The Monster She Wrote Podcast

We are officially in SPOOKY SEASON so we thought what better than a good old fashioned ghost story to celebrate. Kelly Link’s story “Two Houses” (which appeared in her collection titled Get in Trouble) is at once both a classic ghost story and one that is entirely unique. It combines elements of the dusty old English manor home and the idea of sharing ghost stories with friends around a fire with elements of space travel and science fiction. “Two Houses” is a story about a group of astronauts who have just awakened from a long deep sleep and are swapping ghost stories to pass the time. Their computer companion, Maureen, keeps things on the ship running, but she also can manipulate their surroundings--adding special effects to help bring the stories to life. As each astronaut takes their turn telling a tale, the atmosphere is getting creepier and more unsettling. By the end of Link’s story, it is difficult to tell who the true ghosts are. 

Recommended in this episode: Kelly Link's Get in Trouble and Craven Manor by Darcy Coates. 

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. 

Becky Spratford is a Readers' Advisor in Illinois specializing in serving patrons ages 13 and up. She trains library staff all over the world on how to match books with readers through the local public library. She runs the critically acclaimed RA training blog RA for All. She is under contract to provide content for EBSCO’s NoveList database and writes reviews for Booklist and a horror review column for Library Journal. Becky is a 20 year locally elected Library Trustee [still serving] and a Board member for the Reaching Across Illinois Library System. Known for her work with horror readers, Becky is the author of The Reader’s Advisory Guide to Horror, Second Edition [ALA Editions, 2012] and is currently hard at work on the 3rd Edition. She is a proud member of the Horror Writers Association and currently serves as the Association’s Secretary and organizer of their annual Librarians’ Day. You can follow Becky on Twitter @RAforAll.  

Recommended in this episode: Ladies of the Fright podcast (episode 36), Through the Woods by Emily Carroll, Into the Forest and All the Way Through by Cynthia Pelayo, and Doll Bones by Holly Black 

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). 

It’s a familiar story. A happy couple moves into an old estate, which is probably haunted. Only this isn’t the story you think it is. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a different kind of ghost story. The narrator is sick, and her husband John, who is firmly “practical,” doesn’t believe his wife is sick, not with anything more serious than a “nervous condition” anyway. John has moved his wife to the crumbling old house to help her condition, and she is left alone all day. Soon, the house becomes her prison. As her world becomes increasingly smaller, the narrator starts to see mysterious shadows move across the hideous yellow wallpaper in her room. Now, the narrator is convinced a woman has come out of the walls--but will anyone believe her?

Recommended in this episode: Priya Sharma's Ormeshadow and Tananarive Due and Patricia Stephens Due's Freedom in the Family

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). 

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic opens in Mexico City with socialite Noemi Taboada uncharacteristically leaving a party early because of a summons from her father. Noemi isn’t really interested in following other people’s directions. She yearns to strike out on her own, make her own choices, and continue her education: three things her father doesn’t approve of. Thinking her father means to reprimand her for something, she is instead shocked when he shows her a letter from her recently married cousin who lives in a remote area near the town El Triunfo in a manor house called High Place. Catalina’s letter claims that her husband, Virgil Doyle, is poisoning her and won’t let her leave. She also claims to see ghosts coming out of the walls and believes she is losing track of time. Noemi’s father, who was Catalina’s guardian, had driven away a man Catalina had loved in favor of her waiting for a better, richer match. Catalina then married Doyle so quickly that Mr. Taboada could never properly discern the suitor’s social position. Noemi’s father may or may not feel some guilt over being so overbearing to Catalina, but he quickly decides that Catalina is hysterical and needs psychiatric treatment. He wants Noemi to scope out the situation and get Catalina help, if possible. Noemi knows Catalina is trapped between Doyle’s wishes as her husband and Mr. Taboada’s previous control as her guardian. But her father promises Noemi that she can pursue graduate study if she completes the mission. She then begins her journey to the heart of High Place, during which she will learn that Catalina’s letter didn’t even scratch the surface of the depravity and Gothic horrors the house, and the family within it, contain.      

Recommended this episode: Aliya Whiteley's THE BEAUTY

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. 

Hundreds Hall is a perfect place to set a Gothic novel. Once a grand place where the wealthy gathered for lavish parties, it is now crumbling, as the family bank accounts are swiftly diminishing. That does not stop the novel’s narrator, Faraday, from becoming obsessed with the estate. He remembers a time as a child, when enthralled with the home, he stole an acorn made of plaster, torn right off the wall. His obsession didn’t go away in adulthood, either--in fact, it only grows larger by the day. As a country doctor, he is called back to Hundreds Hall to treat a servant girl who has grown ill, and he uses this opportunity to insert himself into the lives of siblings Caroline and Roderick Ayres, the last remaining heirs. Faraday refuses to let go of his dreams of Hundreds Hall, but he may not be the only one with an unhealthy interest in the home. Are there ghosts that walk the halls? Or is it just an old home that needs the love and attention that only Faraday thinks he can offer? 

Recommended in this episode: The Host on Shudder

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.

Join Mel and Lisa as they discuss the YA horror novel Sawkill Girls, by Claire Legrand.

Following the death of her father in a car accident, Marion Althouse finds herself moving to a new home on Sawkill Island. Her mother, numb with loss, will be the housekeeper for the top family on Sawkill: the Mortimers, a mother and daughter with numerous dark secrets. Marion’s sister Charlotte is eager for a new scene and new friends. While still lost in the throes of grief, Marion has become an anxious caretaker to her remaining family. She just wants a safe place for all three of them to heal. Sawkill isn’t the place for that, however. It doesn’t take long for Charlotte to find new friends, including the boss’s daughter, Val. Then the unthinkable happens: Charlotte disappears. Marion quickly discovers that Sawkill has a terrifying history of disappearing girls, several of whom were friends with Val at the end, and no one really does much to figure out what happened. It turns out that this Island is a temporary home for a monster from another dimension, and this monster needs to eat girls to survive. The Rock of Sawkill isn’t happy about this occupation and needs girls to unite to protect it and its inhabitants. Marion has to negotiate this new community, with its distrust of outsiders and strict class hierarchies, and figure out who are her allies and who are her enemies. It doesn’t take her long to learn that nothing is quite what it seems to be.    

Recommended in this podcast: W. Scott Poole's Vampira: Dark Goddess of Horror, Paul Tremblay's Survivor Song, and Stephen Graham Jones's The Only Good Indians

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. 

Just about everyone knows the tragic story of the Titanic, which sunk in 1912 after an ill-fated meeting with an iceberg, but fewer know about the Titanic’s sister ship, The Britannic, which was built to be “stronger” and “safer” after the Titanic’s sinking. That didn’t stop it’s tragic end in 1916, however, when it sank after an explosion caused by a naval mine. In her novel The Deep, author Alma Katsu weaves a tale, which begins on the Titanic and ends four years later on the Britannic. The story follows a young woman, Annie Hebbley, who takes a job as a stewardess on the Titanic, where she is entranced by the lives of the wealthy men and women she is there to serve. One man, Mark Fletcher, grabs her attention--and she inserts herself into his life (and that of his mysterious new wife and young infant daughter). Following the sinking of the ship, Annie later finds a wounded Mark on the Britannic, where she has taken a job as a nurse on the ocean liner-turned-WWI hospital ship. It could be a fateful meeting of potential lovers--or something far worse. Secrets are everywhere--so too are potential ghosts and curses. 

Recommended in this episode:  Alix E. Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January and The Claudia Kishi Club

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. 

Margaret St. Clair’s Sign of the Labrys takes place in a future United States of America, though the government seems to have fallen, after a yeast pandemic killed a majority of the population. What is left of the country has gone into a kind of subterranean quarantine, and society is fractured, as people are afraid to be too close to one another, for fear of spreading the germ. The quarantine has gone on for so long, that people have grown accustomed to being alone and now prefer it to any kind of human contact. This is the storyworld that readers are introduced to, as they meet the protagonist, Sam Sewell, a man living and working in underground levels, meant to keep people safe but apart. Imagine his horror and surprise when he finds that someone has invaded his space, leaving messages and clues in his home “pod” and attracting the attention of an FBY agent. His journey to discover who is trying to contact him leads him deeper into the ground, level by level, into a world of danger--and of magic. 

Recommended reading: Justina Ireland's Dread Nation, Vivien Chien's Noodleshop series, and Julia Fine's What Should Be Wild

Emily Carroll’s stories have the feel of tales told for centuries around campfires. She’s a horror storyteller who is ranked among Neil Gaiman and Stephen King, with artwork reminiscent of Edward Gorey. Her style is playful, bone-chillingly creepy, and above all, a lot of fun. 

Recommended reading: Alma Katsu's The Deep, Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy, and River Solomon's The Deep 

Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini.

In our discussion, we are joined by a special guest. Shari Holt is an English professor who teaches courses in British Literature and cinema studies at the University of Mississippi. She’s the co-author of Ouida the Phenomenon, a study of the Victorian sensation novelist, and she writes about Charles Dickens, Gothic fiction, and film adaptations of literature.

We try to define "Southern Gothic" and explore the rage of the female ghost.

Books recommended: Priya Sharma's Ormeshadow and the ghost stories of Elizabeth Gaskell.