The Monster She Wrote Podcast

Justina Ireland’s book DREAD NATION has been called “Gone With the Wind with Zombies,” a description that we think does Ireland’s work a great disservice. It is a book about zombies, but it is so much more than that. We thought we’d let Justina Ireland herself describe the book and its sequel, Deathless Divide. The following quote is the author describing her inspiration, found in an interview that can be found online at Blackgirlnerds.com. Ireland says: “The original idea for Dread Nation and Deathless Divide came about in response to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I was reading that book and thinking: How could women who didn’t even dress themselves suddenly become zombie fighting machines?  If anything, I thought, they would’ve had ladies’ maids to do the zombie-killing for them.  And as I considered what that would look like in the United States, the first draft of Dread Nation was born.  It featured Negro girls who went to special combat schools to better themselves, similar to the Indian boarding schools of the late nineteenth century.  Soon, I had a book about zombies and pretty girls fighting the dead in fancy dresses with lovely blades.  Cute boys showed up to complicate things and voila! It seemed like a great young adult novel. One part intrigue, one part survival, a dash of romance, shake until blended and serve chilled.”

Recommend in this episode: Grady Hendrix's The Final Girl Support Group, Timothy Zahn’s original Star Wars Thrawn series (early 90s) Heir to the Empire and Dark Force Rising, and Netflix's Sweet Tooth

Next Episode: "Especially Heinous" by Carmen Maria Machado

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. 

Tananarive Due’s novella “Ghost Summer” takes place in the fictional town of Gracetown, Florida. Gracetown is the kind of small town where everyone knows everyone because the families go back to the town’s founding. But Gracetown is different in one significant way: ghosts come out on hot summer nights. And those ghosts can only be seen by children. Now, most young boys and girls would run away from a town full of ghosts, but narrator Davie is not most kids. He’s a budding ghost hunter, who can’t wait for his summer among the spirits. 

Recommended in this episode: Ring Shout (2020) and Elatsoe (2020)

Up next: Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation 

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. 

Patricia Highsmith, author of novels like The Talented Mr. Ripley, Strangers on a Train, and The Price of Salt, was the daughter of artists, born in Fort Worth, Texas, and raised in New York City by her mother and stepfather, whose last name she adopted. She graduated from Barnard and had dreams of a writing career, which she pursued relentlessly. She also had a fondness for snails, and at one point, bred about 300 of them in her garden (and is rumored to have brought them to cocktail parties in her purse). So it is any surprise that today, we are talking about her giant snail story, The Quest for Blank Claveringi.”

Recommended in this episode: Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers by Sady Doyle and V. E. Schwab's The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

Carmen Maria Machado on Highsmith (warts and all):

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jan/09/twisted-brilliance-patricia-highsmith-at-100

Next Episode: Tananarive Due’s novella Ghost Summer 

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.

Francis Stevens (1883-1948) was the pen name of Gertrude Barrows Bennett, aka “the woman who invented modern American dark fantasy.” Her story “Unseen--Unfeared,” an early example of weird fiction, was published in the February 10, 1919 issue of People’s Favorite Magazine. Like Tanith Lee’s “Yellow and Red,” in “Unseen--Unfeared,” we have yet another lesson about the horrors of photography. This time, however, we have a scientist trying to develop color plates, who unwittingly discovers the right shades of lighting to illuminate some rather nasty creatures. These horrifying-looking creatures are invisible to the naked human eye, yet they live in the world all around us, and, at times, may even be touching us. So, we invite you, listeners, to: See the Great Unseen! Come in! This means you! It is free to ALL!       

Recommended in this episode: American Hysteria podcast and Pam Grossman's Waking the Witch

On the next podcast episode: “The Quest for Blank Claveringi” by Patricia Highsmith

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 film Black Sunday (1960) is about a witch/vampire hellbent on revenge returns from the grave in 1830s Moldavia. She’s beautiful and deadly--and she has a doppelganger conveniently close to her old stomping grounds. The witch and her victim are both played by the arrestingly beautiful Barbara Steele, and this is the film that launched her career as a horror icon. It’s also the film that cemented Italian director Mario Bava as one to watch.

Barbara Steele biography on TCM can be found here.  

Recommended in this episode: Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s and Joan Samson’s The Auctioneer

Next Episode: “Unseen--Unfeared” by Francis Stevens

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.

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Shirley Jackson once again proves that she is the queen of creepy short stories, this time with her story “The Summer People.” The story starts idyllic, like many of Jackson’s stories. The Allisons are a wealthy older couple who summer in a cabin by a lake in rural New England. Their picturesque existence quickly turns nightmarish, however, when they decide to extend their trip and stay past Labor Day. 

Recommended in this episode: Caroline Kepnes's You series and Providence; also Netflix's The Irregulars

Next Episode: Tanith Lee’s story “Yellow and Red” (in the Vandermeer's The Weird anthology)

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. 

In the story “Patient Zero,” readers find themselves privy to a few months of a boy’s journal. Jay is 10 years old; he loves football and his favorite player is Dan Marino; he loves to run and play and climb ropes; he excels at reading and needs a little help with math; and he loves to watch the movie Big. He seems like every other kid at that time and that age, but he’s not. He is the only known American survivor of a virus that is sweeping the world.

NEXT EPISODE: Shirley Jackson's "The Summer People" 

Recommended in this episode: Claudia Gray's Bloodline (a Star Wars novel) and We Believe the Children by Richard Beck (nonfiction)

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. 

Margaret St. Clair’s story “The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles” is a tale inspired by  the Lord Dunsany story “How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles.” St. Clair’s tale is a wonderful update. The gnoles are still horrible creatures of fantasy, but the main character is completely mundane. The hero of the story is Mortensen, a hapless salesman, who only wants to meet his sales quota and maybe get “a special mention at the annual sales-force dinner.” Does it matter that these are dangerous monsters? Not really, because as any good salesman knows, adaptability is key.

Suggested: WandaVision and Stacy Schiff's The Witches

Next Episode: Tananarive Due’s short story “Patient Zero”

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 Gorgon, a 1964 film, was directed by Terence Fisher, and starring Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and Barbara Shelley, who we discussed in an earlier episode. The film tells the story of a mysterious monster, who is lurking around an isolated village, turning victims to stone.

Recommended in this episode: The Upstairs House by Julia Fine

Next episode: "The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles"

Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.