Shows
Talking Scared239 – Sarah Pinborough & What Are Ghosts But Lies Persevering?
It’s a week of sadness and hilarity on Talking Scared.
The happy stuff comes courtesy of Sarah Pinborough, author of Weird domestic gothics, like Behind Her Eyes and the brand new ghost story (or is it?) We Live Here Now.
We talk about confounding expectations, about the rules of the psychological thriller, about the British horror scene then and now, and about the dark truth that we all lie to each other.
The sadness... well you’ll hear that in the outro if you want to sti...2025-05-201h 14Talking Scared233 – Tariq Ashkanani & Bloodstained Hands Across the OceanThis week we go from Edinburgh, Scotland to Nashville, Tennessee, in the company of crime author Tariq Ashkanani. Tariq’s The Midnight King is a tricky, quasi-metafictional murder mystery about cursed manuscripts, familial secrets and the most heinous murders. It’s also a love letter to the kind of occult-tinged American crime epics that both he and I grew up loving. We talk about the challenge of writing about serial killing without exploitation, about the unstable boundary between crime and horror fiction, about the allure of Hannibal Lecter and the pressure of a g...2025-04-081h 15Talking Scared226 – Virginia Feito & A Good Old-Fashioned Bad GirlTime to misbehave. Virginia Feito’s new novel, Victorian Psycho, is all about good behaviour, positive standards and polite conduct…and what happens when you flout all that, by – I dunno – slaughtering a houseload of people. It’s a much buzzed about book that takes the psychopathy of American Psycho back to the straightlaced, be-corseted world of the 19th Century, then let’s rip. We talk about glorious violence, the humour of extremity, Charles Dickens and Bret Easton Ellis…and have a deeply amusing conversation about infanticide. Queen Victorian w...2025-02-111h 19Talking Scared209 – Anna Bogutskaya & A Deep Fear of Things SincereSend us a textAnna Bogutskaya is one of the UK’s most prominent film critics, with a penchant for horror. She knows her scary onions. And in her new book, Feeding the Monster, she asks an important question (well, important to the likes of you and me) – Why does horror have a hold on us? In concise but free-ranging essays, she looks at the prominent themes that sets the horror oft the last decade apart, peeling back the skin of the genre to see how it’s muscle flex and grip, and also gi...2024-08-271h 27Talking Scared188 – Scarlett Thomas & Hot GothicSend us a textI’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 ac...2024-04-091h 19Talking Scared185 – Cynthia Pelayo & A Mermaid in the Windy CitySend us a textChi-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 enforc...2024-03-261h 09Talking Scared166 – Sam Rebelein & You Had Me At “Tongue-Monster!”Send us a textSome stories are just too big for one podcast. Some stories should be too big for one book. Sam Rebelein’s Edenville is one such story. This 300-something page novel has more crammed into it than your average fantasy trilogy. There is backstory upon backstory, a cosmic framework, and enough different monsters to fill Guillermo del Toro’s minibus. Yet somehow Sam corrals it all into a whimsical horror romp – a well-organised riot. We talk about ideas… about thinking them up, letting them evolve and, most crucia...2023-10-241h 09Talking Scared147 – Mike Flanagan & Lighting Up the DarknessSend us a textI’ve rarely been more excited about an episode – for you to hear it or, indeed, about its very contents.We’re joined this week by Mike Flanagan. Yes, that Mike Flanagan. The genius loci of modern visual horror, the writer and director behind Midnight Mass, The Haunting of Hill House, Doctor Sleep, The Midnight Club and Oculus. Our most literary horror director and a man who understand that horror is where the heart is. If you think my praise is too gushing then… we’ll just have to disagree.2023-06-131h 18Talking Scared143 – Alice Slater & Bookish Murder VibesSend us a textWe are paying tribute to the best of us this week. The booksellers. Keepers of the flame, beacons in the night, purveyors of meaning in a cold, dark universe … usually.Alice Slater used to be a member of that celebrated guild, now she’s written about the light and dark side of the trade in her debut smash, Death of a Bookseller. It pulls back the curtain on an industry we all care deeply about, to reveal the obsession, madness and … murder(?) behind the chai lattes and instagram posts.In thi...2023-05-161h 12Talking Scared124 – State of the Horror Nation 2022, with Emily Hughes & Janelle JansonSend us a textIt’s that time of year again. A time to reflect, to look back over a tumultuous twelve months, and to talk about the horror books that helped us survive them.2022 has been a helluva year for the good kind of horror. Far too much for one man to cover. So I’ve drafted in some highly qualified friends – Emily Hughes and Janelle Janson. They have their fingers right on the arterial spurt of the genre – and they have each read far more than me.Together we deliver this year's S...2022-12-272h 00Talking Scared114 – Erin E. Adams & Monsters in the Rust BeltSend us a textIt was Thomas Wolfe who wrote “you can never go home again.” Huh, what did he know? (yes, I understand the metaphor – move on!)This week’s guest proves that whilst you can go home, you may not want to. Erin E. Adams is an actor, playwright and now the debut author of JACKAL, a novel of homecomings horrid and awful. Each year, in the small Pennsylvania town of Johnstown, a young Black girl goes missing, taken by whatever lurks in the woods surrounding the town. Helluva premise!!Erin ta...2022-10-181h 05Talking Scared97 – A Monstrous Roundtable, with Ellen Datlow, Nathan Ballingrud, Chikodili Emelumadu & Joe R. LansdaleSend us a textThis week on Talking Scared it’s monsters all day, every day. To celebrate the release of Screams From the Dark: 29 Tales of Monsters and the Monstrous, we gather around the campfire with editor Ellen Datlow and three of her contributors – no less than Nathan Ballingrud, Chikodili Emelumadu and the great Joe R. Lansdale.As a result, this is not your average Talking Scared episode. There is interruption, overlap, argument much good humour. Amidst the chaos we still manage a fascinating conversation about the creatures that lurk in the...2022-06-211h 14Talking Scared94 – Scott Hawkins and a Dog-Eat-Lion WorldSend us a textThis week we go behind the curtain to look at the inner workings of a bona-fide modern classic. Our guest is Scott Hawkins, whose debut novel, The Library At Mount Char delighted genre fans back in 2015. Now, to commemorate its first UK publication, Scott joins me for a conversation about its many madcap secrets.We talk about everything from cosmic ethics to kidney stone – he gives us a little until-now-unknown backstory on some of the most mysterious characters, and I take umbrage at how awfully he treats the poor, poor...2022-05-311h 04Talking Scared78 – Thomas Olde Heuvelt and the Mountains of (My) MadnessSend us a textThis week is my personal Everest. Thomas Olde Heuvelt, bestselling Euro-horror whizzkid author of HEX, joins me to to talk about his newest novel – Echo. It’s a story of mountaineering, and madness, and monsters of the soul.If you follow me on any form of social media you may have seen that this book utterly distressed me. I can’t even say why myself; it just tweaked a nerve. Echo is a wonderfully easter-egg-laden novel, full of references to other horror masterworks. As you’ll hear in this co...2022-02-081h 08Talking Scared76 – Ally Wilkes and Good Reasons to be Afraid of the DarkSend us a textIs it cold where you are? If so, do I have the book for you.Our guest is Ally Wilkes, whose debut novel, All the White Spaces was my pick for the most anticipated horror novel of early 2022. I was NOT disappointed.The book takes us to Antarctica in 1919, just months after the end of the First World War, in the dying years of the Heroic Age of Exploration. There, trapped in the frozen ‘overwinter’ the team of men are forced to confront a malignant presence that draws them out...2022-01-251h 07Talking Scared69 – Wendy N. Wagner and Nasty ShenanigansSend us a textI know it’s the middle of winter but this week the book in question is taking us back to summer. And not our current plague-summer – but the halcyon days of 1989. Think kids on bikes, running wild, fights and first loves, demonic deer gods … wait … what?Our guest, Wendy N. Wagner is the editor-in-chief of the prestigious Nightmare Magazine, and the author of epic coming-of-age horror The Deer Kings, as well as the ‘Sawmill Gothic’, The Secret Skin. We talk about both books and how Wendy has transposed both the classic British Goth...2021-12-071h 08Talking Scared66 – Ellen Datlow and What Does ‘Scared’ Mean Anyhow?Send us a textFor over three decades Ellen Datlow has been at the centre of the horror community. She is the queen of editors, the doyenne of anthologisers, the person who gets to declare what is the Best Horror of the Year.And she has come back to talk to me after I lost the conversation file the first time around…!That major mishap may have been a blessing in disguise, as since then she has published two standout anthologies, dealing with very different branches of horror. Body Shocks is a bumper co...2021-11-161h 11
Freshly Squeezed42 | It is What You Make of it (ft. Justin McRoberts)In this episode Jacob and Brooks interview Justin McRoberts, an artist, church planter, pastor, singer-songwriter and author, to discuss his new book, "It Is What You Make Of It." . “It is what it is”—a common phrase you hear and maybe even say yourself. But the truth is that there is not one square inch in the whole domain of our human existence that simply is what it is. Justin McRoberts invites you to embrace a new mindset: It Is What You Make of It. We are fresh to the video podcasting scene, but have 40 previous episodes you can...2021-08-311h 01Talking Scared18 - Gabriel Bergmoser and It's Only a Joke Mate!Send us a textMerry Christmas and/or time-off-work-week! For all of you currently freezing your asses off in cold climes, this week’s episode may make you feel a little too warm under the collar. Our guest is Gabriel Bergmoser, an author who exploded onto the horror scene in early 2020 with The Hunted, a pulpy, violent, visceral hell ride through the Australian wilderness in the company of very human prey and predators. Considering the amount of people hanging from hooks and suffering violent deaths in his fiction, Gabriel proves to be a thoroughly charming gue...2020-12-231h 23