The Monster She Wrote Podcast

Dirk has lost his wife, Joan, and he is devastated by grief. Joan was a pilot who crashed during a routine flight, and he knows there isn't any hope of her survival because he was talking to her on the radio when she crashed. He knows she went down in the ocean with no land in sight, and he knows the search was futile. But, despite all evidence to the contrary, he still feels like there's a chance...

Get to know Mel and Lisa: reader edition!   Recommended in this episode: Shirley Jackson's short stories   UP NEXT: Margaret St. Clair's "The Island of the Hands"   Buy Toil and Trouble here!  

Author of the novella Corporate Body and the Shirley Jackson Award-winning story "Not the Man I Married," R.A. Busby spends her spare time running in the desert with her dog and finding weird things to write about.    Buy Corporate Body here (or anywhere books or sold).    Recommended in this episode: Queen of Teeth by Hailey Piper    UP NEXT: Get to know Mel and Lisa's reading styles! Buy Toil an...

TW: Domestic Violence/Abuse  The narrator of "Not the Man I Married" has a happy life. She lives in a big house with her husband, Charles, and their two children, Bella and baby Charlie. Everything seems wonderful…until one day a man comes home who looks like Charles, walks like Charles, and even talks like Charles. Only this isn't Charles at all. It's a monster wearing Charles's body like some ki...

Ghosts come in many forms. In Chesya Burke's story "Haint Me Too," this ghost is of the angry kind. She haunts the Myrtle House, a Southern plantation home, inhabited by "the Perfect Southern American Dream" ("father, mother, three boys and two girls"). Young Shea, the daughter of a Black sharecropping family living on the land, witnesses the haint that lives in Myrtle House. She sees its terror–a...

In her short story "The Debt," Ania Ahlborn weaves a modern fairytale. Karolin is an 11 year old girl, supposedly visiting her grandmother in Poland for the first time, but her grandmother is nowhere to be found. She's traveled there with her father, both of them still reeling from the death of Karolin's mother one year earlier. Karolin is enchanted by the quaint town and the lush dark green fores...

Following the Mexican War of Independence, Beatriz finds her life in ruins: her father has been executed and she is left to take care of her family. Her only hope is a good marriage–so she marries the wealthy but mysterious Don Rodolpho, following the death of his first wife. Beatriz moves into Rodolpho's aging home, the Hacienda San Isidro. But that is only the start of Beatriz's troubles. There'...

Wednesday Addams is a well-known and much beloved character in the horror genre. We all know her trademark macabre attitude, all-black goth dress with the white collar, and of course, her pigtail braids. Much less is known about Lisa Loring, the first actress to portray the original Wednesday on television. Loring recently passed, so today's episode is dedicated to her. Recommended in this episode...

When Hilton James's wife, the only elected African American judge in Dade County, FL, begins receiving racist hate mail threatening her and Hilton and their two children, he understandably becomes obsessed with discovering who the culprit is and protecting his family from them. However, this crisis is not the only one he is facing. After years of feeling that he had moved on from a childhood traum...

When Edith Porter's friend Abby sends her a cutting from a cactus she found while on a trip in Mexico, Edith decides to try to bring it back to life among her collection of cactus plants. To her surprise and delight, it turns green and begins to grow. And grow. And grow. It's the fastest growing cactus she's ever seen, and it doesn't really look exactly like any other cactus, either. As the cactus...

Join Lisa and Mel as they share their favorite books, television shows, and movies from 2022.  Next Episode: Mildred Johnson's "The Cactus" ( Weird Tales story) Buy Toil and Trouble wherever you get books!

An unusual episode for an unusual book!  Helen Oyeyemi's novel Gingerbread is a tale about a mother Harriet and her daughter Perdita–and Harriet's famous Gingerbread recipe, which she learned from her mother. Harriet wants to use it to impress the mothers at her daughter's school. Sounds normal enough, right? Not quite. This is an Oyeyemi book, so of course, things must take a turn of the stranger...

Coppelius's Toyshop is one of the busiest stores in New York during the Christmas season. With life-sized toy soldiers on either side of the entrance and characters straight out of fairy tales roaming the aisles filled with toys, it's a paradise for kids of all ages. It's not a paradise, however, for Connie Willis's narrator, who is late for a Knicks game and just learned his new girlfriend has a...

Christmas is not always the easiest time of year for people. There's often the headache of travel through busy airports, the annoyance of trying to plan a meal that will accommodate everyone's schedules, and of course, the pressure to put your best foot forward in your annual Christmas card. All of that becomes much more complicated, however, when pod people begin to overtake your town, which is e...

This Priya Sharma story was published on Tor.com in July of 2015, and collected in her 2018 collection All the Fabulous Beasts . Here is the description from Tor: "'Fabulous Beasts' by Priya Sharma is a horror novelette about a strange woman living in luxury with her lover, but irrevocably tied to her childhood of deprivation and dark secrets in northwest England. The woman recalls the unravelling...

Annie's life has been turned upside down. Her boyfriend broke up with her after nearly a decade together, and she can't afford to live in New York City without his help splitting the rent. Without many options, she accepts a teaching job in a small town of Rowan. Her life changes when she meets the mysterious and magical Sophie. Sophie seems wonderful, but the townspeople seem to fear her. And her...

Rachel Harrison is the author of Cackle and The Return , which was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. Her short fiction has appeared in Guernica, Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, and as an Audible Original. She lives in Western New York with her husband and their cat/overlord. Her newest book is Such Sharp Teeth. Recommended in this episode:  The...

12-year-old Harper Raine and her family have moved from New York City to a suburb of Washington, D.C., for a new start. Harper is trying to work through wounds left by a traumatic series of events in her past that harmed her physically, mentally, and emotionally and left her with gaps in her memory. Her parents, however, have unknowingly picked the worst new home for Harper to live in: the Grady H...

PREORDER TOIL AND TROUBLE In Eli zabeth Walter's story "The Sin-Eater," Clive Tomlinson gets more than he bargained for on a trip to the Welsh Border to see and sketch an old pre-Reformation church. On his way back to his hotel, he is waylaid by a couple on a farm who are oddly insistent that he visit their ill son, Eddie. Clive quickly realizes that Eddie is dead, and he rushes through drinking s...

PREORDER TOIL AND TROUBLE You know her as Uhura from the Star Trek universe, but her impact went far beyond the sci-fi world. Born in 1932 in Illinois, she had many careers before working with Gene Rodenberry. She was a model, a singer, a dancer, most notably working with Duke Ellington. Robert Heinlein dedicated his novel Friday (about a female artificial human) to her, she received her star on t...

Gwendolyn Kiste is the three-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rust Maidens , Reluctant Immortals, Boneset & Feathers , And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe , Pretty Marys All in a Row , and The Invention of Ghosts . Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Vastarien, Tor's Nightfire, Black Static, The Dark, Dai...

WARNING FOR THIS EPISODE: We do discuss sexual assault as it relates to the plot of the story.  Shudder-to-Think, Pennsylvania, is a dying coal town. People don't stay around for long because it isn't safe for those who live there. Friends El and Octavia learn that the hard way when they wake up one evening in a movie theater with no memory of what has happened. Their subsequent quest for understa...

We are back from our brief hiatus, and in this episode, we welcome writer and academic Crystal O'Leary Davidson! Make sure to check out her short fiction.  In Donna Tartt's The Secret History Richard Papen recounts his ill-fated time at Hampden College in Vermont. A second-year transfer from California, Richard, middle class and awkward amongst his privileged peers, becomes fascinated with a group...

NEWS: Mel and Lisa are taking a brief hiatus so the next episode will be four weeks away instead of two...WE WILL BE BACK! Samantha Heather Mackey is an MFA student at the prestigious Warren University located somewhere in New England. She splits her time between hanging out with her mysterious friend Ava in a ramshackle house in town and taking workshop classes with the rest of her all-female fic...

When his six year old son says he saw a man outside their home, Dr. Holland thinks it is a case of overactive imagination. Mister Mole, as his son calls his new friend, wants to take the young boy for a walk. What could be so sinister in that? Turns out a lot. When another boy in the neighborhood turns up dead, though, Dr. Holland begins to wonder if there isn't more to Mister Mole after all. Hard...