Send us a text When your guest calls herself the “Master of the Bitch” you do wonder what you’re getting into. Courtney Summers, by her own admission, wants to upset people. Yet she’s a delight! To kick of Women in Horror week we discuss her new novel, The Project, which follows a young woman as she investigates the New York based cult that has swallowed up her sister. This is FAR from your standard cult novel. As Courtney explains, she wanted to get away from the exploitation and the obvious ho...
Feb 03, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 24
Send us a text Let’s get Gothic! Our guest this week is Laura Purcell, doyenne of the dark, heiress of historical fiction (and other alliterative titles). Laura blew away the cobwebs wrapped around spooky period fiction with her breakout smash, The Silent Companions in 2017. She followed up with The Corset and Bone China and now she’s back with her newest Gothic novel, The Shape of Darkness. The novel examines all the wrinkles and crannies in the Victorian underbelly, from spirit mediums, to mes...
Jan 27, 2021•56 min•Ep. 23
Send us a text In a week in which the White House becomes a little less orange, it’s hard to dwell on the nasty side of life. But this is Talking Scared and we can find the grim and creepy on even the most optimistic days. Our guest is C.J. Tudor – the current queen of the British thriller. She sits quite comfortably on the cusp of horror and crime, and we get into the subject of exactly where that borderline is. Her new novel, The Burning Girls continues her blending of the fast-paced American ...
Jan 20, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 22
Send us a text Ready for the first GREAT book you’ll read this year? Our guest this week is Will Dean, calling all the way from the middle of a Scandinavian forest to talk about his new novel, The Last Thing To Burn. I’ve been banging on about this book since I read it in December. It’s a latter-day masterpiece, a read-in-one-sitting, this-has-to-be-a-movie kind of book. Think Misery, think Room and then think how much worse could the horrors be. The truth, a lot worse. Will and I talk about off...
Jan 13, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 21
Send us a text I like this year better than last year already. Ok, we may be plunged back into lockdown 3.0 and it may be cold, and the cinemas may still be shut. But we have a vaccine, Trump looks like he’s got nappy rash … and there’s a whole year of horror fiction to look forward to. Unfortunately for you, there’s no guest this week. Instead, you’re stuck with me as I talk you through the highlights and predicted hits of horror fiction 2021. I’ve already read two books that are fighting their...
Jan 06, 2021•30 min•Ep. 20
Send us a text 2020 is nearly behind us (woohoo!) but we have time for one more interview with a master of horror. Our guest this week is Michael Marshall Smith the genre polymath and man of a thousand pseudonyms (all of them involving ‘Michael’.) He is joining me to discuss his new career retrospective, The Best of Michael Marshall Smith, published in a beautiful volume by Subterranean Press. It’s a huge collection of stories, covering Michael’s 30 years of writing, from his recent work, all th...
Dec 30, 2020•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 19
Send us a text Merry Christmas and/or time-off-work-week! For all of you currently freezing your asses off in cold climes, this week’s episode may make you feel a little too warm under the collar. Our guest is Gabriel Bergmoser, an author who exploded onto the horror scene in early 2020 with The Hunted, a pulpy, violent, visceral hell ride through the Australian wilderness in the company of very human prey and predators. Considering the amount of people hanging from hooks and suffering violent d...
Dec 23, 2020•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 18
Send us a text This late into 2020 we are all craving a) a holiday and b) time with friends. Our guest this week may cast a slightly different perspective on both. Rachel Harrison is the author of The Return, a novel that looks into the dark heart of friendship and asks “do you REALLY know who your friends are?” The book was published all the way back in March, by Berkley in the US and Hodder in the UK. I finally found time to catch up with Rachel and to tell her why this book scared me so badly...
Dec 16, 2020•55 min•Ep. 17
Send us a text Stand back! Our Guest this week is Christopher Golden, author of all manner of horror, adventure and generally freaky fiction. His latest book is Red Hands, the third featuring Ben Walker, action-hero and expert in the batsh*t weird! I have used the words ‘relevant’ and ‘prescient’ more than ever in 2020 – this being, after all, the year that all our horror stories became true. Even by that standard Red Hands is creepily on the money though. It’s the story of a plague that is tran...
Dec 09, 2020•59 min•Ep. 16
Send us a text This week our guest is Sam J. Miller, author of The Blade Between - a novel for anyone who loves or loathes their hometown. It’s a story of small-town ghosts, hidden hatreds and sudden violence. And behind it all looms the issue of gentrification, in all its ugliness and beauty. Listening to Sam talk, you may think differently about that cute little bistro that’s opened down the street. Y’know, the one that took over from that local place that had been there for years . . . Sam’s ...
Dec 02, 2020•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 15
Send us a text If you’re a fan of podcasts and horror (and of course you are!) then chances are you’ll recognise our guest. Jonathan Sims is the author of Thirteen Storeys, but you may know him (or his voice) as the creator and narrator of The Magnus Archives. Yep, that’s right, I’m interviewing The Archivist himself. Thirteen Storeys takes a lot of what makes The Magnus Archives great, and blends it with contemporary social realism to create a book that’s horrifying in more ways than one. It’s ...
Nov 25, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 14
Send us a text Things get a little cultish this week on Talking Scared. Our guest is Craig DiLouie, author of the brand-spanking-new creepy commune novel, The Children of Red Peak – released November 18th from RedHook Books. It’s a tale of crazy goings-on in the desert, of ritual mutilation and lasting trauma. All that fun stuff! Craig immediately has me in his thrall, even without the Kool-Aid. (interesting fact, it was actually Flavour Aid that the Jonestown cultists drank). We talk about the ...
Nov 18, 2020•52 min•Ep. 13
Send us a text This week Rumaan Alam presents us with a wholly ambiguous end of the world. Rumaan’s new novel, Leave the World Behind has taken the publishing landscape by storm. Reviews are everywhere and critics are shouting its name from the rooftops, with good reason. Leave the World Behind is a strange, uneasy tale of the world going wrong. What begins as a family getaway to Long Island spirals into fear as strangers arrive, bringing news of a blackout in New York City. From there, things o...
Nov 11, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 12
Send us a text If you are feeling nervous today, or just want something to distract you from the doomscrolling, then welcome to our Election Day special. Our guest is Andrew Pyper whose latest novel, The Residence, is an historical tour around a White House under siege from a demon. This particular spirit is arrogant, spiteful and determined to use the Oval Office for dire purposes – but he’s not orange at least! Andrew is no stranger to creepy, spirit-infested fiction. His previous work include...
Nov 03, 2020•56 min•Ep. 11
Send us a text It’s Halloween and in lieu of any trick and/or treating this plague year, I offer you a conversation with Colin Dickey, mystery-maestro and curator of the creepy. Colin is the author of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places (2016) and The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters and our Obsession with the Unexplained – books that plumb the depths of the human mind and our fixation on the creepy things at the margins of the known world. In this wide-ranging disc...
Oct 31, 2020•1 hr•Ep. 10
Send us a text Where do you stand on horror and comedy? Can a book be too funny to be scary, or too terrifying to raise a chuckle? Our guest this week would argue not. T. Kingfisher is the author of the critically-acclaimed The Twisted Ones (2019) and her brand-new release The Hollow Places. Both are scorching horror tales, with some hideous imagery, exquisite world-building and nightmare-fuel ideas . . . but they are also both laugh-out-loud funny, at least to us sickos anyway! T (short for ‘Th...
Oct 28, 2020•59 min•Ep. 9
Send us a text This week Emily Danforth takes us back to school. Her new novel, Plain Bad Heroines has a lot to say about the history of queer women, the price of fame, and whether found footage horror is any good. Plain Bad Heroines features heavily on all the best-of lists for the season, and it’s an early reputation that’s well deserved. This tricksy, twisty novel spans centuries to tell the tale of a very peculiar school and the horror film made about it two hundred years later. If you have ...
Oct 20, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 8
Send us a text Kate Summerscale is our first guest working in the realms of non-fiction. Her back-catalogue proves that the real world is every bit as dark and terrifying as the inside of Stephen King’s head. She’s covered murder in the famous The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (2008) and now she’s back with a more spiritual crisis in The Haunting of Alma Fielding. The book examines a very odd case of poltergeist activity in the London suburbs between the wars. Famous ghost hunters get involved, much ...
Oct 13, 2020•58 min•Ep. 7
Send us a text Ahoy mateys! My guest this week is the locked-room-murder-maestro himself, Stuart Turton. In 2018 Stu burst onto the scene with his genre-splicing triumph, The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. It won awards and melted some brains with its maddening twists and turns. Stu’s follow-up is equally intricate but this time it’s also seaworthy. The Devil and the Dark Water is a murder mystery set on a 16th Century trading ship, but in true Turton-esque (is that a thing yet) style, it’s ...
Oct 06, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 6
Send us a text This week we get visceral – with the extreme body horror of Robert Jeremy Johnson and his new novel THE LOOP. Jeremy speaks to us from Portland, Oregon, where he’s busy watching the forest fires and working on ways to weaponise his words for good. THE LOOP is a novel all about conspiracy theory, medical mishap, and a class war raging through a small town. Think your favourite 80s teen comedy (with its guts spilling out) mixed with a little bit of 50s pulp Americana and smeared wit...
Sep 30, 2020•59 min•Ep. 5
Send us a text This week’s guest is up-and-coming horror extraordinaire, Jo Kaplan. Jo’s new haunted house novel, It Will Just Be Us is a tour-de-force of chills, thrills and things that kill. It’s got everything you could possibly want: creepy old house – check, mysterious locked room – CHECK, a witch who lurks in a swamp – CHECK!!!! It’s also got some of the best female relationships I’ve read in horror for a while, enough to pass the Bechdel test with flying colours. Jo and I talk about Freud...
Sep 22, 2020•52 min•Ep. 4
Send us a text This week we’re in conversation with Silvia Moreno-Garcia, the author of Mexican Gothic - 2020's twisted publishing phenomenon. We discuss the novel's roots in British soil, and whether a book can be considered 'too' Mexican or not Mexican enough. Along the way we also consider the classic Mexican horror cinema of Enrique Taboada, why not everything has to be magic realism, and why all aspiring writers should learn to keep their receipts. Silvia has fiery words for those who think...
Sep 16, 2020•58 min•Ep. 3
Send us a text In the second episode i'm in conversation with John Langan, contemporary literary horror superstar and all round scholar of the genre. John is the author of the Bram Stoker Award-Winning classic The Fisherman and his latest collection is Children of the Fang and Other Genealogies. We talk about great influences and literary ventriloquism, what makes a great horror title, and what it's like to be part of the coolest club in the horror community. There are few writers out there with...
Sep 08, 2020•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 2
Send us a text In the first ever episode of Talking Scared we speak to horror megastar Paul Tremblay, author of the modern classic, A Head Full of Ghosts and this year's virus-shocker Survivor Song. There are musings on pandemics real and imaginary, the terror of sharks, and the terrible truth at the heart of horror fiction.Books mentioned in our conversation include: The Stand – Stephen King Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus – Bill Wasik & Monica Murphy Things W...
Sep 01, 2020•59 min•Ep. 1
