive and weird universe Marcus is building, and the process of playing game...

A conversation about codes of honour and the rules of haunting in this week’s episode – as I’m joined by Kylie Lee Baker, author of 2025’s incredible Bat Eater, and the brand-new Japanese Gothic.   It’s the story of a very particular haunted house, a brutal samurai family, and a murderer who can’t remember his crime. It’s exhilaratingly weird and Kylie leads me through its many strange rooms.   We...

When Stephen King tells you to have a guest on your podcast – you listen!   That’s how I came to meet Caroline Bicks, the inaugural Stephen E. King Chair at the University of Maine, and author of the Monsters in the Archive – the first full-length study of the King literary collection.   It’s part memoir, part literary biography, part granular exploration of King’s editorial process – but ALL fun....

Listen at your own peril this week.   I spoke with Ian Tuason and Nina Kiri, the director and star of Undertone – billed as “the scariest movie you’ll ever hear!”   It’s the story of an isolated podcaster, who makes the terrible mistake of listening to some very unnerving audio files…which then start to bleed into her own life. You can imagine the number it did on me!   Ian and Nina talk about the...

Corporate culture is a nightmare, but getting out of the office brings its own problems in Carter Keane’s debut novella – Morsel.   It’s a story about monsters and eldritch beings, about killer cults and evil law-enforcement, about wellbeing scams and a boss from hell – but it’s also a springboard for a whole conversation about the cons (many) and pros (debatable) of capitalism. Carter indulges my...

Nat and I stick around in the shadowed recesses of Black House for another half hour, to discuss all the things that Chris got right and wrong – and to make some entirely unfounded claims of our own.   It’s overflowing with spoilers for the whole Dark Tower series, so don’t listen if you’re a newbie. We start to ask who is the Crimson King? Would Roland and Jack have gotten along? And we get very...

Time to whet our appetites for the Dark Tower again – this time with an extra serving of ass cheek! After three months away, we’re picking up with travellin’ Jack Sawyer after we left him in The Talisman. We find him in a sleepy Wisconsin town, where the dimension-hopping, child-eating Fisherman is plying his awful trade.   Yep… it’s time for Black House. The book in which King’s universes collide...

After seeing an early screener of Something Very Bad is Going to Happen I immediately thought it was going to be huge! So I leapt ahead of the curve and invited writer and showrunner, Haley Z Boston to come talk scared about weddings, soulmates, David Lynch and Danish horror, and what it’s like to work with the Duffer Brothers. This show has been my whole personality for two weeks. Ihope you watch...

Tamika Thompson talks me through the great American curseof the 21st Century on this week’s episode. No, not Tangerine Cthulhu … but the plague of gun deaths that is coring out the country.   That’s the focus of her new novel, The Curse of Hester Gardens, which asks whether the deaths gunning for the young men of an inner-city housing project are criminal, or something much weirder!   Yeah, that’s...

Some stories just boggle your mind and boil your imagination.   Such are the ideas in Annie Neugebauer’s You Have to Let Them Bleed, and her logic-shattering novella The Extra. The Uncanny Valley, obsessional thoughts, dangerous knowledge, mothers who aren’t mothers and a camping group that destroys the workings of math and memory… these are just some of the inexplicabilities we discuss in this we...

Time for sex and seances this week on Talking Scared.   Our guest is Avery Curran and her debut novel Spoiled Milk. It’s a story of spiritualism and sapphic desire, set in a 1920s boarding school where death, rot, haunting and much worse things (patriarchy!) runs rampant.   Avery is a specialist in the history of spiritualism (with a brand new PhD to her name) and this conversation is a deep and d...

This Off Book episode is a trip into the deep dark woods, for a very special playdate!   Our guest is Rod Blackhurst, director and co-writer of the new retro horror movie, Dolly. It’s a film about a very scary house in the woods and the even scarier person who lives inside…and who wants nothing so much as a new toy of her own.     Rod and I talk about the tone, gore and influences behind the movie...

This week we’re sharpening our swords and checking our armpits for boils!   Christopher Buehlman is the guest, author the hugely-acclaimed 2012 medieval horror fantasy, Between Two Fires – now being reissued for a new, wide audience. It’s a book that everyone has been screaming at me to read, and I’m glad I did.   Christopher and I get hellishly geeky, talking history, plague, angelology and demon...

Clap your hands twice if you believe in Catriona Ward!   Cat is back on the show this week, to talk Nowhere Burning – a horror novel informed by everything from Peter Pan (it has its own Tinkerbell), to certain disgraced megastars, and even the CIA checklist on what constitutes a cult!   It’s a lot, and we talk about all of it, as well as various weird mysteries, the grimmest cult we’ve ever heard...

When is a zombie not a zombie?   I don’t have a punchline to that joke. But something…something … revenant!   Brennan LaFaro’s The Denizens is about a small southern town with a very unusual relationship with death. What precisely is the nature of the corpses roaming the woods, and what do they want with the living. You’ll have to listen to find out.   What is certain is that this book gives Brenn...

This Valentine’s week, come for a walk up on t’moors with me and Agatha Andrews.   I’ve invited Agatha, my friend and sister-in-Gothic, host of She Wore Black podcast, for a conversation about Wuthering Heights. It’s known as “the greatest love story ever told,” but that’s such nonsense. Instead we talk about mania and melancholy, hate and power, cannibalism and necrophilia… and we also look ahead...

A bit of chaos on the show for the weekend. We start with one guest and end with two. And there’s a dude with an alligator’s head running amok!   Mama Came Callin’ is the slasher/cryptid/mystery/noir graphic novel written by Ezra Claytan Daniel and illustrated by Camilla Sucre. It’s set in the swamps of Florida, amongst murky waters and dirtier histories.   The three of us (eventually) talk about...