Talking Scared

Here is the first Let Us Palaver minisode – in which Nat Cassidy and I kick Chris off the call, and get to grips with the inner workings of The Dark Tower, without spoiling anything for him, or any of you on your first trip through these books. If you still listen after this spoiler warning and the two I give in the first few minutes of the episode… well, you only have yourself to blame. But for s...

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the podcaster followed…”   Welcome to the start of what is sure to be an epic journey. Step by step, over more than a dozen episodes, Talking Scared will be following the beam all the way to the Dark Tower – that mad edifice at the heart of Stephen King’s opus. Maybe it’s the heart of every story ever told… time will tell.   Unlike Roland Deschain, I d...

The latest Off Book episode takes you out to the American desert and leaves you there, cold, alone and confused. We’re speaking with Dutch Marich, the surprisingly lovely mind behind the most terrifying found footage I’ve seen in years – The Horror in the High Desert series. These films are full of a particular kind of fear. Never obscure, but always hidden – leaving you as fascinated as you are s...

Tyranny is the key this week on Talking Scared this week. How fitting.   Susan Barker’s Old Soul is a globe-trotting, decade-spanning supernatural tour of autocracies, from behind the Iron Curtain to contemporary China. If that isn’t frightening enough, it also features an ageless woman who curses anyone she meets, a grand cosmic entity, and the exhilaration and terror of deep time.    Heady stuff...

It’s a collegial week on Talking Scared. ‘Cos I’m talking dark, occult academia with someone very local to me.   Kate van der Borgh’s debut, And He Shall Appear is basically a sinister version of my own life. It’s about a young working class lad, like me, who goes to a prestigious university, like me… but there ours paths diverge, as he meets a fellow student who perhaps has diabolical powers.   I...

Welcome back and Happy New Year. 2025 looms ahead. Frightening. Uncertain. Crazy!!   Our first guest of the year has written the book that best captures this mad future we’re living in. Clay McLeod Chapman returns to Talking Scared, to talk about Wake Up And Open Your Eyes – his new novel of mass demonic possession, transmitted through poisonous media, and the destruction of families and communiti...

Send us a text How else to end 2024 than with an entirely subjective list of the best things I’ve read over the year?   How many of you will guess the number one spot? I bet none of you will guess the number two?    Let me know your thoughts – what you loved, and what you think I missed   Enjoy!   Support Talking Scared on Patreon   Come talk books on Twitter @talkscaredpod, on Instagram, or email...

Send us a text It’s that time of year again. When I celebrate the winter solstice by getting some horror authors to come and talk in deep, emotional detail about a scary book that we like.   This time the Christmas Special Deep Dive kicks the tires and looks under the hood of Stephen King’s most underrated novel: From a Buick 8. My friends on this weird-ass-road trip are Ally Malinenko and Nat Cas...

Send us a text … and we’re back! Just in time for this seasonal tradition. The State of the Horror Nation 2024 – our expert-led review of the best that the year had to offer in terms of horror writing and pen-and-ink nightmares.   I’m joined, as ever by my stalwart co-host for this gig, Emily Hughes, author of Horror For Weenies (go check her mammoth 2025 anticipated horror book list at ReadJumpSc...

Send us a text This is the last way-back episode before the show returns with a scream next week.   But this is an episode worth remembering – my first ever conversation with Catriona Ward, about her game-changing The Last House on Needless Street too!   This was a big ask for a novice interviewer. How the hell do you talk about a book that hinges on such a huge secret. Somehow we managed to walk...

Send us a text A chance to revisit one of my favourite books and favourite ever conversations this week.   Zakiya Dalila Harris’s The Other Black Girl came out in early 2021, and for once I was ahead of the curve! Right from the start, I adored this novel of workplace micro-aggression and satirical horror in the publishing industry – and I’m glad to see the world has since agreed.   It’s a high-co...

Send us a text I’m feeling Gothic this week. Must be the weather.  In lieu of a new episode, I searched the vault and found this cracker from January 2021, in which Laura Purcell — doyenne of the contemporary British Gothic —  talked me through her Victorian spookshow of mesmerism and haunted silhouettes, The Shape of Darkness.  We also get into the social nightmare of Victorian England – when lif...

Send us a text This From the Vault episode is not quite so dusty. Gemma and I recorded this in 2022, but it’s more pertinent than ever. One because Gemma’s great uncanny novella The Folly is being reissued this week, and two, because the world is a mad place right now, and we all need to take care of our minds.   This conversation is all about that. An epic conversation about the issue of mental h...

Send us a text Still on a break – still releasing episodes “From the Vault.”   But this week’s was carefully chosen. In a time of darkness and doom-laden days, laughter is the best thing I can lace your horror with. And thankfully T. Kingfisher exists in the world.   The funniest horror writer I know. We spoke WAAAAY back in October 2020, in episode 9, when The Hollow Places had just come out.   ...

Send us a text I’m on a break – but couldn’t resist releasing something.    Especially on today of all days, when lovers of democracy require audio sustenance whilst they wait in line to preserve America.   For the first From the Vault episode, I’ve gone back to December of 2020, for an interview with Michael Marshall Smith. We talk about his 30 years of writing horror, fantasy, science fiction an...

Send us a text Halloween has finally arrived. I’m marking it in grim, macabre style.   For this Off Book Samhain Special, I’m joined by Kaelyn Moore, host and creator of Heart Starts Pounding – a podcast for the darkly curious, which offers up a new true-story of horror, hauntings and mystery every week.   Kaelyn is a treasure trove of haunted anecdote and freaky facts. We only touch the tip of he...

Send us a text Things are heating up as we approach Halloween.   I’m joined by a good friend of Talking Scared – Rachel Harrison – to talk about the hot kind of immortality   Her new novel, So Thirsty, does much more than that though. It weighs the weaponization of beauty culture, it asks how women can navigate a world in which youth seems to be everything, and it illustrates the sheer social awkw...

Send us a text As we gear up for Halloween, we get all gussied up in Gothic.   Del Sandeen joins me to talk about the curses, colorism, and all the many influences in her Southern Gothic debut This Cursed House. It’s a novel that twists the sub-genre’s typical reliance on race, for a more subtle, pernicious form of prejudice.    But it’s also chock full of all the haunted house–cursed family–secre...

Send us a text Things get disinhibited on Talking Scared this week, when CJ Leede joins us for a conversation about her new novel, American Rapture.   The novel plunges middle America into a torrid apocalypse, as a sexual plague spreads across the nation, creating “lust hell on earth.” In this framework, C.J crafts a story of sexual awakening, sacrifice, found family, hypocrisy and cruelty.  It’s...

Send us a text Hold hands, we need to stick together.   This week’s episode plunges us into the impossible and endless dark, with Sofia Ajram and her experimental, existential headf*ck of a debut novella, Coup de Grâce. It’s the tale of a man who gets lost in an endless subway station – and the monsters inside (and inside himself)   We talk about everything from the mythical history of mazes, to l...

Send us a text I started Off Book so that I could speak to some of the brightest dark stars in the wider universe of horror.   This week that plan comes to absolute fruition – ‘cos Kate Siegel is Talking Scared!   Yes, Kate Siegel, scream-queen of our generation, horror maven, acting superstar and now director of extraterrestrial found-footage nightmare (!!) ”Stowaway.” (a segment from the new V/H...

Send us a text Release your inner child!    …I mean through reading, not by letting it burst out of your stomach like some horrible sugar-coated xenomorph.   Lora Senf can help. Her Blight Harbor Trilogy is a piece of magic, an umbilicus of imagination between the tired old grump that you’re halfway to becoming, and the wide-eyed wonder you once were.    Lora and I talk about the challenge and rew...

Send us a text More devilish fun on Talking Scared this week when an old friend returns to talk about god, angels, demons and other things out there in the cold reaches of the universe.   Johnny Compton is the author of The Spite House, one of my most admired books from 2022. In his newest, Devils Kill Devils, he starts with a compelling question – “what if your Guardian Angel was a murderous thre...

Send us a text Keith Rosson is our first guest to be personally recommended by Stephen King!    And the praise doesn’t stop there. Keith’s Fever House was one of the biggest hits of 2023, and now he’s back with the sequel, The Devil By Name, which takes the contained punk-rock fury of the first book in a whole different, nation-spanning direction.   This is an epic tale of occult magic, diabolical...

Send us a text Laird Barron is on the podcast. This feels like cause for celebration.    Not only is Laird Barron a phenomenal writer. Not only is it wonderful that he’s back to writing and talking about writing. Not only am I lucky to be able to speak to him…   We also talked about DOGS!    Granted, a cybernetic, immortal monster hound called Rex – but a dog nonetheless. That’s just one of the cr...