Talking Scared

Send us a text Back to the Island this week! With Rachel Eve Moulton and The Insatiable Volt Sisters. Rachel sophomore novel is the weirdest island story since Lost, or Brexit. It features a strange family with a stranger secret, curses, killer quarry ponds and the wearing of other people’s skin. And yet you probably still want to visit Fowler Island (I did).  We talk about working with surrealism...

Send us a text Fairy tales are the first horror stories, right? Kids being eaten by witches, narcissistic imps who steal your babies. That’s the good stuff.  Kelly Link knows a thing or two about the darkness inside fairy tales, and how to (re)tell them for maximum effect. She is a superstar of the short story, a Pultizer nominee and someone who just plain knows a lot of interesting stuff.  Her ne...

Send us a text Terrible times and awful words await us this week. Thankfully, on this show that’s a good thing! Our guest is Max Booth III, the wizard behind Ghoulish Books and the author of bathroom-set apocalypse, We Need to Do Something. He’s here to talk about his new collection of uber-dark stories, Abnormal Statistics. These tales are pitch black, treacle-thick pieces of clotted nastiness. B...

Send us a text Wagons West this week, with a guest I’ve been trying to get on the show since the early days. It’s Victor Lavalle. I had always wanted to speak to him about The Ballad of Black Tom in the dream that we could join together to call Lovecraft names. As it turns out, that will have to wait, cos he’s brought out a brand-new novel … and it’s a Weird Western.  Cue squealing!! It’s one of m...

Send us a text There is no cool and collected way to introduce this week’s episode. Our guest is Margaret Atwood. Yes, that Margaret Atwood. The author of The Handmaid’s Tale. One of the few writer’s who genuinely deserves to be called an icon (though she may be tired of the term).  She published her first novel in 1969 and now as she enters her seventh decade of writing, her stories are no less c...

Send us a text Vampires, finally! After years of recording a horror podcast, I’ve finally recorded a conversation about the first thing you all probably think of if I said “horror monster.” Actually, at this very moment, maybe you’d name a Floridian politician but you get my drift… I’m delighted to be joined by Jacqueline Holland, to talk about her new novel of bloodsucking and cursed immortality,...

Send us a text This week I take a road trip with Matt Ruff, into the more monstrous corners of the universe. Sure, some of them are alien planets… but some are here on earth, with the racists!  Matt is best known as the author of 2016’s Lovecraft Country. He never planned to write a sequel, yet here it is. The Destroyer of Worlds picks up several years later, when Atticus, Letetia, Montrose and Hi...

Send us a text I like my ghosts like I like my podcasts – weird and slightly furious.  Thankfully, this week delivers on both counts – with Johnny Compton’s The Spite House delivering more ghosts than you think you could fit into 250-pages … and none of them are anything less than fuming!  Johnny talks us through the odd, off-kilter history of spite houses, we trace the legacy of the American haun...

Send us a text It’s a Valentine’s day episode and what better to celebrate today than a conversation about cruelty, brutal folklore, political terror and black magic? Don’t tell me I don’t understand my audience. I’m beyond delighted to welcome Mariana Enriquez to the show to talk about her massive novel, Our Share of Night. It features all of the above ingredients, in a 700+ page roam through dec...

Send us a text Are you ready for another bloody confrontation? Same rules, different setting (actually still my attic bedroom) and more gore? Stephen Graham Jones AKA Professor Slasher, returns to Talking Scared to discuss Don’t Fear the Reaper, the sequel to his zeitgeist-blasting slasher-ode, My Heart is a Chainsaw. Reaper takes us back to Proofrock, Idaho for a freezing night of rage and bloods...

Send us a text It’s not even the end of January and we’re already dealing with the second apocalypse of the year. This one is written by CJ Tudor, whose new novel, The Drift, moves her out of the crime chillers she is best-known for, into a whole other world of horror. It’s a series of locked room mysteries, occurring in the hideous aftermath of global pandemic. And if you are a little sick of glo...

Send us a text When it comes to stress, they say selling a house is up there with divorce and death. Now imagine that house is haunted… by demonic puppets.  Yeah – that’s the premise of Grady Hendrix’s brand-new horror novel, How to Sell a Haunted House. It combines Grady’s trademark humour, genre-knowledge and playfulness, with a genuinely frightening story about homes, and all the things they co...

Send us a text …AAAND WE’RE BACK!  I hope you’re slipping into 2023 like it’s a warm bath, but either way this week’s episode will be a cold, sharp system shock.  The guest is Stephen Markley; the book is The Deluge – a 900-page beast of ecological and societal disintegration, and the best book I have read in decades. Imagine The Stand was based on rigorous scientific research and was, y’know, abo...

Send us a text The year is almost over. What is left to do except offer you my last-minute ranking of the best books I’ve read and enjoyed in 2022. I will warn you – I am poorly and my voice sounds like ten miles of bad gravel. This sounds like the Reba McIntyre book club. I am HUSKY!! Hang around for the afterword when my voice finally gives out as I labour over a long and elaborate thank-you for...

Send us a text It’s that time of year again. A time to reflect, to look back over a tumultuous twelve months, and to talk about the horror books that helped us survive them. 2022 has been a helluva year for the good kind of horror. Far too much for one man to cover. So I’ve drafted in some highly qualified friends – Emily Hughes and Janelle Janson. They have their fingers right on the arterial spu...

Send us a text It’s the Christmas Special and with the obligatory requirement to do something different – we’re turning the tables. Yes, I’m the one being interviewed this week. To make that a palatable offering for listeners, the guest interviewers are none other than Rachel Harrison and Josh Malerman. Friends of the show and horror superstars who, out of the goodness of their hearts, devoted an...

Send us a text Are you ready for some learnin’? This week rather than focusing on any single book, or any single author – I thought we’d have a little look at … y’know … the entire friggin’ history of Horror and Gothic across the centuries. After all, what’s a Christmas break from podcasting if you aren’t doubling the length of your episodes and making the scope infinite?  Thankfully, I’m joined b...

Send us a text This week I’m beginning my supposed ‘break’ from reading. There is still an episode, however, and it’s a doozy. You may be glad to hear I’ve put down the books for a short while, ‘cos my guest is a huge name from the cinematic aisle of the horror world – Craig Engler, GM of Shudder is in the house!! He joined me for a conversation back in October, when we were both in the throes of...

Send us a text Get ready to be sickened by my praise. My guest this week is Philip Fracassi. Last year his historical horror, The Boys in the Valley got the Stephen King endorsement. He’s already following up with A Child Alone With Strangers - his second novel (or is it his first, or his third – as you’ll hear it’s complicated). This book is an all-timer. It blends the relaxed, character driven s...

Send us a text Are you a city mouse or a country mouse?  That’s the question at the heart of my conversation with Charlotte Northedge. Her new novel, The People Before argues that though the city may be a hassle, it’s a lot less scary than what waits out there in the fields and farmhouses of this pleasant land.  Charlotte is very much a city mouse. She’s also the Head of Books for The Guardian New...

Send us a text It’s coming home, it’s coming … horror’s coming home! Alright, no one panic – this isn’t about football. We’ll avoid that particular nightmare of human corruption and talk about something much more nourishing – the delights of British Folk Horror. Our guest is Fiona Barnett, and these days it’s seems like a mini-celebration everytime I have a fellow Brit on the show. Her debut novel...

Send us a text I don’t always talk about Bigfoot … but when I do it’s with the BEST people. Our guest this week is Erika T. Wurth, author, narrative artist and creative writing guru. She is of Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee descent and she pours all of that skill and heritage into her new novel White Horse. It’s a tale of haunting, hard-living and violence, with a certain hairy indigenous monster that...

Send us a text Halloween may be over but I trust you aren’t tired of horror?  No? Good. ‘Cos this week’s guest packs a double-whammy – horror novels and horror movies all in one. Brian McAuley is a screenwriter and debut novelist. His first book, Curse of the Reaper is a behind-the-scenes look at how the horror movie sausage gets made, featuring the greatest slasher icon never to actually exist, a...

Send us a text The last episode before Halloween and it’s suitably about my favourite book of the year: Andy Davidson’s The Hollow Kind Andy is the Stoker-nominated author of In the Valley of the Sun and The Boatman’s Daughter. The Hollow Kind is his third book and it packs a lot into its 400 pages. It’s as dense and weighty as an imploding paper star.  It’s a haunted house story (of sorts), a cre...

Send us a text It was Thomas Wolfe who wrote “you can never go home again.” Huh, what did he know? (yes, I understand the metaphor – move on!) This week’s guest proves that whilst you can go home, you may not want to. Erin E. Adams is an actor, playwright and now the debut author of JACKAL, a novel of homecomings horrid and awful.  Each year, in the small Pennsylvania town of Johnstown, a young Bl...