Ah the madhouse. The loony bin. The ASYLUM!!   A classic horror location. One of my favourites, but problematic as hell in the wrong hands. Thankfully, I have the right author for the topic. Christ Panatier has the talent and the sensitivity to ensure that his novel, The Redemption of Morgan Bright can engage with the tropes without perpetuating them. He brings something as old-as-time but very new to asylum horror, and the results are dizzying, terrifying, awful.   We talk about the perils...

We all love a good spooky house. And most of us enjoy a terrifying home-invasion ordeal (or at least, I know I do).   What happens when you put them together? Kaaron Warren’s The Underhistory is the answer, but it’s nothing at all like what you’d expect.   This new novel by the award-winning Australian writer is a story of memory, of rooms and architecture, of violence and misogyny, and of a very unusual old lady. We talk about all of that and more. It’s a great conversation, one in which we...

I bite off a lot this week, in a five-way conversation with editors and contributors to the ever-so-of-the-moment anthology The Black Girl Survives in This One. That’s a promise right there on the title page, but as you will find out, survival is not always the same thing as living happily ever after.    Saraciea J. Fennell, Desiree S. Evans, Monica Brashears & Eden Royce talk to me about the vision (and necessity) of the project and where their stories came from? We discuss the role of...

I’m in literary hero territory again … at least this time it’s sunny!   My guest is Scarlett Thomas, the groundbreaking writer of PopCo, Oligarchy, The Seed Collectors and the (post)modern speculative classic, The End of Mr Y. She’s one of my favourite writers, who has never seen five or six separate genres she can’t mash together.   This time around we are talking “Hot Gothic” in The Sleepwalkers, a darkly playful tale of a vacation–and a marriage–gone horribly wrong.    We cover...

Carrie White turns 50 years old today!   April 5th, 1974 – the day King’s debut came out, and the world of horror we know live in changed forever.    To celebrate such an auspicious anniversary, there are only two people I could invite to this party. Step up Nat Cassidy and Ally Malinenko – writers who understand King and that bitter, brutal world between childhood and adulthood.   We talk about empathy and monsters, about the horror of high school, the abject and the menstruation taboo and...

Alas, we come to the end!   Stephen Graham Jones’s The Angel of Indian Lake brings the most important horror trilogy of the century to its conclusion. For one last time we return to Proofrock, Idaho – to watch Jade Daniels do battle with monsters in the wood and the demons in her head.    SGJ also comes back to Talking Scared to finish our adjacent trilogy of conversations about these books. We talk about slashers and final girls for sure, but as ever with Stephen, these are windows onto...

Chi-Town!!   We’re heading to the midwestern metropolis this week, for a conversation with Cina Pelayo – all about murder, mystery, history and strange things in the water.   Her new novel, Forgotten Sisters is a heady, dreamlike concoction of Chicago lore and much older horrors. It features a pair of very wyrd sisters and a house by a river that holds nothing good.    As well as all of that, we talk about Cina’s personal journey with the paranormal, mermaid sightings, writing law...

Never mind the floor is lava. This week the ground has teeth.   Joshua Hull is our guest, to talk about his obsession with dangerous, weird holes. He wrote one into his hilarious, grisly horror movie, Glorious (on Shudder) and now he’s given a hole a whole personality in his debut novella, Mouth.    It’s a grindhouse, b-movie celebrations, with larger than life characters, grisly death, and the most lovable monster of the year.    We talk about writing endearing creature features, about...

Time to get liminal and haunted.    Gwendolyn Kiste comes back to Talking Scared for another high-concept twist on the Gothic. In The Haunting of Velkwood, and entire street turns ghostly overnight. Yeah, I can’t explain that any more clearly, we’ll leave it to Gwendolyn.   Despite this being a book centered on trauma and angst, we do a whole lot of laughing. Amongst the chuckles we also sneak in conversation about the many meanings of the word haunted, child-free horror fiction televisual...

Sometimes you meet someone who just gets you.   Like Tim Lebbon. A man who writes riotously good adventure-horror novels, and also likes running outrageous distances up big hills. What a pleasure it was to speak to him.   The main topic of conversation is his new novel eco-horror novel, Among the Living. A story of ancient buried history and ‘intelligent’ infection, it blends the paranoia of The Thing with the ragtag group heroism and intensity of Aliens. In short, it’s good!   Tim and I talk...

Back from a too-short break, but ready to delve into the greatest haunted house of them all! Shirley Jackson’s Hill House. The place where the scary things walk alone.   Thankfully, I am not alone. I’m joined by my own group of creepy ghost-hunters: Paul Tremblay (A Head Full of Ghosts, Cabin at the End of the World), Johnny Compton (The Spite House) and Catriona Ward (Last House on Needless Street, Looking Glass Sound). I can think of no better collective to explore the corridors of this...

Yes I put sex in the title to make you download it. Did it work?   It shouldn’t be necessary, ‘cos this week’s guest is an absolute literary icon. Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, Haunted, Lullaby, Choke, and last year’s Not Forever, But For Now – a writer who helped shape the nihilism and extremity of 90s and noughties fiction. The man who makes people faint with his short stories.    He’s here, talking to us!   In this conversation Chuck and I roam all over the blasted map of his...

Are you hungry?    If so we have a chewy, salty, deeply flavoured feast for you this week. Ally Wilkes returns to Talking Scared to discuss the icebound horrors of her new novel, Where the Dead Wait. It’s a tale of Arctic exploration gone very wrong, complete with haunting, human suffering and the morbid fascination of cannibalism!   Don’t pretend that hasn’t whet your appetite.   Ally and I get into the raw details of consuming human meat, we talk about queerness in historical horror...

The first new book coverage of 2024 – and it starts us off on suitably horrific footing.   Jenny Kiefer’s debut novel, This Wretched Valley, has been getting a huge amount of early buzz in horror circles. It’s the story of four unlucky adventurers, who head into the Kentucky woods and meet all manner of nasty sh*t.    It’s a tightly wound tale of misadventure, that takes at least some inspiration from the Dyatlov Pass mystery. And if you don’t know what that is… boy have you got a wiki hole...

To kick off a new year of Talking Scared, I’ve gone and hooked us a big guest, with a whopper of a story.   John Langan is the author of The Fisherman. It’s one of the great works of supernatural fiction written this century, but its story doesn’t end at its back-cover. The strange mythology of The Fisherman extends beyond, swimming further downstream, to pop its monstrous head above the surface in John’s wider universe of short stories and novellas.   In this special episode, we talk at...

Another year done. We squeaked through without another plague or a nuclear apocalypse (don’t tempt fate Neil!!) and along the way, oh the stories we read!    The only thing left to do after mopping away the chalk pentagrams, is to run you through my very favourite books of the year. The so-called Best Horror Novels of 2023, as chosen by me. Ten of them to be precise, cos humans are obsessed with round numbers. Mwaha, in fact I talk about thirteen!!   Thanks again for listening and supporting...

Dickens said that Christmas Eve was a time for ghost stories, and who am I to argue?   It is my show though, so I get to pick the ghost story – and I picked Peter Straub’s classic novel of the name. A tale of old men with horror in their youths, seductive evil and a town besieged by winter and… worse things.   It’s a slippery beast though, this novel. So to really help pin it down, I needed help. I called and help came, in the form of Alan Baxter (author of Sallow Bend, The Gulp and many...

And so we come to the end of another year in horror. Time to look back at the best that 2023 has had to offer, as determined by three of the best in the business. My trusted horror chancellor, Emily Hughes joins me ­– alongside C.J. Leede, the author of this year’s gloriously transgressive Maeve Fly, and the maestro of the macabre himself, Victor Lavalle. Together we cover the year’s freshest nightmares in the macro and the micro, looking at wider trends and picking our own favourite horror...

We’re going up in the world this week – longitudinally and latitudinally, with the GOAT of endurance, adventure Gothic, Michelle Paver.   Michelle joins me for a big conversation about her novels Dark Matter and Thin Air – two of the most effective ghost stories of the 21st century. One takes us to the Arctic, the other to a Himalayan peak, both places littered with the dead… who may still be around.   We talk about how ghost stories work, their tradition and what perhaps differentiates them...

Last time Gemma Amor came on the show we had a good ol’ chinwag about our haunted brains. This time around we get to some other ghosts, in her new novel, The Folly.   It’s a sharp slice of coastal Gothic; Cornwall’s answer to The Shining if you will. The story follows Morgan and her aging father to the weird structure of the tital, where they find hauntings of many stripes, some uncannily familiar.    It wouldn’t be a Gemma Amor episode if things didn’t get personal – and we talk about...

We’ve had Cowboys versus Aliens but have you ever considered a threeway fight between gunslingers, vampires and weird cosmic cultists to an Elder God?    If not why not? What do you even think about when you are washing the dishes? But fear not, C.S. Humble has you covered. His weird western trilogy, That Light Sublime is packed with all of the above and more. In The Massacre at Yellow Hill and  A Red Winter in the West Seth introduces a cast of lovable rogues and the stakes of their battle...

Sometimes two words can make a jaded horror reader sit up straight.    Ghost is one, Dinosaur is another.   Ghost. Dinosaur.   Have you ever heard a more beautiful combination, a sweeter symphony of syllables.   If “Ghost Dinosaur” doesn’t make you go squeeee and shake your fists in excitement, I don’t know how to help you.   Anyway, that’s the focus of Luke Dumas delightful new novel, The Paleontologist. It’s a story about a haunted man, a creepy museum, institutional intrigue, murder and...

Horror is about finding light in darkness.   That’s the mission statement of this podcast, at least. And it’s never been truer than in this week’s episode. Tyler Jones re-joins us on Talking Scared to talk about his new novel, Midas. We cover its original mix of western tropes, Gothic fantasy and cult horror, but it’s family that lies at the heart of both the book and the conversation. Tyler talks us through the real life emotional rollercoaster that inspired this story.   It’s a personal...

History is haunted. Ghosts are injustice persevering.   So many horror stories hinge on that idea, but for Tananarive Due it’s more personal than that. Her new novel, The Reformatory, is borne from the ghosts hidden in her own family history.    The story takes place in a hideously cruel juvenile correction facility, in a racist town, in the 1950s. As you can imagine, very few good things happen to her child protagonist.    We talk about the link between horror and history, about writing from...