Time to talk righteous violence! S.A. Cosby is a writer on a meteoric rise. After the insane success of Razorblade Tears, and the Gothic horrors of All the Sinners Bleed, he’s back with a fresh crime epic of titanic brutality. King of Ashes is the tale of a family under threat from criminal forces, and the shocking depths they will go to in their fight back. It’s a challenging book, full of unexpected character arcs, Shakespearean intrigue, and a candid exploration of kink. It’s also bloody, ver...
Jun 24, 2025•1 hr 25 min
Sometimes monsters are real! This week’s episode is a foray into non-fiction, but no less scary for it. I’m talking to Pulitzer-winning Caroline Fraser about Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers This is no grotesque revelling in death and sadism,however. Murderland examines the extreme violence that plagued her native Pacific Northwest in the late 20th century – and posits a link with the environmental damage of heavy industry in the region. It’s a compelling argument, a...
Jun 17, 2025•1 hr 10 min
Vampirism is time travel. It’s also tragedy and freedom and Queerness, and sex and death. We talk about all of these thing with V.E. Schwab, when we sink our teeth into her new epic novel, Bury our Bones in the Midnight Soil. It’s the story of three women who lead complicated, violent, sensual lives across the centuries. The interconnect. They love. They kill. It wasn’t the book I was expecting…and I loved it. I think you’ll love this conversation too. Enjoy! Other books mentioned: The Invisible...
Jun 10, 2025•1 hr 20 min
The third Let Us Palaver minisode (though this one is not so mini) – in which Nat and I reflect on The Waste Lands in full spoiler mode…and say REALLY mean things about Chris and his hurtful opinions. If you’ve been to the Tower before, I hope you dig this. Unless you agree with Chris about [redacted], in which case you’re dead to us. Support Talking Scared on Patreon Check out the Talking Scared Merch line – at VoidMerch Come talk books on Bluesky @talkscaredpod.bsky.social on Instagram/Threads...
Jun 06, 2025•43 min
We’re finally on the path of The Beam. The Dark Tower Readalong reaches the land of wonder and ruination, in Book 3, The Waste Lands. Accompanied by Nat and Chris, we battle the great bear, get dirty in the speaking ring, and brave the streets of Lud. But we also have the first quake in our Ka-tet, when Chris offers the most egregiously wrong opinion that anyone could offer on these books. You may agree with him… but if you do, we have a problem. I have never cursed or yelled so much on this sho...
Jun 03, 2025•2 hr 15 min
John Connolly is, in my opinion, the greatest living writer working in the overlap of crime and horror. His long-running series of novels—focused on the Strange cases of his haunted detective, Charlie Parker—is now over twenty books strong. The latest, The Children of Eve is a pivotal instalment, so this seemed a good time to get John on the show, to grill him about this saga’s many mysteries, and hideous horrors. We talk about creating iconic villains, writing violence against the vulnerable, t...
May 27, 2025•1 hr 33 min
It’s a week of sadness and hilarity on Talking Scared. The happy stuff comes courtesy of Sarah Pinborough, author of Weird domestic gothics, like Behind Her Eyes and the brand new ghost story (or is it?) We Live Here Now. We talk about confounding expectations, about the rules of the psychological thriller, about the British horror scene then and now, and about the dark truth that we all lie to each other. The sadness... well you’ll hear that in the outro if you want to stick around for it. If n...
May 20, 2025•1 hr 15 min
Talking Scared goes live! In April I was invited to chair a conversation between Michelle Paver and Ally Wilkes at the Oxford Literary Festival. I duly leapt on a train and bundled my way there – to ask the two survival horror queens about their stories of haunting and isolation in the coldest parts of the world. We talk about handling the Victorian attitudes of exploration horror, the unique properties of fear in the vast open, and how their law careers led them to write such wild stories. Also...
May 13, 2025•1 hr 5 min
Send in the clowns! In this Off Book episode I talk to Eli Craig, director of cult-classic Tucker and Dale vs Evil, and the man who put Clown in a Cornfield up on the big screen. After crowbarring my way into his press day, I asked him what drew him to the project, what else there is to ‘do’ with scary clowns and slashers in cinema, and what this movie has to say about Middle America right now. We go deeper than you’d expect for a movie about clowns chasing kids with chainsaws. Enjoy Clown in a ...
May 09, 2025•50 min
Let’s get grim and dark with Lord Grimdark! Perhaps the greatest benefit of having a book podcast like mine is the opportunity to speak to my very favourite authors. I’ve been reading Joe Abercrombie’s violent, world-weary dark fantasy for TWENTY years! And now he’s on the show. Consider me excited. His new book may be called The Devils, and it may contain werewolves, vampires, necromancers and oceans of blood – but it’s quite a cheery affair for Joe. I have never laughed so much in preparation ...
May 06, 2025•1 hr 14 min
Brian Keene has written so many damn books! …and I had never read any of them. This absolute horror faux-pas (and my embarrassment) is the reason that it’s taken so long to get Brian on the show. But I set a week aside and read as many Keene books as I could and here we are… on a leisurely stroll through Brian’s life and career,both of which he has devoted to stories of really nasty s*** happening to undeserving people. We talk abouthis bleak coming-of-age novel, Ghoul, his story of a homicidal ...
Apr 29, 2025•1 hr 19 min
I’ve been looking forward to releasing this one… Nat Cassidy comes to Talk Scared about When the Wolf Comes Home, his new novel that I –and people like me – are already calling out as one of the Best Books of the Year™. It’s a shaggy, undisciplined, sprinting beast of a book that obeys no rules. You may think it’s a werewolf novel, and you may be right... but also very wrong. It’s a book about transformations of many kinds, about fatherhood and the very nature of fear itself. But it’s also funny...
Apr 22, 2025•1 hr 34 min
Back to the 80s this week for one of the most singular horror movies of the year – now streaming on Shudder. Dead Mail is an ode to the era, but there are no neon fonts or leg warmers (or Olivia Newton Johns) here. Instead we’re in the drear of the decade, for a story about a synth-obsessed man who keeps his business partner captive in his flock-wallpapered bathroom. The poor victim’s only hope is the investigative ‘Dead Mail’ department of his local post office. If that sounds mad… well, it is....
Apr 18, 2025•56 min
In the week that the world changed, we’re talking about the last time things got this crazy. Katherine Arden is the author of The Warm Hands of Ghosts — a novel set in the trenches of the First World War and on the borderline between horror and fantasy. It’s a Faustian pact made in No-Man’s Land, where our memories are the price we pay for keeping ourselves alive. In this episode we talk a lot about history, about inflection points and moments of no-return. We talk about how systems of power can...
Apr 15, 2025•1 hr 20 min
This week we go from Edinburgh, Scotland to Nashville, Tennessee, in the company of crime author Tariq Ashkanani. Tariq’s The Midnight King is a tricky, quasi-metafictional murder mystery about cursed manuscripts, familial secrets and the most heinous murders. It’s also a love letter to the kind of occult-tinged American crime epics that both he and I grew up loving. We talk about the challenge of writing about serial killing without exploitation, about the unstable boundary between crime and ho...
Apr 08, 2025•1 hr 15 min
Time to throw ourselves around. We’re covering Punk Goes Horror. The anthology of stories inspired by punk and alternative rock songs came out just a few weeks back. It brings together a mosh-pit full of authors, both new and established, to transmute their favourite songs into nasty little stories. I invited the anthology editor, William Sterling, and two of his contributors, Wendy Dalrymple and Brian McCauley, to talk about punk, and horror and the affinity between the two. We get into our fav...
Apr 01, 2025•1 hr 5 min
The second Let Us Palaver minisode – in which Nat Cassidy dig into the things we couldn't say about The Drawing of the Three, and give MAJOR SPOILERS about whole Dark Tower series. We're really start to wonder if Chris is punking us. Support Talking Scared on Patreon Check out the Talking Scared Merch line – at VoidMerch Come talk books on Bluesky @talkscaredpod.bsky.social on Instagram/Threads, or email direct to talkingscaredpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/ad...
Mar 28, 2025•32 min
The Ka-tet picks up exactly where we left off: on the beaches of Midworld, with Roland Deschain. (If none of that makes any sense to you, go listen to episode one of the Dark Tower Deep Dive immediately) Nat Cassidy, Chris Panatier and I gather for a long, philosophical, expletive-littered conversation about Book 2: The Drawing of the Three. We get further into the character of Roland and his quest, and spend some time with the gaggle of oddballs he meets along his scenic tour of the coast. The ...
Mar 25, 2025•2 hr 15 min
It’s always great when Stephen Graham Jones comes to Talk Scared with us – but for once we aren’t talking about slashers! No, this time, we’re talking vampires! Or are we? Stephen’s new novel, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, is his best yet. Or at least the one that I love the most. It’s an epic and brutal saga of American history and shame, told through three very distinctive voices, speaking across the centuries. There are monsters with fangs AND with flags. We talk about Stephen’s relationship wit...
Mar 18, 2025•1 hr 16 min
Saddle up for a weird west week on Talking Scared. The start of a loose trilogy of sorts. This first instalment features Alex Grecian, talking about his fantastical vision of the Old West (and East) in 2023’s Red Rabbit and the brand-new follow-up, Rose of Jericho. We cover western inspirations, the melancholia of ghosts, Kansas legends and surprising witches. There’s also a nerdy little cryptid section thrown in there too cos you know I can’t resist. It’s a charmer this week. With a glint in it...
Mar 11, 2025•1 hr 10 min
No one is doing dystopia right now like Agustina Bazterrica. After Tender is the Flesh made us all consider vegetarianism, now she’s back for a long hard look at patriarchy, religion and populism in The Unworthy. It’s a quiet end of the world, set almost entirely in the confines of a strange convent, and the cult who will do anything to maintain their power. We talk about how Agustina finds the necessary voice of her characters, why love is just another form of madness, how science-fiction just ...
Mar 05, 2025•1 hr 12 min
The latest Off Book episode has me facing my demons. My guest is Scott Derrickson, one of the best horror movie makers to ever do it. He scared us with Sinister, moved us with The Black Phone, marvelled us with Doctor Strange, and ruined my life with The Exorcism of Emily Rose. He’s back with The Gorge, a mad genre mashup, starring Anya-Taylor Joy and Miles Teller, currently streaming on Apple+. Scott joins me for a leisurely conversation about making that artistically-inclined ‘drive-in’ movie,...
Feb 28, 2025•1 hr 28 min
Ready to hear a conversation about some devastatingly dark things? Sophie White and I have got you covered! In this expansive chat, we talk about her calculatingly distressing novel, Where I End – in which an isolated island community plays host to the worst, cruellest kind of loneliness. And that books is a springboard for others things, psychosis, weaponised empathy, real-life atrocity and the way that all that darkness can seep into a place forever. But then we also have a good old chat about...
Feb 25, 2025•1 hr 30 min
The title speaks volumes this week. It’s a mission statement. Kirsty Logan is the master of certain kind of edgy, on-the-margins fiction, Queer in every meaning of the word. She can be witchy and folkloric, or contemporary and cutting edge – and all of that range is showcased in her new collection, No & Other Love Stories. We talk about female desire and monstrous fantasy, formal experimentation and the personal logic of stories…and some reassuringly unsettling focus on the erotics of human ...
Feb 18, 2025•1 hr 18 min
Time to misbehave. Virginia Feito’s new novel, Victorian Psycho, is all about good behaviour, positive standards and polite conduct…and what happens when you flout all that, by – I dunno – slaughtering a houseload of people. It’s a much buzzed about book that takes the psychopathy of American Psycho back to the straightlaced, be-corseted world of the 19th Century, then let’s rip. We talk about glorious violence, the humour of extremity, Charles Dickens and Bret Easton Ellis…and have a deeply amu...
Feb 11, 2025•1 hr 19 min
Are you hungry? Depending on your…erm… tastes, the next hour of conversation will do strange things to your appetite. Our guest is Lucy Rose, whose debut novel, The Lamb renders muscle and fat and sorrow down into a rich stew of cannibalism and rural Gothic. We talk about how rooted this book is in the landscape, history and folklore of Northern England – and we also talk a lot about eating people. How to make it sound gross… how to make it sound weirdly poetic. This is a book that’s gonna get p...
Feb 04, 2025•1 hr 18 min
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 seasoned ‘slingers. I hope this is fun. Support Talking Scared on Patreon Come talk books on Twitter ...
Feb 03, 2025•26 min
“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 don’t go alone. I’m joined by author and fellow King-nut, Nat Cassidy (Mary, Nestlings, When the Wolf Com...
Jan 28, 2025•2 hr 13 min
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 scared. It’s the kind of weird, collective storytelling that used to set internet forums alight! In t...
Jan 24, 2025•1 hr 10 min
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, and Susan and I talk about all of it – and just why she likes to write about as many times and places i...
Jan 21, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 224
