Send us a text Talking Scared is a whole year old today, and to celebrate I’ve brought you one of the brightest stars in the horror sky, someone who is getting bigger, better and badder with each book he releases. It’s Stephen Graham Jones! Stephen is here to discuss My Heart is a Chainsaw – his oh-so-meta revision of the slasher movie and the final girl. The book starts dark and gets darker, with references to every single slasher that you’ve seen, as well as plenty you haven’t. If you say you’...
Aug 31, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 54
Send us a text Morning campers! This week we’re off to the great outdoors for a hike, a night under the stars and a spot of psychological terror. Our guest is Zoje Stage. In her previous novels, Babyteeth and Wonderland she took us to dark houses and interior spaces. Her new novel, Getaway, does the opposite, dragging us on the adventure of a lifetime. A week hiking in the Grand Canyon. Just the ticket to blow away the covid claustrophobia. Shame it all goes so horribly wrong! We talk a lot abou...
Aug 24, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 53
Send us a text This week the walls between reality and fiction begin to break down. What is truth, what is a lie? Can a story be both? These are the kinds of questions my guest, Richard Chizmar, has become an expert at answering. His new novel (if we can call it that) is Chasing the Boogeyman and it’s a unique beast. Part memoir, part true-crime, part horror fiction – it takes the streets of Rich’s boyhood home, colours them sepia and then lets a serial killer run loose. We talk about the illusi...
Aug 17, 2021•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 52
Send us a text This week’s guest couldn’t be better timed. In a week when we find out the world is not only screwed, it’s REALLY screwed, our guest is Brian Evenson, with his new collection, The Glassy Burning Floor of Hell – which could be a description of many places on the globe right now. These stories transport the reader to strange, deformed, blasted landscapes. Like the worlds they depict, Brian’s tales are harsh and dark and frightening but, as you’ll hear me say, they are also a surpris...
Aug 10, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 51
Send us a text Sisters are doing it for themselves – literally! Our guest this week is Sara Flannery Murphy, author of Girl One – which is either a feminist dystopian nightmare or a superhero origin story, or both. It is an alternative history of genetic science that asks the question of what would happen if women no longer needed men to conceive a child. The answer is simultaneously complex and chilling. Sara and I talk about writing as a feminist in the time of Trump (and living in a Red State...
Aug 03, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 50
Send us a text Why isn’t there more horror about marriage? Think about it. You marry someone. Spend your life with them. But do you really know them, or what they are capable of. Ronald Malfi’s Come With Me pries open these secrets, sending the protagonist on a tailspinning road trip in pursuit of the truth about the woman he has loved and lost. It’s a big, satisfying, chunky summer novel packed full of murder and monstrosity and motel-stays in the creepier corners of the country. You’ll love it...
Jul 27, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 49
Send us a text Weather this hot demands the cool balm of a book, and do I have one for you. The Book of Accidents is the latest horror-epic from Chuck Wendig – the seeming literary successor to King, Straub, McCammon and Barker. Wendig’s books take you in their embrace and say “you’re mine now” or maybe “we all float down here.” Here, in this case, being a mineshaft in the rural vacancy of Pennsylvania. There is plenty of hype around The Book of Accidents and I’m delighted to say it’s all earned...
Jul 20, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 48
Send us a text Hello fellow horror-fiends. This week we’re going retro, to the heyday of horror, when men wore masks and women checked basements in their negligee. Our guest is Grady Hendrix, a writer perpetually interested in taking tropes, only to stab them, kill them, and resurrect them as something new. He’s done it with exorcisms, vampires, the devil and … erm .. IKEA. Now he’s taking on the slasher and his counterpart, in The Final Girl Support Group. A novel that takes the bloody, weary b...
Jul 13, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 47
Send us a text This week we’re doing something different. No author and no single book. Instead it’s a roundtable discussion, with Sadie Hartmann (AKA Mother Horror) and Emily Hughes, the genius loci behind Tor Nightfire. Together we look back over the last six months – the highs, the not-so-many-lows and all the endless twitter controversies – to address the state of the horror nation at the midpoint of 2021. All three of us talk about the books we have loved the most so far this year, what els...
Jul 06, 2021•1 hr 53 min•Ep. 46
Send us a text This week I have been forced to up my game. Our guest is Carmen Maria Machado, and her works is not for the lazy or faint-hearted. From her dizzying collection of short fiction, Her Body and Other Parties, to her one-of-a-kind memoir, In the Dream House, Carmen’s writing forces a humble interviewer such as me, to question how we talk about books, author, character, truth, fiction and all the messy space in between. In the Dream House deconstructs what a memoir is and can do, and I...
Jun 29, 2021•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 45
Send us a text It’s a dirty, grim, glorious time on Talking Scared this week. After a last-minute schedule reshuffle we have Eric LaRocca, here to talk about his word-of-mouth sensation of a novella – Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke. Gotten worse is quite the understatement. This book goes so far beyond the pale in terms of horror’s usual comfort level these days. It’s a simple tale of online love, BDSM and self-mutilation, all tinged with some wonderful early noughties nostalgia. T...
Jun 22, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 44
Send us a text Pour yourself a whisky, grab a seat and listen to the best voice in dark fiction tell you some stories. Our guest is Joe Lansdale author of so many books I can’t even begin to list them. Oh, ok, I will. Edge of Dark Water, Paradise Sky, The Bottoms, The Thicket, Fender Lizard … “Bubba Ho Tep”, Cold in July … the entire Hap and Leonard series. And he joins me to talk about his newest, Moon Lake. A tale of dark nostalgia, small town politics and murder set on the banks of a drowned ...
Jun 15, 2021•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 43
Send us a text Maybe it’s the heat but this week we’re getting angry on Talking Scared. Our guest is V. Castro – author of Goddess of Filth and her newest, Queen of the Cicadas – and she’s full of rage. Thankfully, it’s not directed at me, despite my hideous attempts at Spanish pronunciation. Queen of the Cicadas is about identity, folklore and the residue of a decades-old crime that stands as representative of all crimes against Latinx people by an uncaring world. The death of a young girl brin...
Jun 08, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 42
Send us a text It’s not often you speak to the author of a book that EVERYONE has heard of. This week I got the chance. Max Brooks. Max-freaking-Brooks, author of global bestseller World War Z is here. But rather than the undead, we’re talking hairy things in the woods, technological dependence and woke hipsters being eaten. Max’s latest novel, Devolution, regales us with the lives (and deaths) of an eco-community living deep in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Stranded by a disaster, they ...
Jun 01, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 41
Send us a text If you’re returning to the office any time soon and you’re really bummed about it – this week’s guest will make you feel better …. cos it could be so much worse. Zakiya Dalila Harris is the author of the much-anticipated debut, The Other Black Girl. It’s been touted as Jordan Peele’s Get Out meets The Devil Wears Prada and that’s true, there is white conspiracy and awful bosses aplenty, but I’d also suggest more than a little of the paranoid frisson of Rosemary’s Baby and the toe-...
May 25, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 40
Send us a text Josh Malerman, bestselling wunderkinder of horror, author of Birdbox, Malorie, Unbury Carol and now Goblin, has graced Talking Scared with his presence. We’re talking about Goblin specifically, his new ‘novel in six novellas’ detailing the lives and losses of people in the weirdest small-town west of Castle Rock. It’s got monstrous owls and more monstrous police, an impossible hedge maze, things in boxes that MUST NOT BE OPENED, and the fear of fear itself. As Josh points out (and...
May 18, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 39
Send us a text This week the Queen of black horror is Talking Scared. Tananarive Due is bestowing her patronage on little ol’ me and I’m not quite sure what to do with myself. Tananarive ranks amongst the most respected horror writers of the 21st Century, from her breakout effort, The Between, to her British Fantasy Award winning collection, Ghost Summer and her magnum opus (so far at least) The Good House. She took the time to talk me through her career, from breaking free of the MFA fixation o...
May 11, 2021•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 38
Send us a text Do you ever feel you’re being watched? Ever caught a flicker from the corner of your eye that you can’t explain? Do you run out of milk more than you think you should? Maybe, just maybe, there is someone living in your house. It’s a worldwide phenomenon (just check google) and this week’s guest has turned it into a genre-bending novel that’s tipped as one of THE Gothic reads of 2021. A.J. Gnuse’s debut, Girl in the Walls is a literary chiller about grief, loneliness and what the w...
May 04, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 37
Send us a text Jeff VanderMeer is our guest. Need I say more? First things first though, rest easy, the episode title doesn’t refer to either me or Jeff. We both make it out alive. Not everything does though. Listen on for the most on-the-nose display of savage nature, so perfect a backdrop to a conversation about animals, ecological crisis and the horror of extinction. What starts with the brave little hummingbird could end up killing us all. Jeff’s new novel, Hummingbird Salamander is an eco-n...
Apr 27, 2021•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 36
Send us a text This week, I bring you MOAR monsters!!! Our guest is Christina Henry, whose new novel, Near the Bone fits so nicely as the unofficial second part to a cryptozoology-inflected series that began with Danielle Trussoni last week. Don’t worry, I’m not talking about the Loch Ness Monster for an hour, but the novel does feature a monster, some cryptid hunters and the very violent evils of both man and beast. Christina does manage to get me off the subject of monsters for a while, to giv...
Apr 20, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 35
Send us a text When was the last time a story took you completely by surprise? Danielle Trussoni’s The Ancestor ambushed me into loving it. What seems a standard Gothic fiction turns into something wholly weirder … and wilder … as a young American woman inherits a creaky European castle, and the monstrous baggage that comes with it. Dani came on the show – somehow finding time between writing her new novel and being the New York Times’ horror columnist – to talk about The Ancestor’s paperback re...
Apr 13, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 34
Send us a text Welcome to the Green Mountain State, lovely, liberal . . . haunted!! Our guest is to ghost-stories what Ben and Jerry are to ice cream – Vermont’s resident ghost-writer-in-chief, Jennifer McMahon. Her new novel, The Drowning Kind takes us back to the small towns, local stores and eerie histories typical of her fiction, but with an added turning of the screw – it’s not the house that’s haunted, it’s the pool out back. If that sounds cheesy, it ISN’T. The Drowning Kind is an alterna...
Apr 06, 2021•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 33
Send us a text Does your child draw pentagrams? Have you noticed the neighbours hanging their robes over the washing line? Worst of all, have they started listening to …. HEAVY METAL?? You may be experiencing a satanic panic. Worry not, our guest, Clay McLeod Chapman can diagnose this for you. Clay’s new novel, Whisper Down the Lane is both a homage to the horror of the 80s, and an exploration of how that decade's battle with truth, memory and Satan(!!) lives on today. His story riffs on the ver...
Mar 30, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 32
Send us a text We’ve covered our share of plagues on this show during our all-too-real year of sitting indoors and waiting for the pandemic to sod off. Do you have the guts for one more? You should, but you may empty them. Our guest is V.L. Valentine and her debut novel The Plague Letters transports us to London in 1665. The Great Plague is scouring the population, with only the barest medical expertise to hold it at bay. Into this ghastly furnace comes a killer, hiding in plain sight. It’s a fa...
Mar 24, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 31
Send us a text This is a big one. The Last House on Needless Street may be the best pure horror novel I’ve read this decade. Okay, the decade is only 3 months old, but check back with me in 9 years and I may still be saying the same. I’m delighted to speak to the author of this latter-day classic, Catriona Ward, about secrets and lies and how the hell you begin to describe a book that is one big spoiler! Once Cat and I work out how to even talk about the novel without ruining for everyone, we th...
Mar 17, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 30
Send us a text Once upon a time in a land far, far away, there was a young woman, bad men, and some homicidal mermaids. It’s fairy tale time. Our guest is Angela Slatter, who’s new novel All the Murmuring Bones turns the fairy stories that comforted you as a child, into a horrid tale of murder, inheritance, death, sex and entrapment. In this world Hansel and Gretel would be a very tasty pie-filling. Angela has spent years studying the fairy tale tradition and turning it against her readers. All ...
Mar 10, 2021•59 min•Ep. 29
Send us a text Isolation is a bitch, but it could be worse! Our guest is Bethany Clift and her debut novel is Last One at the Party – a pandemic novel that reminds you that at least we have Netflix, facetime and the chance to call our friends. Beth’s novel follows an unnamed woman, the last survivor of a global plague that has emptied out the world in just a few weeks. As she struggles through the ruins of a posta-apocalyptic Britain, she also confronts the wreckage of her life in the ‘before ti...
Mar 03, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 28
Send us a text If you’ve been homeschooling, in labour, or generally responsible for the life of a small human during lockdown, then this episode is for you. There are people out there, writers with great skill and empathy, who share your pain, and know how you feel. This week’s guest is Julia Fine, the author of Bram Stoker Award Nominated What Should Be Wild, and now the postpartum nightmare, The Upstairs House. Julia’s novel is about new motherhood, societal expectation, the horror of lost se...
Feb 24, 2021•59 min•Ep. 27
Send us a text Hands up who wants a holiday! Sarah Pearse’s The Sanatorium could be just the thing to purge your lockdown travel desires. It will either transport you to the ice-white peaks of the Swiss Alps, to luxuriate in the views inside your mind. Or, it’ll make you never ever want to stay in a hotel again. The Sanatorium is Sarah’s debut thriller, a novel that sits uncomfortably (in the best possible way) between crime, mystery and horror – with a hospital-cum-hotel that would rank VERY lo...
Feb 17, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 26
Send us a text Have you ever had a book scare you so much that part of you wishes you hadn’t read it? That’s the experience I had reading Gemma Files’ latest collection, In That Endlessness, Our End. I don’t know how Gemma does it, but with each story she finds a psychological pressure point that feels specifically mine, and the presses down on it hard with her pen. On more than one occasion I had to stop reading this book because it freaked me out too much. And I mean that as the highest praise...
Feb 10, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 25
