The Monster She Wrote Podcast

Octavia Butler's "Speech Sounds" imagines a world that has been ravaged by a disease. The illness ravages the brain especially, attacking the ability to process and use language. For our protagonist, who used to be a history professor, losing the ability to read and write has hit especially hard.

Recommended in this episode: Ruth Ware audiobooks and Outer Range

NEXT UP: "Harry" by Rosemary Timperley

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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is [email protected]. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is "Misconception" by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.

Wolves are a staple of horror literature and fairy tales alike. They are fierce creatures that walk the woods, reminding us of the dangers that lurk once we leave the confines of comfortable and safe civilization. In her short story "The Company of Wolves," Angela Carter retells the familiar tale of "little red riding hood," examining the very real world danger that women often navigate every day.

Recommended in this episode: Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw and The Institute by Stephen King

UP NEXT: "Speech Sounds" by Octavia Butler

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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is [email protected]. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is "Misconception" by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.

Two words: Goth Byron

The narrator of Everil Worrell's "The Canal" is a man who enjoys long walks at night on the edge of the city. Really, what could go wrong? As it turns out, a lot. Narrator Morton comes across a mysterious woman who is living on a half-sunken boat, on the far edge of a disused canal. He only speaks to her for a short while, but it is enough. Morton is enamored of this secretive beauty, and he agrees to do whatever it takes to be close to her. He will live to regret that decision, as he may have unwittingly unleashed an unspeakable evil upon the city. Listen to Worrell's story on Pseudopod.

Recommended in this episode: Hulu's FRESH and Dorothy Quick's "Strange Orchids" (Weird Tales 1937)

UP NEXT: Angela Carter's "The Company of Wolves"

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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is [email protected]. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is "Misconception" by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.

"The advent of the artist and the door was almost simultaneous. I have always wondered if the one would have been as sinister without the other." Thus begins Dorothy Quick's story "The Artist and the Door," first published in Weird Tales in November 1952. The narrator, who is a successful author, lays out an innocent situation. She purchased a fixer-upper Elizabethan farmhouse and painstakingly restored it. In search of the perfect door, she attended an auction and found just the thing for her home. The only problem is that the house the door used to be a part of was haunted and had to be exorcized by a priest. But that's just superstition, right? Could a door possibly be evil?

This story is available on the Pseudopod podcast.

Recommended in this episode: Allison V. Harding stories from Weird Tales and Severance on AppleTV+.

UP NEXT: Everil Worrell's "The Canal"

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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is [email protected]. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is "Misconception" by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.

Nalo Hopkinson's "The Easthound" tells the story of twins, Millie and Jolly, as they navigate the dangers of a post-apocalyptic world. A pandemic has taken most of the adults, and now, the children must fend for themselves. There's danger of starvation and disease, but there is also danger in simply growing up. Millie and Jolly cannot stay children forever, and this story is about how they deal with pending adulthood and what that means in this new world.

Recommended in this episode: Gemma Files's Experimental Film

UP NEXT: Dorothy Quick's "The Artist and the Door" (Pseudopod 750, March 2021)

Please rate and review us, or better yet, tell a friend.

Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is [email protected]. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is "Misconception" by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.

"The Prayer of Ninety Cats" by Caitlín R. Kiernan is a story about a film critic watching a film, specifically a fictional film about Elizabeth Bathory, the Blood Countess. Through the description of this experience, however, Kiernan moves the reader beyond the spectacle of the theater and film to explorations of film history and critique, discussions of representation and illusion, and questions of how and why we adapt histories and legends for the screen.

Recommended in this episode: Thornhill by Pam Smy

UP NEXT: Nalo Hopkinson's "The Easthound"

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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is [email protected]. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is "Misconception" by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.

Poppy, Zack and Alice are three friends who meet after school to play a game of fantasy and imagination. They use dolls and action figures to tell an elaborate story involving pirates, mermaids, and other adventurers. The main story involves the Great Queen, a bone-china doll who lives in the glass cabinet at Poppy's house. Zach wants to stop the game, because his father believes middle school is too old to play make-believe, but Poppy brings the friends together one last time. She's been dreaming of the ghost inside of the china doll–and the ghost won't rest until the doll is buried in her grave.

Recommended in this episode: The Book of Boba Fett and Wolf Like Me

UP NEXT: "The Prayer of Ninety Cats" by Caitlín R. Kiernan

Please rate and review us, or better yet, tell a friend.

Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is [email protected]. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is "Misconception" by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.

12 year-old Maggie has been moved from boarding house to boarding house. She's never quite fit in anywhere, as every new school has labeled her "impossible to handle." Maggie is sent to live at the former Adelphi Hills Academy, a large manor house that looks more like an institution, with her only living relatives, her great aunts Lillian and Harriet, who are cold, severe women obsessed with health and good manners, and her great uncle Morris, who tries his best to bond with the sickly Maggie–to no avail. Maggie is lonely at Adelphi Hills–until she begins to hear the voices coming from behind the walls.

Recommended in this episode: The Other Black Girl and The Last House on Needless Street

UP NEXT: DOLL BONES

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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is [email protected]. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is "Misconception" by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.

While spending time with her Aunt Clare in her grandparents' old house, 12-year-old, going on 13, Amy Treloar makes a startling discovery in the attic. A dollhouse that is an exact replica of the house she is staying in! At first, she is excited about the possibilities of the dollhouse–she loves miniatures–but her excitement quickly turns to terror when she realizes it isn't a typical dollhouse. At certain times, the dollhouse lights up, and the dolls are never in the places she leaves them.

Recommended in this episode: Cruelly Yours by Cassandra Peterson and Artie and the Wolf Moon, a YA graphic novel by Olivia Stephens

UP NEXT: Behind the Attic Wall

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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is [email protected]. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is "Misconception" by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.

Elizabeth de Wynt and Cecilia Montresor are friends, writing letters back and forth, sharing news of their lives as friends do. Elizabeth is traveling, while Cecilia is getting settled into a new house in London. The house is perfect, but it did come with startingly cheap rent for the city. Cecilia's letters turn darker and more suspenseful as the story progresses, and it becomes clear that something sinister lives within the walls of the house at number 32 in May Fair.

Recommended: Louise Erdrich's The Sentence

Next Episode: Betty Ren Wright's The Dollhouse Murders and horror for children

Please rate and review us, or better yet, tell a friend.

Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is [email protected]. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is "Misconception" by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.