Send us a text And so we come to the end of another year in horror. Time to look back at the best that 2023 has had to offer, as determined by three of the best in the business. My trusted horror chancellor, Emily Hughes joins me – alongside C.J. Leede, the author of this year’s gloriously transgressive Maeve Fly, and the maestro of the macabre himself, Victor Lavalle. Together we cover the year’s freshest nightmares in the macro and the micro, looking at wider trends and picking our own favour...
Dec 19, 2023•2 hr 2 min•Ep. 174
Send us a text We’re going up in the world this week – longitudinally and latitudinally, with the GOAT of endurance, adventure Gothic, Michelle Paver. Michelle joins me for a big conversation about her novels Dark Matter and Thin Air – two of the most effective ghost stories of the 21st century. One takes us to the Arctic, the other to a Himalayan peak, both places littered with the dead… who may still be around. We talk about how ghost stories work, their tradition and what perhaps differentiat...
Dec 12, 2023•1 hr 31 min•Ep. 173
Send us a text Last time Gemma Amor came on the show we had a good ol’ chinwag about our haunted brains. This time around we get to some other ghosts, in her new novel, The Folly. It’s a sharp slice of coastal Gothic; Cornwall’s answer to The Shining if you will. The story follows Morgan and her aging father to the weird structure of the tital, where they find hauntings of many stripes, some uncannily familiar. It wouldn’t be a Gemma Amor episode if things didn’t get personal – and we talk about...
Dec 05, 2023•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 172
Send us a text We’ve had Cowboys versus Aliens but have you ever considered a threeway fight between gunslingers, vampires and weird cosmic cultists to an Elder God? If not why not? What do you even think about when you are washing the dishes? But fear not, C.S. Humble has you covered. His weird western trilogy, That Light Sublime is packed with all of the above and more. In The Massacre at Yellow Hill and A Red Winter in the West Seth introduces a cast of lovable rogues and the stakes of their ...
Nov 28, 2023•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 171
Send us a text Sometimes two words can make a jaded horror reader sit up straight. Ghost is one, Dinosaur is another. Ghost. Dinosaur. Have you ever heard a more beautiful combination, a sweeter symphony of syllables. If “Ghost Dinosaur” doesn’t make you go squeeee and shake your fists in excitement, I don’t know how to help you. Anyway, that’s the focus of Luke Dumas delightful new novel, The Paleontologist. It’s a story about a haunted man, a creepy museum, institutional intrigue, murder and G...
Nov 21, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 170
Send us a text Horror is about finding light in darkness. That’s the mission statement of this podcast, at least. And it’s never been truer than in this week’s episode. Tyler Jones re-joins us on Talking Scared to talk about his new novel, Midas. We cover its original mix of western tropes, Gothic fantasy and cult horror, but it’s family that lies at the heart of both the book and the conversation. Tyler talks us through the real life emotional rollercoaster that inspired this story. It’s a pers...
Nov 14, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 169
Send us a text History is haunted. Ghosts are injustice persevering. So many horror stories hinge on that idea, but for Tananarive Due it’s more personal than that. Her new novel, The Reformatory, is borne from the ghosts hidden in her own family history. The story takes place in a hideously cruel juvenile correction facility, in a racist town, in the 1950s. As you can imagine, very few good things happen to her child protagonist. We talk about the link between horror and history, about writing ...
Nov 07, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 168
Send us a text Sometimes when you’re doing something scary good company can be a blessing. Nat Cassidy is good company. And this week he talks me through the haunted hallways and avenues of his New York horror ode, Nestlings – but he also helps me tackle the very real world horror that is turning our newspapers into nightmare-fodder and the Middle East into a tinderbox. But have no fear (well, always have a little fear!) this is no mere despairing, depressing look at reality. We also talk about ...
Oct 31, 2023•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 167
Send us a text Some stories are just too big for one podcast. Some stories should be too big for one book. Sam Rebelein’s Edenville is one such story. This 300-something page novel has more crammed into it than your average fantasy trilogy. There is backstory upon backstory, a cosmic framework, and enough different monsters to fill Guillermo del Toro’s minibus. Yet somehow Sam corrals it all into a whimsical horror romp – a well-organised riot. We talk about ideas… about thinking them up, lettin...
Oct 24, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 166
Send us a text Some stories are too short, some are too long, but some stories are just right. It’s the Goldilocks zone: the novella. What is the secret to crafting a longer story but not letting it run away from you? How do you sustain the terror beyond the shortest form? How do you know what to keep in and what to cut out? This is the art of the novella, and I’m joined by a pair of expert practitioners to talk it through. Josh Malerman and Ronald Malfi have both published novella collections t...
Oct 17, 2023•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 165
Send us a text This week is a special roundtable episode. An exciting, challenging and very very thought-provoking tour of contemporary Black horror, in the company of three writers at the bleeding edge. Nnedi Okorafor, Maurice Broaddus and Lesley Nneka Arimah are just three of the contributors to Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror. It’s curated by Jordan Peele, who knows a thing or two about that particular landscape, and these three authors present a fantastic cross-section ...
Oct 10, 2023•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 164
Send us a text Come home!! We have to come home!! The House is calling us. Yep, this week we are going back to the most haunted house of all. Hill House. Shirley Jackson’s classic bad place. And we’re going in the company of three-time Shirley Jackson Award Winner, Elizabeth Hand, whose new novel is the first ever sanctioned sequel to Jackson’s classic. A Haunting on the Hill submits four new unwitting victims to the horrors of Hill House. But that’s where the stories diverge. Liz’s take on this...
Oct 03, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 163
Send us a text This week on Talking Scared we are joining hands with Chuck Wendig to take the fight to Big Fruit. They have been lying to us about apples all our lives. Chuck’s new novel, Black River Orchard is all about apples. Tasty, evil, corruptive. The book grows from the fertile soil of American small-town horror, and we talk about some texts in that storytelling style, as well as how Chuck himself approaches writing such big books with so many character arcs. We also cover apple-lore, how...
Sep 26, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 162
Send us a text Clay McLeod Chapman returns to Talking Scared to answer some serious questions, the first being what the holy f**k Clay?! Clay has never been a writer to shy away from a high concept challenge (haunted mushrooms, anyone?) but his latest novel, What Kind of Mother goes into the uncharted regions of the mind and soul, dredging the craziest of horrors from the murky waters of his native Chesapeake Bay. We talk the terrors of both adolescence and parenthood, the terrible power of imag...
Sep 19, 2023•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 161
Send us a text I’m back, partially rested and with some romance lingering in my soul. Good timing, cos this week’s episode focuses on the heart as well as the blood that it pumps. Isabel Cañas returns to the show to talk about her second novel, Vampires of El Norte – a sweeping historical love-story set against a backdrop of class tumult, war and … yeah… vampires. It’s not a spoiler guys – it’s in the title! Isabel speaks so eloquently about the relationship between vampirism and cultural legacy...
Sep 12, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 160
Send us a text Why do we keep heading back to the woods? WHY?? Nothing good ever happens there. Alexander James would argue otherwise, but he’s clearly made of sterner stuff than me. In his debut novel, The Woodkin, Alex parlays his love of the wild outdoors into a story that heads toward a familiar backwoods nightmares, before veering far off the beaten trail into something stranger and even scarier. In this episode we talk about his love for the woods of the Pacific Northwest (and yes! I ask h...
Sep 05, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 159
Send us a text If you thought The Last House on Needless Street was tricksy, just wait until you hear about Looking Glass Sound. This is Cat’s ode to the Maine of Stephen King, the enigmatic narrators of Shirley Jackson and… well, a host of other comparisons that I foist upon her in the next hour. Above all that though – the book is so typically, inimitably Catriona Ward. It’s a destined Gothic classic that takes the genre, crumples it into a ball before rewriting the whole thing. We cover the p...
Aug 29, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 158
Send us a text We’re off to La La Land this week, to talk cursed films, 90s horror nostalgia and Winona Ryder(!!) Our guest is Josh Winning – who has parlayed his years of writing from and about film sets into a horror novel. Burn the Negative is set in the backlots, soundstages, cutting rooms and dank motel rooms of Hollywood. It features a film with a fatal jinx and a whole lotta love for the 90s teen slasher. Amongst all of that, Josh and I also tick off the uncanny creepiness of child stars,...
Aug 22, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 157
Send us a text Sorry not sorry this week. Yes I’m going to destroy your wallet and your bookshelves…but you LOVE IT!! Our guest is Sadie Hartmann, AKA Mother Horror to the likes of us. One of the most influential horror reviewers in the world. The editor in chief of Dark Hart Books and the co-owner of the Night Worms horror subscription service. She knows a thing or two about this haunted library. And she’s written a book to guide the unwary, or the just-plain curious. Or anyone who wants a new ...
Aug 15, 2023•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 156
Send us a text Our guest this week is Stephen King. That’s it. That’s the intro. Stephen King. The architect of modern horror and the creative north star of my life, and many of yours. He’s on the show, talking about his new book, Holly and why the central character just won’t let him go. We cover his attitude to academia, horror and hope, how his worldview sits with a fractured reality, and we even hear some exciting, exclusive details about some upcoming books. I lack the words to convey my de...
Aug 08, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 155
Send us a text We’re off on a Goth pilgrimage this week folks, to the motherland, Transylvania, to talk folk-horror and more with Alex Woodroe. Alex is a Romanian writer of dark fictions, the Editor in Chief of Tenebrous Press, and the debut author of Whisperwood. The book brings the monsters of Romanian myth and legend to the fore in a battle of wills with an isolated village. There isn’t a vampire in sight. Bram Stoker didn’t know what he was talking about. Alex does! And we get into lots of t...
Aug 01, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 154
Send us a text This week we’re joined by the man, the myth, the mystery that is Chuck Tingle. Who knows the truth of this enigmatic figure? What visage lies beneath the pink bag that forever encases his face? Does he really have a PhD in massage? Puzzles abound… The one thing that’s certain is the brilliance of his new novel. Camp Damascus is a full-bloodied horror novel set in that most hideous of environs: a religious community and a gay conversion camp. Sounds triggering. It may well be … but...
Jul 25, 2023•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 153
Send us a text This week I’m recording very close to home with Andrew Michael Hurley. Andrew burst onto the folk-horror scene with subtle aplomb (can one burst subtly?) back in 2014, with The Loney. That slice of weirdness was set in the very town in which I spent my wet, dismal childhood holidays. It conjured shivers in more ways than one. Now he is here to talk about the reissue of his 2019 novel, Starve Acre. It’s a bleak, bitter, wintery tale of isolation, grief and ritual, set in the Yorksh...
Jul 18, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 152
Send us a text War, what is it good for? Absolutely noth…. well actually, it is quite good for horror stories. Our guest this week doesn’t plumb the usual horrors-of-war route, though. Verity Holloway’s The Others of Edenwell is a supremely subtle, slow-burning excavation of trauma and national nightmares, set in a (supposedly) idyllic spa-cum-convalescent-hospital as battle rages elsewhere. Of course, there are horrors much closer to home. It’s possibly my first foray into the First World War o...
Jul 11, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 151
Send us a text This week Danielle Trussoni arrives at Talking Scared in a rush. She has a meeting to get to, and we have LOTS of things to talk about in less than an hour. Her new novel, The Puzzle Master crams in enough for a whole Discovery Channel series on conspiracy, mysticism and esoteric history, plus dolls, Golems, quantum computing and a cute little Dachshund named Conundrum. How is a host supposed to cover all that at a rush. The answer, drink more coffee and don’t pause to breathe! We...
Jul 04, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 150
Send us a text Thrust your fists against the post and still insist you see the… …oh hello. You came back. Thank Gan. We have a monster to defeat this week. Yes, this is the second part of the Talking Scared dive into Stephen King’s IT. This time we are getting weird. Joined by stalwart friends, Ally Malinenko (Ghost Girl, This Appearing House) and Nat Cassidy (Mary: An Awakening of Terror), I’m delving below ground and into the cosmic tangle that underpins all of King’s fiction. We’re asking wha...
Jun 30, 2023•1 hr 37 min•Ep. 149
Send us a text Come get a balloon, bring your slingshot, let’s float…it’s here!!! Yes, finally we’re off to Derry, to do battle with that goddamn clown. But as everyone knows, we can’t fight Pennywise alone. That’s why I’m taking my trusty, loyal, brave band of Losers with me. Nat Cassidy (Mary: An Awakening of Terror) and Ally Malinenko (This Appearing House) are joining me for a tour of the sewers, subtext and sociological horrors at the heart of King’s IT. Halfway through we realised this wou...
Jun 26, 2023•1 hr 34 min•Ep. 148
Send us a text I’ve rarely been more excited about an episode – for you to hear it or, indeed, about its very contents. We’re joined this week by Mike Flanagan. Yes, that Mike Flanagan. The genius loci of modern visual horror, the writer and director behind Midnight Mass, The Haunting of Hill House, Doctor Sleep, The Midnight Club and Oculus. Our most literary horror director and a man who understand that horror is where the heart is. If you think my praise is too gushing then… we’ll just have t...
Jun 13, 2023•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 147
Send us a text If horror is indeed a broad church, then our guest this week is preaching from the darkest of pulpits. Paula D. Ashe is the author of We Are Here To Hurt Each Other – a collection of short stories that has accrued infamy and acclaim in equal measure over the last 12 months. Her stories are cruel. They present a depraved world of man (and woman’s) direst excesses, a world that rubs against the numinous and the cosmically amoral. Can you say ‘trigger warnings needed’! We talk at len...
Jun 06, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 146
Send us a text What if the house that shaped you was a broken, haunted place? That’s one of many questions we explore this week, in the company of Sarah Gailey. Their 2022 hit, Just Like Home is out in paperback and … hell … do we get our fingers right into its dusty, cobwebbed corners! We talk about serial-killing fathers and monstrous mothers, the power and pitfalls of descriptive prose. We discuss Freudian metaphors and the profound fears of childhood, offer a fresh take on the thorny questio...
May 30, 2023•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 145
