Send us a text

Morning campers! 

This week we’re off to the great outdoors for a hike, a night under the stars and a spot of psychological terror. 

Our guest is Zoje Stage. In her previous novels, Babyteeth and Wonderland she took us to dark houses and interior spaces. Her new novel, Getaway, does the opposite, dragging us   on the adventure of a lifetime. A week hiking in the Grand Canyon. Just the ticket to blow away the covid claustrophobia.

Shame it all goes so horribly wrong!

We talk a lot about characters in this conversation – how to build them, how to make them interesting, and why no-one ever thinks they are the villain of the story. Zoje also relates the eerie incident in the Great Outdoors that inspires her novel, and I go on a rant about Thanos and Negan from the Walking Dead (keeping it highbrow!)

What we learn, most of all, is that a tent is only a psychological barrier against whatever else is roaming the wilds. 

Enjoy! 

Getaway was published August 17th by Mulholland Books

Other books mentioned in this episode include:

Support the show on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/TalkingScaredPod 

Come talk books on Twitter @talkscaredpod, on Instagram, or email direct to [email protected].

Download Novellic on Google Play or Apple Store.

Support the show

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Send us a text

This week the walls between reality and fiction begin to break down. What is truth, what is a lie? Can a story be both?

These are the kinds of questions my guest, Richard Chizmar, has become an expert at answering. His new novel (if we can call it that) is Chasing the Boogeyman and it’s a unique beast. Part memoir, part true-crime, part horror fiction – it takes the streets of Rich’s boyhood home, colours them sepia and then lets a serial killer run loose. 

We talk about the illusion of storytelling, about true-crime and false memories, and the golden-hued horror that we both love. Stephen King, Ray Bradbury and others loom in the background, but Chasing the Boogeyman is uniquely Chizmar, in all the ways a book can be. 

If that all sounds gorge-risingly poetic then, well, first of all, sod-off, it’s my podcast and I’ll rhapsodise if I want to. Secondly, don’t worry we also talk about monsters and mayhem and the time Rich’s friend crapped in his own hand. In short, something for everyone.

Enjoy!! (I really did!)

Chasing the Boogeyman was published August 17th by Gallery Books in North America and Hodder & Stoughton in the UK. 

Other books mentioned include:

Support the show on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/TalkingScaredPod

Come talk books on Twitter @talkscaredpod, on Instagram, or email direct to [email protected].

Download Novellic on Google Play or Apple Store.

Support the show

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Send us a text

This week’s guest couldn’t be better timed. In a week when we find out the world is not only screwed, it’s REALLY screwed, our guest is Brian Evenson, with his new collection, The Glassy Burning Floor of Hell – which could be a description of many places on the globe right now.

These stories transport the reader to strange, deformed, blasted landscapes. Like the worlds they depict, Brian’s tales are harsh and dark and frightening but, as you’ll hear me say, they are also a surprising amount of fun. As well as the end of all things, there are also cults, flying cities, terrifying feathered men, and a murderous leg.

So read them and enjoy them – but heed the wakeup call. These monstrous worlds could all too easily be our own

(if you want some light relief, here’s the wiki on the Human Interference Task Force – cats and cults and wizards-a-plenty)

Enjoy.

Other books mentioned in this episode include:

Support the show on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/TalkingScaredPod 

Come talk books on Twitter @talkscaredpod, on Instagram, or email direct to [email protected].

Download Novellic on Google Play or Apple Store.

Support the show

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Send us a text

Sisters are doing it for themselves – literally! 

Our guest this week is Sara Flannery Murphy, author of Girl One – which is either a feminist dystopian nightmare or a superhero origin story, or both. It is an alternative history of genetic science that asks the question of what would happen if women no longer needed men to conceive a child. The answer is simultaneously complex and chilling.

Sara and I talk about writing as a feminist in the time of Trump (and living in a Red State), and whether her characters are witches in any sense of the word. We discuss how pathogenesis has always had a home in the horror genre. And I demand to know why, if she was going to rewrite history, she didn’t save poor Kurt Cobain. 

Enjoy! 

Girl One was published by on 1st June by FSG in the US and on August 5th by Raven Books in the UK.

Other books mentioned in the show include:

Support the show on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/TalkingScaredPod 

Come talk books on Twitter @talkscaredpod, on Instagram, or email direct to [email protected]. 

Thanks to Adrian Flounders for graphic design.

Support the show

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Send us a text

Why isn’t there more horror about marriage?

Think about it. You marry someone. Spend your life with them. But do you really know them, or what they are capable of.  

Ronald Malfi’s Come With Me pries open these secrets, sending the protagonist on a tailspinning road trip in pursuit of the truth about the woman he has loved and lost. It’s a big, satisfying, chunky summer novel packed full of murder and monstrosity and motel-stays in the creepier corners of the country. You’ll love it.

Ronald joins me to talk about the book, about writing grief and the very real tragedy that underpins Come With Me. Despite the absurd heat at either end of the conversation, we soldier on heroically, taking in local lore, the link between leaded petrol and serial killers, and why ecology may be the new haunting. And yes, we talk about how marriage should be a bigger theme in horror! Next time your wife, or husband, or significant other gets up in the night – think about that. What are they up to in the bathroom? Could be the usual. Could be something evil. Mwah ha ha!

Enjoy.

Come With Me was published by Titan on 20th July. 

Other books mentioned in the show include: 

Support the show on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/TalkingScaredPod 

Come talk books on Twitter @talkscaredpod, on Instagram, or email direct to [email protected]. 

Thanks to Adrian Flounders for graphic design.

Support the show

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Send us a text

Weather this hot demands the cool balm of a book, and do I have one for you.

The Book of Accidents is the latest horror-epic from Chuck Wendig – the seeming literary successor to King, Straub, McCammon and Barker. Wendig’s books take you in their embrace and say “you’re mine now” or maybe “we all float down here.” Here, in this case, being a mineshaft in the rural vacancy of Pennsylvania. 

There is plenty of hype around The Book of Accidents and I’m delighted to say it’s all earned. This is quite simply the kind of big, bombastic storytelling you don’t get much of anymore, a steak-and-lobster-with-ice-cream for after sort of novel that fills you up and leaves you satisfied. 

The book is so big, and the ideas so grand, that Chuck and I end up forgetting to talk much about the actual story. Instead we discuss what it has to say about society – good and bad – about kindness, and love and the comfort of horror that we all-too often ignore in favour of the viscera. In short, it’s a wholesome conversation about a wholesome book, about a very unwholesome scenario. 

Oh – and Chuck tells us all about the very real haunted house that inspired it. A house he happens to have grown up in.

Enjoy! 

The Book of Accidents was published by Del Rey on 20th July.

Other books mentioned in the show include:

Support the show on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/TalkingScaredPod 

Come talk books on Twitter @talkscaredpod, on Instagram, or email direct to [email protected].

Thanks to Adrian Flounders for graphic design.

Support the show

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Send us a text

Hello fellow horror-fiends. This week we’re going retro, to the heyday of horror, when men wore masks and women checked basements in their negligee. 

Our guest is Grady Hendrix, a writer perpetually interested in taking tropes, only to stab them, kill them, and resurrect them as something new. He’s done it with exorcisms, vampires, the devil and … erm .. IKEA.

Now he’s taking on the slasher and his counterpart, in The Final Girl Support Group. A novel that takes the bloody, weary body of the female heroine, and gives her the chance to kick the hell out of the monster chasing her. It’s meta, funny, wry and ironic – but it’s also a story with heart. I enjoyed it immensely.

Grady and I talk about our favourite slashers (and final girls), why we’re obsessed with nostalgia, what it means that we enjoy films about killing women, and I – once again ­– give away too much of my own psychological frailty. This time it’s my all-consuming terror of Freddy Kruger.

This is a book and conversation that will REALLY please the true horror lovers.

Enjoy! 

The Final Girl Support Group is published July 13th by Berkley in North American and Titan in the UK.

Books mentioned in this episode include:

Support the show on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/TalkingScaredPod

Come talk books on Twitter @talkscaredpod, on Instagram, or email direct to [email protected].

Thanks to Adrian Flounders for graphic design.

Support the show

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Send us a text

This week we’re doing something different. No author and no single book. Instead it’s a roundtable discussion, with Sadie Hartmann (AKA Mother Horror) and Emily Hughes, the genius loci behind Tor Nightfire. Together we look back over the last six months – the highs, the not-so-many-lows and all the endless twitter controversies – to address the state of the horror nation at the midpoint of 2021.

All three of us talk about the books we have loved the most so far this year, what else we are looking forward to in the months ahead, and what our hopes are for horror writing in general. 

We also address the concerns around trauma, trigger warnings, twitter subtweeting and the endless, vice-like grip of Goodreads. 

If you want to get a true sense of the breadth and depth of the horror being created right now, then this is designed for you. Also, if you just want to listen to three horror nerds talk about scary stuff whilst you do the ironing, then it’s also for you.

Basically, it’s for everyone. 

Cos I’m a giver. 

Enjoy!

Emily Hughes’ list of horror books to be excited about in 2021 is HERE. 

The (huger-than-normal) list of books mentioned in this episode includes:

The Picks

Coming Soon

 Assorted Others

Support the show on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/TalkingScaredPod

Come talk books on Twitter @talkscaredpod, on Instagram, or email direct to [email protected].

Thanks to Adrian Flounders for graphic design.

Support the show

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Send us a text

This week I have been forced to up my game.  

Our guest is Carmen Maria Machado, and her works is not for the lazy or faint-hearted. From her dizzying collection of short fiction, Her Body and Other Parties, to her one-of-a-kind memoir, In the Dream House, Carmen’s writing forces a humble interviewer such as me, to question how we talk about books, author, character, truth, fiction and all the messy space in between.

In the Dream House  deconstructs what a memoir is and can do, and I had to really think about the questions I wanted to ask, and how to ask them. It is, nominally, a narrative of domestic abuse in a same-sex relationship, but Carmen chooses to tell that story using every literary tool in her (and everyone else’s) toolbox. The result is electrifying.

We talk about privacy versus public, what it’s like to write about sex you’ve actually had, hypochondria, double-standards and the lure of horror and gothic as a way to tell a real-life story of violence and trauma. 

It’s not all dark though. We laugh a lot. Mostly at my awkwardness. 

Enjoy! 

Her Body and Other Parties and In the Dream House are both published by Greywolf Press in North America and Serpent’s Tail in the UK.

Other books discussed in this episode include:

Support the show on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/TalkingScaredPod

Come talk books on Twitter @talkscaredpod, on Instagram, or email direct to [email protected].

Thanks to Adrian Flounders for graphic design.

Support the show

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Send us a text

It’s a dirty, grim, glorious time on Talking Scared this week. After a last-minute schedule reshuffle we have Eric LaRocca, here to talk about his word-of-mouth sensation of a novella – Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke. 

Gotten worse is quite the understatement. This book goes so far beyond the pale in terms of horror’s usual comfort level these days. It’s a simple tale of online love, BDSM and self-mutilation, all tinged with some wonderful early noughties nostalgia. This book does for MSN messenger what the Blair Witch Project did for the woods.

Eric and I talk about all of that, as well as transgressive fiction, the beauty to be found in disgust, and our shared love of books and movies that have achieved legendary status as things that you probably shouldn’t experience (if you know what's good for you)!

Enjoy!!

Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke is out now from WeirdPunk Books. 

Other books discussed in this episode include: 

Support the show on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/TalkingScaredPod

Come talk books on Twitter @talkscaredpod, on Instagram, or email direct to [email protected].

Thanks to Adrian Flounders for graphic design.

Support the show

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices