Talking Scared

By Neil McRobertSociety & Culture Arts Books

Favorites
42
Followers
Typical duration
75 min
per episode

Based on Podcast App listening data

Talking Scared episodes

October 06298 – Stephen King & The Final Turn of the Big Combination
This episode needs no attempt at a witty introduction. Stephen King is back to talk about Other Worlds Than These – the concluding volume of The Talisman saga, begun with Peter Straub 45 years ago.

We keep it spoiler-free, but we talk about Jack Sawyer’s journey and how it entwines with The Dark Tower. We reflect on The Talisman and Black House, on Wolf and my heartbreak. We discuss Peter’s inspiration for the story and how King summoned him to bring it to a close. And we even get some hints of what’s cooking in Steve’s brain for future projects. It seems he’s never slowing down, no matter what he say.

I hope you enjoy this.

Other books mentioned:
Julia (1975), by Peter Straub

Ghost Story (1979), by Peter Straub

Redheaded Peckerwood (2010), by Christian Patterson

King Sorrow (2025), by Joe Hill

Sleeping Beauties (2017), by Stephen and Owen King

Trad Wife (2026), by Sarah Langan

Support Talking Scared on Patreon

Check out the Talking Scared Merch line – at VoidMerch

Come talk books on Threads, Bluesky, and Instagram, or email direct to [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 1 min
September 29297 – Kyle Winkler & Roll For Your “F**K You” Stats
Leaning into absolute high geekery this week – with Kyle Winkler’s novel of how family game night can go badly wrong!

The Ship of Death is about a cursed (and I mean CURSED!) tabletop role-playing game and the unlucky couple who choose to play it. Or, as Kyle describes it “Dark Jumanji.”

It prompts a conversation about games in life and fiction. Epistolary structure and found-fiction. We discuss his relationship with the bizarre, his love for mysteries without answers, we consider who is really responsible for the world-building in a story, and we pay a lot of respect to cosmic horror influences beyond Lovecraft.

It’s was a delight to record. Hope you enjoy listening.

Other books mentioned:
Grasshands (2024), by Kyle Winkler

Boris Says the Words (2022), by Kyle Winkler

The Nothing That Is (2020), by Kyle Winkler

Borne (2017), by Jeff VanderMeer

Zothique (1970), by Clarke Ashton Smith

The Dying Earth (1950), by Jack Vance

Enduring Love (1997), by Ian McEwan

Negative Space (2020), by B.R. Yeager

True Crime (2020), by Samantha Kolesnik

The House Next Door (1978), by Anne River Siddons

My Dark Places (1996), by James Ellroy

Penpal (2012), by Dathan Auerbach

Mockingbird (1980), by Paul Tevis

The Blacktongue Thief (2021), by Christopher Buehlman

Support Talking Scared on Patreon

Check out the Talking Scared Merch line – at VoidMerch

Come talk books on Threads, Bluesky, and Instagram, or email direct to [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 29 min
September 22 296 – Deena Helm & Horror Says Free Palestine
This week’s episode shows what a good haunted house can do.

Deena Helm is a mixed American-Palestinian author, who’s
debut novel, Our Cut of Salt, puts all the power of the Gothic to use in
framing the occupation and oppression of Palestine. It takes place before the ongoing genocide, but offer a chance to consider how horror fiction can play its part in framing that obscenity.

That all sounds heavy, and it rightfully is – but this book also has a frightening, tragic and murderous house at its core… so there’s (our kind) of fun to be had as well.

This is an important episode for the show. I hope you listen and enjoy.

Other books mentioned:

White is for Witching (2009), by Helen Oyeyemi
Tell Me I’m Worthless (2021), by Alison Rumfitt
Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013), by Ahmed Saadawi
Mornings in Jenin (2006), by Susan Abulhawa
Behind You is the Sea (2024), by Susan Muaddi Darraj
Gentle Things (2026), by Danielle Giles
Hungerstone (2025), by Kat Dunn

Support Talking Scared on Patreon

Check out the Talking Scared Merch line – at VoidMerch

Come talk books on Threads, Bluesky, and Instagram, or email direct to [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 14 min
September 15295 – Chris Panatier & If These Walls Could Talk
Home is where the horror is this week, with Chris Panatier and Worry Box!

This latest offering from Panatier’s uniquely strange mind is a complete revision of the haunted house as we know it. It’s a house that means well, but understands little. Couple that with a family in flux and a child suffering intrusive thoughts, and you have a recipe for terrible, no-good disaster.

In short, it’s 400 pages of slowly tightening dread!

I hope you enjoy.

Other books mentioned:
The Redemption of Morgan Bright (2024), by Chris Panatier

This House isn’t Haunted but We Are (2025), by Stephen Howard

Our Cut of Salt (2026), by Deena Helm

Pet Semetary (1983), by Stephen King

The Library at Mount Char (2015), by Scott Hawkins

Gideon the Ninth (2019), by Tamsyn Muir

Gormenghast (1950), by Mervyn Peak

Angel Down (2025), by Daniel Kraus

Chimera Skin (2026), by Johnny Compton

The Butcher of Nazareth (2026), by David Scott Hay

Support Talking Scared on Patreon

Check out the Talking Scared Merch line – at VoidMerch

Come talk books on Threads, Bluesky, and Instagram, or email direct to [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 33 min
September 08294 – China Miéville & A Million Dreaming Words for Ghost
There are big books and big books. This week we cover a HUGE book.
China Miéville is the guest. The award-winning author of Perdido Street Station, Embassytown, The City & the City, and other modern speculative classics – and he’s back with a book two decades in the making.

The Rouse is an epic of true proportions, a 1300-page saga of the twentieth century, rife with war, atrocity, tragedy, and a secret war fought with ghosts?? That’s the premise but it barely touches the sides of this ginormous undertaking.

This is not just a conversation, it’s a search for answers – in which we plumb the personal, political, and supernatural influences behind this story of shady military conspiracy and ghosts of many strange kinds.

I hope you enjoy, ‘cos I worked my ass off for this one!

Other books mentioned:
King Rat (1999), by China Miéville

The City & The City (2009), by China Miéville

Ducks, Newburyport (2019), by Lucy Ellman

Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), by Thomas Pyncheon

Against the Day (2006), by Thomas Pyncheon

House of Leaves (2000), by Mark Z. Danielewski

“The Ash Tree” (1904), by M.R. James

A Dark Corner (1971), by Celia Dale

Support Talking Scared on Patreon

Check out the Talking Scared Merch line – at VoidMerch

Come talk books on Threads, Bluesky, and Instagram, or email direct to [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 50 min
September 01293 – James Tynion IV & How to Draw a Dismembered Child
James Tynion IV is a modern master of the horror comic. He’s the maniac behind so many contemporary classic series, but perhaps none are such
pop-culture behemoths as Something is Killing the Children.
I mean… with a title like that, how could it fail?
With the new omnibus collection out right now, and an in-world novel (co-authored with Kiersten White) coming in October, I thought now was a good time to get James on the show and talk monsters, masks, mythology and the most baddass hero in graphic novels.

Enjoy!

Other books mentioned:
The Woods (2014-2017), by James Tynion IV

Memetic (2014-2015), by James Tynion IV

Hide (2022), by Kiersten White

At the Mountains of Madness (2019), by Gau Tenabe

Monster (1994-2001), by Naoki Urusawa

Support Talking Scared on Patreon

Check out the Talking Scared Merch line – at VoidMerch

Come talk books on Threads, Bluesky, and Instagram, or email direct to [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 6 min
August 25292 – Chuck Wendig & Little Vulgar Hell-Babies
Wendig is here!! The man my wife refers to as “Chuck Apples”
(as opposed to “Chuck Fight Club) is back to talk about his most fun, yet
nastiest book to date. The Calamities is what would happen if The Godfather
had cenobites, if Logan Roy had made a pact with monsters, it prompts me to ask the questions “who’s your favourite demon Chuck?”

That kinda book.

Chuck tells us how the study of demonology has underpinned almost his entire writing career. We discuss the increasingly tight links between his novels, the influence of D&D structure, and the challenge of making the reader care about some of the worst-behaved characters in the world.

And I drop the C-bomb for the first time on air. That damn baby deserves it.

Enjoy!

Other books mentioned:
Staircase in the Woods (2024), by Chuck Wendig

Daytide (2026), by Chris Panatier

The Three Body Problem (2008), by Cixin Liu

Books of Blood (1984-88), by Clive Barker

Cabal (1988), by Clive Barker

Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology (2021), by Ed Simon

Blacktail (2026), by Scott Hawkins

Support Talking Scared on Patreon

Check out the Talking Scared Merch line – at VoidMerch

Come talk books on Threads, Bluesky, and Instagram, or email direct to [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 17 min
August 18291 – Natasha Pulley & No Priests Were Harmed in the Making of this Podcast
No one let the Pope listen to this week’s episode.

Our guest is Natasha Pulley, genre-defying author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, The Bedlam Stacks, The Kingdoms, and now, in the The Salt King she pits the Vatican and Catholic Doctrine against something much, much older, lurking in the salt mines of the world.

It leads us to a conversation about faith of many kinds, about reality-adjacent fiction, the horrid truth of Sodom and Gomorrah, dark representations of the Catholic Church, and the challenge of fusing folk horror and global apocalypse.

There are also some holy dick pics.

Enjoy!

Other books mentioned:
Gentle Things (2026), by Danielle Giles

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2024), by Susanna Clarke

The Hill in the Dark Grove (2026), by Liam Higginson

The Name of the Rose (1980), by Umberto Eco

Foundation (1951), by Isaac Asimov

A Canticle for Liebowitz (1959), by Walter M. Miller Jr

Father Alberto and the Flying Girl (2026), by Timothy X Atack

Support Talking Scared on Patreon

Check out the Talking Scared Merch line – at VoidMerch

Come talk books on Threads, Bluesky, and Instagram, or email direct to [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 30 min
August 14 Off Book #23 – Are We Doomed? A Cheerful Guide to Apocalypse, with Ben Bradford
Happy Friday! Let’s talk about the end of the world.

Our guest is Ben Bradford, creator and host of Are We Doomed? – the new hit podcast examining the existential risks facing humanity.
“Dammit Neil”, I hear you say “Are we not suffering enough.” To you I
reply … sure, Ben and I make talk nukes and rogue AI, climate change and supervolcanoes, but believe me, you’ll feel more optimistic at the end of this episode!

Somehow, the general answer to Are We Doomed seems to be “no, not if we don’t want to be.” So have faith, listen, and have a great weekend.

Enjoy!

Support Talking Scared and get become a Patreon subscriber.

Check out the Talking Scared Merch line – at VoidMerch

Come talk books on Threads, Bluesky, and Instagram, or email direct to [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 16 min
August 11290 – Liam Higginson & Awful Things in Lonely Farmhouses
Finally, we dare venture to the darkest land of all. Wales!
After years of avoiding the terror of the Valleys, Liam Higginson takes us to The Hill in the Dark Grove – his debut novel of isolation, folk-memory, and things unearthed from the soil of a mountain farm.
We talk about the link between folklore and nationalism, about marriage and madness (not linked) and why it’s always men who go barmy in these situations.
This is up there with my favourite books of the year.
Enjoy!

Other books mentioned:
The Shining (1977), by Stephen King

Incidents Around the House (2024), by Josh Malerman

The Salt King (2026), by Natasha Pulley

Small Gods (1992), by Terry Pratchett

Meet Me at the Surface (2024), by Jodie Matthews

Boss in the Wall: A Treatise on the House Devil (1998), by Avram Davison and Grania Davis

North Woods (2023), by Daniel Mason

Country People (2026), by Daniel Mason

Support Talking Scared on Patreon
Check out the Talking Scared Merch line – at VoidMerch
Come talk books on Threads, Bluesky, and Instagram, or email direct to [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 15 min

About Talking Scared

From the publisher's feed

Conversations with the biggest names in horror fiction. A podcast for horror readers who want to know where their favourite stories came from . . . and what frightens the people who wrote them.