The Monster She Wrote Podcast

In Jenny Kiefer’s This Wretched Valley, there is a bad place just off a highway in a secluded forest in Kentucky. When a small group made up of geology grad students and rock climbers set up camp there to document a previously unknown rock wall, they find more than they bargained for. The place is old. And it isn’t always what it seems.    

Recommended in this episode: Grady Hendrix’s Witchcraft for Wayward Girls

NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses. 

More info about the Canadian museum exhibit here: https://www.orillia.ca/en/visiting/exhibits.aspx?_mid_=28224 (Opening October 5 until December 20, 2024 - Temporary Exhibit)

UP NEXT: The holiday season is approaching, and we are going to take full advantage. So the podcast will be on hiatus for the remainder of 2024.  We will run a few of our favorite holiday episodes from years past. We will be back in 2025 with a brand new episode.

Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble. 

Jenny Kiefer is a debut author, avid rock climber, and Kentucky resident. She also owns and manages Butcher Cabin Books, a horror bookstore in Louisville, KY, with her mother. Her background is in copywriting and journalism, and she is the recipient of the Miracle Monocle Editor’s Award for Emerging Writers and four Society of Professional Journalism Awards. She was a 2021 Pitch Wars mentee and is a member of the Horror Writers Association. 

NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses. 

More info about the Canadian museum exhibit here: https://www.orillia.ca/en/visiting/exhibits.aspx?_mid_=28224 (Opening October 5 until December 20, 2024 - Temporary Exhibit)

UP NEXT: This Wretched Valley 

Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.

For Toil and Trouble, our book, we did a deep dive into research of the witch. And since the witch is a mainstay of this time of year, we thought it would be fun to do a little bit of a different episode today. We watched the first two episodes of Disney Plus’s Agatha All Along. 

NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses. 

More info about the Canadian museum exhibit here: https://www.orillia.ca/en/visiting/exhibits.aspx?_mid_=28224 (Opening October 5 until December 20, 2024 - Temporary Exhibit)

Recommended in this episode: We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer and Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix (available for preorder)

UP NEXT: An interview with Jenny Keifer. Her new book This Wretched Valley is available on our Bookshop!

Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble. 

In this episode, we are discussing Christa Carmen’s meta Gothic novel The Daughters of Block Island with special guest Crystal O’Leary-Davidson.

Crystal O’Leary-Davidson, writing as C. O. Davidson has published fiction in PseudoPod, Cemetery Gates, and in anthologies, most recently Hard to Find: An Anthology of New Southern Gothic. Her story, “The Mark,” in Vastarien, was recognized by editor Ellen Datlow in her anthology of The Best of Horror of the Year, Vol. 15 as one of the works of “notable dark fiction in 2022.”

An English professor at Middle Georgia State University, she teaches classes in the Gothic, the Weird, and slasher horror films, and she co-edited a book of critical essays, Monsters of Film, Fiction, and Fable. Currently she is writing on the American mall in teen horror.

Davidson serves on the board of Broadleaf Writers, and is one of the founding members of the Atlanta Chapter of the Horror Writers Association.She makes her home in Georgia amongst the pine trees with her husband, the novelist Andy Davidson, and their clowder of beloved cats.

NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses. 

Recommended in this episode: B.R. Myers’s A Dreadful Splendor and I Saw the TV Glow 

UP NEXT: a very special Halloween episode!

Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.

About The Unmothers: After the death of her husband, journalist Marshall is sent to the small town of Raeford to investigate a clearly ridiculous rumor—that a horse has given birth to a human baby. As she's pulled deeper into the town and its guarded people, she realizes Raeford may be harboring more dark secrets than she expected.

NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses. 

Recommended in this episode: The Night Guest by Hildur Knútsdóttir

UP NEXT: The Daughters of Block Island with special guest Crystal O’Leary-Davidson

Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble. 

Leslie J. Anderson has spent much of her life riding, training, and caring for horses. Her collection of poetry, An Inheritance of Stone, was nominated for an Elgin Award. She has a master’s in creative writing from Ohio University and lives in Ohio with her family.

The Unmothers is her debut novel.

NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses. 

UP NEXT: The Unmothers

Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble. 

Joyce Carol Oates’s story “The Long-Legged Girl” (collected in Night-Gaunts) is part horror story, part cozy mystery…after all, the plot of the story revolves around a teapot. That tea contains poison, of course, but the sentiment is there nonetheless. Our story begins as a frustrated housewife hosts her professor-husband’s young, gorgeous, and yes, long-legged student at their home. 

NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses. 

Recommended in this episode: I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones and Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson 

Bonus Recs: Let Me Tell You and Come Along With Me

UP NEXT: Interview with Leslie J. Anderson (The Unmothers)

Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble. 

Join Mel and Lisa as we discuss Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory. When 12-year-old Robert Stephens is sent to Gracetown School For Boys, a reformatory, he finds himself in a nightmare. Like many children in Gracetown, Florida, he has a special ability to see ghosts, a “talent” which the warden exploits, charging Robbie with the task of getting rid of the “haints” of the boys who died because of the warden’s cruel treatment. 

NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses. 

Recommended in this episode: Stephen Graham Jones’s I Was a Teenage Slasher and Julia Alvarez’s The Cemetery of Untold Stories

UP NEXT: “The Long Legged Girl” by Joyce Carol Oates (collected in Night-Gaunts)

Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.

Join Lisa and Mel as they discuss Lora Senf’s The Clackity. Young Evie lives with her aunt in Blight Harbor–a seemingly quiet small town where everyone knows each other and looks out for each other. There’s just one small problem: it is the seventh most haunted town in America. Nearly everywhere you go, there are ghosts. Most are friendly. Still, there are some places everyone avoids. Like the abattoir. But now Evie must go there to save her aunt, who has gone missing. 

NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses. 

Recommended in this episode: Catriona Ward’s Looking Glass Sound 

UP NEXT:  The Reformatory by Tananarive Due

Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble. 

 We have a bookshop.org shop set up. Now you can shop for all of your favorite horror books by women. You’ll find Lisa's books, Mel’s books, and the books you hear about on this podcast. Plus, bookshop helps small bookstores.

Find all of our favorite books at Bookshop.org shop now!