After seeing an early screener of Something Very Bad is Going to Happen I immediately thought it was going to be huge!

So I leapt ahead of the curve and invited writer and showrunner, Haley Z Boston to come talk scared about weddings, soulmates, David Lynch and Danish horror, and what it’s like to work with the Duffer Brothers.

This show has been my whole personality for two weeks. Ihope you watch, listen to this interview, and love it all.

Enjoy

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Tamika Thompson talks me through the great American curseof the 21st Century on this week’s episode. No, not Tangerine Cthulhu … but the plague of gun deaths that is coring out the country.

That’s the focus of her new novel, The Curse of Hester Gardens, which asks whether the deaths gunning for the young men of an inner-city housing project are criminal, or something much weirder!

Yeah, that’s right. Listen to a cossetted little English guy try and keep up in an conversation about gun crimes and street life.

Enjoy!

Other books mentioned:

• The Rats (1974), by James Herbert
• The Ghosts of Sleath (1994),by James Herbert
• Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century (2022), by Kim Fu
• Mystery Lights (2024), by Lena Valencia
• “How to Do Diversity When You’re Lazy, Ignorant and/or Malicious” (2018), by Tamika Thompson – Link HERE

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Some stories just boggle your mind and boil your imagination.

Such are the ideas in Annie Neugebauer’s You Have to Let Them Bleed, and her logic-shattering novella The Extra. The Uncanny Valley, obsessional thoughts, dangerous knowledge, mothers who aren’t mothers and a camping group that destroys the workings of math and memory… these are just some of the inexplicabilities we discuss in this week’s episode.

If this episode gives you an existential crisis, ontological collapse, or just plain migraine nightmares – well, I can’t and won’t be held responsible. You’re all adults.

Enjoy!

Other books mentioned:

• “If Those Ragged Feet Won’t Run” (2018), by Annie Neugebauer
• Things We Say in the Dark (2019), by Kirsty Logan
• Silent Nightmares: Haunting Stories to Be Told on the Longest Night of the Year (2026), edited by Chuck Palahniuk and Michael C. Bailey
• There is No Antimemetics Division (2025), by qntm
• House of Leaves (2000), by Mark Z. Danielewski
• Delbert Judd (2014), by Dan Hammond Jr.
• Incidents Around the House (2024), by Josh Malerman

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Time for sex and seances this week on Talking Scared.

Our guest is Avery Curran and her debut novel Spoiled Milk. It’s a story of spiritualism and sapphic desire, set in a 1920s boarding school where death, rot, haunting and much worse things (patriarchy!) runs rampant.

Avery is a specialist in the history of spiritualism (with a brand new PhD to her name) and this conversation is a deep and deeply enjoyable route through all of her books haunted classrooms.

It’s one of those episodes when we ALL learn something, listeners.

Enjoy!

Other books mentioned:

• The Wells of Loneliness (1928), by Radclyffe Hall
• “The Female World of Love and Ritual” (2006,) by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg
• Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), by Eve Kososfky-Sedgewick
• IT (1986), by Stephen King
• The Haunting of Alma Fielding (2021), by Kate Summerscale
• Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower (2020), by Tamsyn Muir
• A Canticle for Liebowitz (1959), by Walter M. Miller Jr

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This Off Book episode is a trip into the deep dark woods, for a very special playdate!

Our guest is Rod Blackhurst, director and co-writer of the new retro horror movie, Dolly. It’s a film about a very scary house in the woods and the even scarier person who lives inside…and who wants nothing so much as a new toy of her own.  

Rod and I talk about the tone, gore and influences behind the movie – from 16mm classics to New French Extremity. We discuss the pathos of a truly great horror monster, and the physical performance that brings Dolly to terrifying life.

I’m really cheering for this movie. It was so much more than I expected.

Enjoy

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This week we’re sharpening our swords and checking our armpits for boils!

Christopher Buehlman is the guest, author the hugely-acclaimed 2012 medieval horror fantasy, Between Two Fires – now being reissued for a new, wide audience. It’s a book that everyone has been screaming at me to read, and I’m glad I did.

Christopher and I get hellishly geeky, talking history, plague, angelology and demonology, Biblical reference and epic poetry. But he also tells us about his past career insulting drunk people at ren-fairs.

Enjoy!

Other books mentioned:

Those Across the River (2011), by Christopher Buehlman

The Blacktongue Thief (2021), by Christopher Buehlman

The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death (2005), by John Kelly

Angel Down (2025), by Daniel Kraus

The Starving Saints (2025), by Caitlin Starling

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Clap your hands twice if you believe in Catriona Ward!

Cat is back on the show this week, to talk Nowhere Burning – a horror novel informed by everything from Peter Pan (it has its own Tinkerbell), to certain disgraced megastars, and even the CIA checklist on what constitutes a cult!

It’s a lot, and we talk about all of it, as well as various weird mysteries, the grimmest cult we’ve ever heard of, and Cat’s various brushes with fame over the years.

This little precise may have you thinking WTF? – but the way I see it, that’s the perfect set-up for a Cat Ward novel.

Enjoy!

Other books mentioned:

• The Last House on Needless Street (2021), by Catriona Ward
• Looking Glass Sound (2023), by Catriona Ward
• Peter & Wendy (1911), by J. M. Barrie
• Hunt for the Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah (2005), by Colm A. Kelleher and George Knapp
• Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings (2020), by Neil Price
• Tradwife (2026), by Sarah Langan

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When is a zombie not a zombie?

I don’t have a punchline to that joke. But something…something … revenant!

Brennan LaFaro’s The Denizens is about a small southern town with a very unusual relationship with death. What precisely is the nature of the corpses roaming the woods, and what do they want with the living. You’ll have to listen to find out.

What is certain is that this book gives Brennan and I a launchpad for a conversation about writing action-horror scenes, the ethics of suffering and pain, what comes after death, and all the horrible little small towns that inspired his own.

Enjoy!

Other books mentioned:

• On Sundays She Picked Flowers (2026), by Yah Yah Schofield
• Pet Semetary (1983), by Stephen King
• Knockemstiff (2008), by Donald Ray Pollock
• The Devil All the Time (2011), by Donald Ray Pollock
• Donnybrook (2013), by Frank Bill
• The Complex (2016), by Brian Keene
• The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch (2015), by Daniel Kraus

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This Valentine’s week, come for a walk up on t’moors with me and Agatha Andrews.

I’ve invited Agatha, my friend and sister-in-Gothic, host of She Wore Black podcast, for a conversation about Wuthering Heights.

It’s known as “the greatest love story ever told,” but that’s such nonsense. Instead we talk about mania and melancholy, hate and power, cannibalism and necrophilia… and we also look ahead to the Hollywood adaptation with bated (but amused) breath.

Enjoy!

Other books mentioned:

• David Copperfield (1850), by Charles Dickens
• The Brontës (1994), by Juliet Barker
• The Gabriel Hounds (1964), by Mary Stewart
• East of Eden (1952), by John Steinbeck
• The Vampyre (1819), by John Polidori
• The Favourites (2025), by Layne Fargo

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A bit of chaos on the show for the weekend. We start with one guest and end with two. And there’s a dude with an alligator’s head running amok!

Mama Came Callin’ is the slasher/cryptid/mystery/noir graphic novel written by Ezra Claytan Daniel and illustrated by Camilla Sucre. It’s set in the swamps of Florida, amongst murky waters and dirtier histories.

The three of us (eventually) talk about the horrendous racist truth underpinning the story, we discuss how two creatives can bring their distinctive skills to a singular vision. We hear about the joy and hustle of a multidisciplinary career, and Ezra gives us some insight into the writing room for the TV show Severance.

Enjoy

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We’re tiptoeing towards the sci-fi end of things this week, with Justin C. Key and The Hospital at the End of the World.

This is a techn-othriller about AI run amok in the medical establishment, and the junior doctor who must navigate a shadowy conspiracy, a fatal (and horrific) disease, all whilst making time for class at the sole human-led teaching hospital left in the country.

It’s a lot. And a lot of fun – when it’s not ambushing me with one of my greatest medical phobias!!!

Justin and I talk about the real horrors of his medical school experience, what he’s learned about human connection from his work in psychiatry, and we have that rare thing – a genuinely nuanced conversation about the role of AI in society.

Enjoy!

Other books mentioned: 

• The World Wasn’t Ready for You (2023), by Justin C. Key
• On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000), by Stephen King
• Insomnia (1994), by Stephen King
• Ender’s Game (1985), by Orson Scott Card
• Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming (1994), by Stephen LaBerge and Howard Rheingold
• The Curse of Hester Gardens (2026), by Tamika Thompson
• Nuclear War: A Scenario (2024), by Annie Jacobson

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