The Ghost & Quill Podcast

I'm fangirling hard this week, because I'm joined by Rachel Harrison, author of Play Nice and Kiss Slay Replay. Both books cost my friends and family 24 hours of my attention.

Rachel tells me how a scared, anxious kid ended up writing horror. She explains how she builds a time loop that never repeats itself, and how staring at her own reflection gave her the idea for her vampire novel So Thirsty. We talk about why horror is having such a moment right now, and why being a full-time author is still a climb. She also shares the hotel with bad energy that she couldn't wait to leave.

Then things get fun. Rachel names herself the welcome wagon into horror, and together we build a haunted house of horror writers. Find out who's hiding behind the grandfather clock, who's waiting for you in the cellar, and who's sitting in the attic in a single rocking chair.

📚 Rachel's books are available at Ghost & Quill: www.ghostandquill.co.uk

This week on the Ghost & Quill podcast, I'm joined by John Ironmonger, author of The Angel of St Piran, a novel I devoured in a single day while in Kenya.

John was born and raised in Nairobi, studied zoology, and spent a teenage summer counting elephants in Tsavo. We talk about the TV documentary that sparked the novel's central question: what if a chimp researcher could climb the trees with her subjects? We also hear about the real chimps at Chester Zoo who inspired its characters, and the linguistics research into chimpanzee communication that shaped how Angel talks to her apes.

We get into why trophy hunters make perfect villains, and how a pandemic novel written years before COVID became a bestseller in Germany. John also explains why "write what you know" might be the worst advice a writer can get. Along the way we swap favourite opening lines, confess to the classics we still haven't read, and reminisce about the wild places of Kenya.

Settle in for a conversation about Africa, apes, and the stories that take years to cook.

This week we're joined by Eleanor Conlon and Martin Vaux, the award-winning writers behind Three Ravens, the independent folklore podcast. We're talking about their new book, Three Ravens Ghost Tales.

We didn't get far before the laughs started. I got Martin's surname wrong straight away (it's Vaux, with a hard X). Martin says he's still "in recovery" from being French and has to resist the urge to invade places and make people build him cathedrals. We also meet George, a skull wine cup Eleanor gave Martin in honour of Lord Byron, and get Martin's firm views on "false Martyns" who spell it with a Y. Eleanor's historical drama underwear rants get a mention too. And we came up with a tagline I might have to steal for the shop: "Where rebels come to be better read."

We also get into the stories behind the book and the podcast:

• How Three Ravens grew from England's historic counties to Wales and now the original American colonies
• Why we're so drawn to ghost stories, and why the best ones never explain themselves
• Why ghosts tend to linger at forgotten places, old monastery ruins, hospitals and the London Underground
• A night at Chiltern Open Air Museum, with a sudden freezing cold room in the middle of a heatwave
• A ghost box conversation in Kent, and a very unsettling Airbnb
• A household ghost who kept leaving marbles and Lego, until they struck a deal with a toy soldier

Along the way there's an Edinburgh witch banned for releasing too many ghosts, and ghosts who might just be judging teenagers' outfits. My two spaniels also make a guest appearance, and for a moment Eleanor and Martin were sure the squeaky toy was a poltergeist.

Find Three Ravens wherever you get your podcasts. Pick up their first book, Three Ravens Folk Tales, and look out for Three Ravens Ghost Tales when it comes out.

We've left the video calls behind for our very first in-person recording, and it shows. Marlene can't work out how to start, so Dee Lawlor jumps in with her best morning-TV welcome. There's a Stepford Wife smile, talk of Sally Jessy Raphael-sized glasses, and the idea of a game-show-host run-in. Dee's drinking decaf on purpose, because otherwise her adrenaline would make her impossible to understand. We invent a few words ("vampiric lorist", anyone?), and by the end we're asking someone to run round the room doing the clapping.

In between the giggles, it's a proper deep dive into Scotsferatu, Dee's new book on vampire folklore in Scotland. We get into:

• Why so many medieval monks came back as troublesome revenants
• A vampire caterpillar that might really be a giant leech
• Why a vampire is so hard to define
• How literature gave the vampire a glow-up
• Dee's theory that vampires are ambush predators, and that the good looks are there to lure you in
• The Galloway vampire letter, and the strange gap in Scottish vampire stories from the 14th to 16th centuries
• Why Slains Castle didn't inspire Dracula (sorry, Aberdeenshire)
• Emily Gerard, the Jedburgh-born writer who influenced Bram Stoker
• Lestat, Byron, violent unicorns and Aberdeen's pirate problem

A huge thank you to SugarBird Wines on the Terrace for hosting us, and to our first ever live audience. You'll find our new book club there from next month. It's the first of many.

Scotsferatu is out on 24 September.

A bookshop is one of the quietest rooms you'll ever stand in. It's also full of thousands of voices. That's the idea that became Bookkeepers.

This week Marlene sits down with Vincent Cotroneo, a 28-year-old indie author whose debut horror novel follows Robert — a writer surrounded by other people's published work, trying to live up to the expectations of an eleven-year-old critic who happens to be his daughter. When his wife dies unexplained in the family bookshop, the words start vanishing off the page for his daughter. And then the books start talking back.

It turns into a proper horror education. Vincent traces his obsession from The Ring through The Exorcist, The Conjuring and Hereditary, and makes the case that found footage works because it hands the scariest job to your own imagination. Marlene confesses to owning The Exorcist, Frankenstein and Dracula and reading none of them — and gets a reading order. There is a side quest about the release date of The Blair Witch Project. There is a Stephen King quote about a man banging his head against a wall. There is a strong opinion about what Nicolas Cage is doing in Renfield.

Also covered: why Obsession rattled every man who watched it, whether Backrooms lived up to the hype, Robert Eggers' Werewolf, and the endings that physically hurt.

Chapters
00:00 – Meet Vincent Cotroneo
01:28 – The Ring, and watching horror you weren't allowed to watch
02:50 – Horror's subgenres and why the genre is catching up with its audience
04:09 – Real-world horror, Ed and Lorraine Warren, and Stephen King on why we like being scared
05:59 – Why The Exorcist and The Conjuring feel like documentaries
06:43 – The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity and the birth of dread
09:44 – The film that still lives in his head
11:34 – Marlene's pick: Rose Red, and the pull of a haunted house
13:25 – Inside Bookkeepers
15:46 – The writing process, self-imposed deadlines and indie publishing
17:44 – "Unconscious subconscious": naming his own genre
19:04 – Shutter Island and the joy of being tricked
20:37 – Endings that make or break a film
24:11 – Favourite authors and what he's reading now
25:27 – The TBR shame pile
26:37 – What order to read Frankenstein, Dracula and The Exorcist
29:39 – Whitby, Slains Castle and Dracula on the page
33:07 – What he's excited about next
37:05 – Obsession, Hokum and Backrooms
42:26 – A very pagan Christmas

"It is not the old witch in the woods. It is the old witch in the Black Forest. And if you go there, the fourth wall disappears and you're in the story."

Benjamin Stimpson is a Wales-based writer of folklore and the occult, a psychotherapist, and the author of Ancestral Whispers and Of Doves and Ravens: The Witches and Wise Folk of Wales and the Borders. He grew up in a 500-year-old cottage in North Wales, emigrated to Canada at eight, spent thirty years there — much of it in a haunted fieldstone brewery — and came home last year.

This conversation goes everywhere. The linguistic thread that ties South Scotland to Wales. Why psychotherapy and the occult are the same discipline if you accept that both are really about relationship. The overlap between queerness, neurodivergence and witchcraft, and why othered people find each other in othered spaces. The individualism eating modern paganism alive. And the fake lore proliferating online — where did the purple door thing come from? — and why Benjamin went into medieval archives to build a proper encyclopaedia of Britain's cunning folk instead.

Plus: hag attacks, a great-great-grandmother who turns out to have been a herbalist, a dynasty of cunning men in South Wales whose descendants still live there, and a pirate ship in the Aberdeen haar that may or may not exist.

Chapters
00:44 – Introductions: Wales, Canada, folklore and the day job
01:33 – The Old North: what links Wales and southern Scotland
03:05 – Growing up in Caerwys, with a 700-year-old pub and a 500-year-old cottage
04:36 – Folklore as a lifeline after emigrating
05:55 – Psychotherapy and the occult: it all comes down to relationship
09:07 – Otherness: queerness, neurodivergence and witchcraft
11:59 – Reclaiming Christianity, Judaism and Islam through folk practice
12:33 – The individualism problem in modern paganism
15:35 – Trauma, identity, and why a fact can feel like an attack
17:00 – Ancestral Whispers and why the West lost its ancestors
18:42 – The fake lore problem
21:29 – Building a 300,000-word encyclopaedia
22:42 – Of Doves and Ravens
24:07 – Book four: the male magicians
24:36 – A face, a place and a story
25:03 – What the Brothers Grimm got wrong
26:03 – The Old Woman of the Mountain
27:29 – Scotland's witch memorials
29:10 – Haar, pirate ships, and having a relationship with the horizon
30:39 – Hag attacks and the little man in the verge
35:46 – Growing up in a haunted brewery
37:14 – The genogram and the herbalist great-great-grandmother
38:23 – What's next: Welsh, regional practice and fiction
41:19 – Dr Harris and the cunning dynasty of South Wales

"I've always had too much sympathy for the devil, because he really just feels so human to me."

C.N. Vair wrote her debut novel Fawn around a single image she couldn't shake: a romance between a witch and the devil. What grew around it is a folk horror novel about Tess, a small town, an old religion, and a question the book asks without ever answering — can you live alongside people whose values you don't share?

In this episode she and Marlene talk about place as a character, and why the Appalachia of Fawn is the southern tier of New York rather than the West Virginia most people picture. About stumbling sideways into horror from a childhood of Tolkien, Narnia and Redwall. About finding your people when you're not sure how many horror readers live in your village.

And about being told, at sixteen, that she had a Jezebel spirit — which was not intended as a compliment, and which she has worn as a badge of honour ever since.

Plus: what actually changes when your book goes out into the world (less than you'd think, and more than you'd hope), why the villain had to be a pastor rather than a data centre, and a first look at book two — The Walking Tree, out autumn 2027, about a six-foot-one arborist and a tree haunted by the girl sacrificed to it a thousand years ago.

Chapters
00:00 – How to say the name (and why it's not on the cover)
01:00 – Reading Fawn in Kenya, and writing place as a character
03:05 – The Appalachia people don't picture
04:40 – Why Appalachian horror is having a moment
07:17 – Folklore, deep time, and the comfort of the very old
08:13 – "Who are our neighbours?" — the question at the heart of Fawn
09:56 – Finding your tribe in the horror community
12:18 – Stumbling into horror from a fantasy childhood
15:33 – Why Fawn sits comfortably in folk horror
17:10 – "You have a Jezebel spirit"
20:35 – Tess, the witch and the devil
23:07 – The drafts that didn't survive
24:21 – Why the villain had to be religion, not a data centre
26:18 – Letting the book go
29:19 – What actually changed after publication
33:36 – The Walking Tree, coming autumn 2027
38:40 – The earworm: can we coexist?
43:21 – What she's reading next
45:42 – Reading systems, TBRs and tandem reads

Good Grieving, Spooky Readers. For the very first episode of the Ghost & Quill podcast, Marlene summons the brilliant Kat Dunn — author of Bitterthorn, Hungerstone, and her spellbinding new gothic novel Rottenheart, a gender-swapped reimagining of Hamlet.Together they wander through Kat's earliest stories (a girl, a land of chocolate, a beginning, a middle and an end), how a part-time goth found her way to horror, and the long battle to silence the inner critic and write the haunted house books she was desperate to read. Along the way: teenage Hamlet and who is allowed to suffer, why writing villains means looking your own worst self in the eye, the emotional toll of living inside two very different narrators, Victorian ghost stories churned out to pay the rent, lucid dreams, a showdown with Jigsaw, and the eternal mystery of why nobody ever gives up their secondhand horror books.Whether you believe in ghosts or simply suspect your brain is a badly organised machine, pull up a chair by the fire. The nightlight stays on for this one.Rottenheart by Kat Dunn is available now from Ghost & Quill — Scotland's first horror-themed bookshop. www.ghostandquill.co.ukStay Spooky,Marlene