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… and we’re back! Just in time for this seasonal tradition. The State of the Horror Nation 2024 – our expert-led review of the best that the year had to offer in terms of horror writing and pen-and-ink nightmares.

I’m joined, as ever by my stalwart co-host for this gig, Emily Hughes, author of Horror For Weenies (go check her mammoth 2025 anticipated horror book list at ReadJumpScares.com)

Our special correspondents are Anna Dupre, reviewer and interviewer at Anna Rose Reads, and Stephani Gagnon of the landmark, can’t-be-beaten horror podcast, Books In the Freezer

They pick their books of 2024, and we talk about the things that have defined the year, whilst also looking forward to what’s next.

Enjoy!

Anna's Essay on IT

https://filmfreakcentral.net/2024/10/terrifier-3-2024/

Books Picked

The Eyes Are the Best Part (2024), by Monika Kim

Cuckoo (2024), by Gretchen Felker-Martin

American Rapture (2024), by C.J. Leede

Woodworm (2024), by Layla Martinez

Horror Movie (2024) by Paul Tremblay 

Night’s Edge (2024), by Liz Kerin

So Thirsty (2024),  by Rachel Harrison

Model Home (2024), by Rivers Solomon

I Was a Teenage Slasher (2024), by Stephen Graham Jones

Books Anticipated

Victorian Psycho (2025), by Virginia Feito

The Poorly Made (2025), by Sam Rebelein

The Unworthy (2025), by Augustina Bazterrica

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (2025), by Stephen Graham Jones

Bat Eater (2025), by Kylie Lee Baker

Sick Houses: Haunted Homes and the Architecture of Dread (2025), by Leila Taylor

The Haunting of Room 904 (2025), by Erika T. Wurth

8114 (2025),by Joshua Hull

When the Wolf Comes Home (2025), by Nat Cassidy

Senseless (2025), by Ronald Malfi

King Sorrow (2025), by Joe Hill

And He Shall Appear (2025), by Kate van der Borgh

Nowhere Burning (2025), by Catriona Ward

Girl in the Creek (2025), by Wendy Wagner

The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre (2025), by Philip Fracassi

The End of the World As We Know It: Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand  (2025), edited by Brian Keene and Christopher Golden

Old Soul (2025), by Susan Barker

rekt (2025), by Alex Gonzalez

Wake Up and Open Your Eyes (2025), by Clay McLeod Chapman

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This is the last way-back episode before the show returns with a scream next week.

But this is an episode worth remembering – my first ever conversation with Catriona Ward, about her game-changing The Last House on Needless Street too!

This was a big ask for a novice interviewer. How the hell do you talk about a book that hinges on such a huge secret. Somehow we managed to walk that tightrope, whilst also talking about cats (feline) serial killers, and the haunted bedroom of Cat’s (author) girlhood.

It’s fun to retread this grim path.

Enjoy!

Other books mentioned:

• Rawblood (2015), by Catriona Ward
• Little Eve (2018), by Catriona Ward
• The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (2019), by Hallie Rubenhold
• Spider (1990), by Patrick McGrath

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A chance to revisit one of my favourite books and favourite ever conversations this week.

Zakiya Dalila Harris’s The Other Black Girl came out in early 2021, and for once I was ahead of the curve! Right from the start, I adored this novel of workplace micro-aggression and satirical horror in the publishing industry – and I’m glad to see the world has since agreed.

It’s a high-concept thriller that blends the paranoia of Rosemary’s Baby with the bite of Get Out – and for once it’s a story that deserves those comparisons. Zakiya talks about her own background in publishing and how it informed this nightmare. We talk about discussing racism in fiction, and (in a slightly meta way) we discuss how interviews LIKE THIS ONE may actually perpetuate a degree of othering. In short, I tie myself in white millennial knots, but Zakiya is wonderfully generous.

God I love this book. Some may say it’s not horror. I’d disagree so much that I stuck it on my list of best horror novels ever. Let’s see what you think. 

Enjoy!

Other books mentioned:

• All Her Little Secrets (2021), by Wanda M. Morris
• Rosemary’s Baby (1967), by Ira Levin

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I’m feeling Gothic this week. Must be the weather. 
 
In lieu of a new episode, I searched the vault and found this cracker from January 2021, in which Laura Purcell — doyenne of the contemporary British Gothic —  talked me through her Victorian spookshow of mesmerism and haunted silhouettes, The Shape of Darkness.
 
 We also get into the social nightmare of Victorian England – when life was even more gothic than it is now, believe it or not!
 
 Enjoy!
 
 Other books mentioned:
 

•  The Residence (2020), by Andrew Pyper
•  The Haunting of Alma Fielding (2020), by Andrew Pyper
•  Shadowland, or Light From the Other Side (1897), by Elizabeth d’Esperance
•  “The Blue Lenses,” in The Breaking Point (1959), by Daphne du Maurier
•  “The Mezzotint”, “A View From A Hill” and “Oh Whistle and I’ll Come To You My Lad”, found in The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James

 
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This From the Vault episode is not quite so dusty. Gemma and I recorded this in 2022, but it’s more pertinent than ever. One because Gemma’s great uncanny novella The Folly is being reissued this week, and two, because the world is a mad place right now, and we all need to take care of our minds.

This conversation is all about that. An epic conversation about the issue of mental health as creators and consumers of dark stories. We dig DEEP into our own neuroses, and talk about how great horror comes with great responsibility.

Yes, there is difficult, challenging stuff to churn through —  but there’s also chat about the Uncanny Valley, Men in Black, Creepypasta and Black Mirror. And the ethics of vandalising racist statues.

Enjoy!

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Still on a break – still releasing episodes “From the Vault.”

But this week’s was carefully chosen. In a time of darkness and doom-laden days, laughter is the best thing I can lace your horror with. And thankfully T. Kingfisher exists in the world.

The funniest horror writer I know. We spoke WAAAAY back in October 2020, in episode 9, when The Hollow Places had just come out. 

Yes Ursula and I talk about that book, and The Twisted Ones (2019) and how they twist Weird classics into fascinating new shapes. But we also cover building your own Golem, the homicidal value of pig farmers, and the anxiety of being a frog biologist. 

I dunno guys… just liste! Hope it makes you smile.

Enjoy!

Other books mentioned:

• “The White People” in The House of Souls (1906), by Arthur Machen
• “The Willows”, in The Listener and Other Stories (2007), by Algernon Blackwood
• It Will Just Be Us (2002), by Jo Kaplan
• From a Buick Eight (2002), by Stephen King
• The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman
• Coraline, by Neil Gaiman
• Firefly Rain (2008), by Richard Dansky

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I’m on a break – but couldn’t resist releasing something. 

Especially on today of all days, when lovers of democracy require audio sustenance whilst they wait in line to preserve America.

For the first From the Vault episode, I’ve gone back to December of 2020, for an interview with Michael Marshall Smith. We talk about his 30 years of writing horror, fantasy, science fiction and assorted dark imaginings – captured in his career-spanning Best Of collection.

Michael gives us all the good stuff about where ideas came from, why he writes the way he does, and all those details that literary voyeurs like us, want to know.

It’s also a trip back into the weirdness of the pandemic, and the dying days of the Trump presidency. Have your trauma shields up just in case. 

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Halloween has finally arrived. I’m marking it in grim, macabre style.

For this Off Book Samhain Special, I’m joined by Kaelyn Moore, host and creator of Heart Starts Pounding – a podcast for the darkly curious, which offers up a new true-story of horror, hauntings and mystery every week.

Kaelyn is a treasure trove of haunted anecdote and freaky facts. We only touch the tip of her knowledge in this conversation, but still manage to cover the grimmest deaths at Disneyland, a South American Nazi cult, the most cursed book in history and Kaelyn’s own family history with an early American serial killer.

All that, plus a lot of recommendations for movies and the gruesome true-crime reading.

Stick around for the afterword, and plenty of updates on the future of Talking Scared,

Enjoy! Happy Halloween. 

Books mentioned:

• The Man From the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery (2017), by Bill James and Rachel McCarthy James
• The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine (2017), by Lindsey Fitzharris
• I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer (2018), by Michelle McNamara
• The Devil’s Rooming House: the True Story of America’s Deadliest Female Serial Killer (2011), by M. William Phelps

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Things are heating up as we approach Halloween.

I’m joined by a good friend of Talking Scared – Rachel Harrison – to talk about the hot kind of immortality

Her new novel, So Thirsty, does much more than that though. It weighs the weaponization of beauty culture, it asks how women can navigate a world in which youth seems to be everything, and it illustrates the sheer social awkwardness of immortality.

Plus – it prompts a frank reckoning with just how badly I would cope in an orgy. 

This is a fun episode, a deep episode, the perfect kind of bookish sign off for a few weeks whilst I take a break. And maybe a good hour of respite from the manic news cycle.

Enjoy.

Other books mentioned:

• The Return (2020), by Rachel Harrison
• Cackle (2021), by Rachel Harrison
• Such Sharp Teeth (2022), by Rachel Harrison
• Black Sheep (2023), by Rachel Harrison
• Nestlings (2023), by Nat Cassidy
• Reluctant Immortals (2022), by Gwendolyne Kiste
• The Militia House (2023), by John Milas
• The Unsuitable (2020), by Molly Pohlig

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As we gear up for Halloween, we get all gussied up in Gothic.

Del Sandeen joins me to talk about the curses, colorism, and all the many influences in her Southern Gothic debut This Cursed House. It’s a novel that twists the sub-genre’s typical reliance on race, for a more subtle, pernicious form of prejudice. 

But it’s also chock full of all the haunted house–cursed family–secret rooms–and weird incest that you could want from a truly Gothic novel. It’s a damn good time, as is this conversation.

We talk about New Orleans hauntings, the inspiration of Del’s grandmother, forgiveness as a theme, and the relative ickiness of incest.

Consider this your starting gun for spooky season.

Enjoy.

Other books mentioned:

• Voodoo Dreams (1993), by Jewel Parker Rhodes
• The Good House (2003), by Tananarive Due
• Beloved (1987), by Toni Morrison
• The Vanishing Half (2020), by Brit Bennett
• Sing, Unburied Sing (2017) , by Jesymn Ward
• When the Reckoning Comes (2021), by LaTanya McQueen
• “A Rose For Emily,” (1930), by William Faulkner
• “Jordan’s End,” in The Shadowy Third (1923), by Ellen Glasgow
• The Elementals (1981), by Michael McDowell
• The Conjure Woman (1899), by Charles W. Chesnutt
• The House Behind the Cedars (1900), by Charles W. Chesnutt

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