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To kick off a new year of Talking Scared, I’ve gone and hooked us a big guest, with a whopper of a story.

John Langan is the author of The Fisherman. It’s one of the great works of supernatural fiction written this century, but its story doesn’t end at its back-cover. The strange mythology of The Fisherman extends beyond, swimming further downstream, to pop its monstrous head above the surface in John’s wider universe of short stories and novellas.

In this special episode, we talk at length about The Fisherman – about the classic books, real-world legends and cultural beliefs that inspired it, and about the process of building a  whole new mythos.

John is the poet-scholar of horror. This is the class you wish you’d taken in college. 

Enjoy!

Other books mentioned:

House of Windows (2009), by John Langan

“Mother of Stone”, in The Wide Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies (2013), by John Langan

“Bor Urus”, in Sefira and Other Betrayals (2019), by John Langan

Our Share of Night (2023), by Mariana Enriquez

The Croning (2012), by Laird Barron

The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All (2013), by Laird Barron

Pet Sematary (1983), by Stephen King

“The Monkey’s Paw” (1902), by W. W. Jacobs

Absolom, Absolom (1951), by William Faulkner

“The Call of Cthulhu” (1928), by H.P. Lovecraft

The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (1988), by Roberto Calasso

“Development” (1889), by Robert Browning

Ironweed (1983), by William Kennedy

Come Closer (2003), by Sara Gran

Motherless Child (2012), by Glen Hirshberg

Screams From the Dark: 29 Tales of Monsters and the Monstrous (2022), edited by Ellen Datlow (contains “Glen Hirshberg’s “Devil” and John Langan’s “Bludzuger”)

Furnace (2016), by Livia Llewelyn

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