Zombies first shambled onto our cinema screens in the 1932 film White Zombie staring Bela Lugosi. Early incarnations involved voodoo reanimation and lacked the whole brain-eating aspect. (There’s a really interesting article by Carnegie Mellon University that charts the early history of the zombie). But let us jump to what modern audiences consider a zombie. For that, […]

Part of a murder mystery’s charm is the narrative movement from chaos to order. The natural balance of justice is overturned and it’s up to ordinary people – rather than the law – to fix it. The uncovering of clues, red herrings, the many suspicious characters – all of these are essential to a good […]

Fairy tale retellings are always popular. Fairy tales are some of the first stories we learn as children. As well as being entertaining, they are instructive. Don’t stray from the path. Don’t trust wolves, or men. Fill your pockets with stones, not breadcrumbs. If you’re going to steal some herbs for your pregnant wife, be […]

It seems like these days you can’t go into a bookshop without seeing a display of romantasy books. It’s a broad term that applies to everything from secondary fantasy worlds with devilishly handsome princes to witches running cafes and falling for the leader of the coven. You can also get every flavour of spiciness under […]

We live our lives burdened with responsibilities, and expectations of how we should act. Those expectations are placed on us by society, by family, and even by ourselves. However, fiction allows us a space in which to examine what would happen if we stepped outside those expectations. What if, for example, we weren’t dutiful children […]

We are back for 2025! We took a hiatus during the second half of 2024 due to our lives becoming that much busier. But loving what we have built with the show over the almost 10 years we’ve been running (!) we wanted to find a way to continue with BtGS. To that end, we’re […]

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We have a lot of authors on our podcast, talking about their books, what inspired them, how they’ve written them etc. Quite often they’ll get drawn into the TV series or films that inspired them [*coughs* Star Trek]. But a medium we don’t often touch upon is comics & graphic novels, even though some of […]

When we say the word “novel,” most of us think of a book written in prose, split into chapters and possibly parts. But every now and again, we come across novels that defy our expectations. Pratchett’s early work not only eschewed chapters – instead presenting the reader with continuous prose divided by section breaks – […]

A few decades ago, if you said the word “Gothic haunted house novel,” the phrase would very definitely have brought to mind something with a rambling Victorian mansion, tortured heroines, mad women in the attic, sombre men, and wailing ghosts. It probably wouldn’t have brought to mind a little old lady baking scones and conducting […]