Leaning into absolute high geekery this week – with Kyle Winkler’s novel of how family game night can go badly wrong!

The Ship of Death is about a cursed (and I mean CURSED!) tabletop role-playing game and the unlucky couple who choose to play it. Or, as Kyle describes it “Dark Jumanji.”

It prompts a conversation about games in life and fiction. Epistolary structure and found-fiction. We discuss his relationship with the bizarre, his love for mysteries without answers, we consider who is really responsible for the world-building in a story, and we pay a lot of respect to cosmic horror influences beyond Lovecraft.

It’s was a delight to record. Hope you enjoy listening.

Other books mentioned:

• Grasshands (2024), by Kyle Winkler
• Boris Says the Words (2022), by Kyle Winkler
• The Nothing That Is (2020), by Kyle Winkler
• Borne (2017), by Jeff VanderMeer
• Zothique (1970), by Clarke Ashton Smith
• The Dying Earth (1950), by Jack Vance
• Enduring Love (1997), by Ian McEwan
• Negative Space (2020), by B.R. Yeager
• True Crime (2020), by Samantha Kolesnik
• The House Next Door (1978), by Anne River Siddons
• My Dark Places (1996), by James Ellroy
• Penpal (2012), by Dathan Auerbach
• Mockingbird (1980), by Paul Tevis
• The Blacktongue Thief (2021), by Christopher Buehlman

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This week’s episode shows what a good haunted house can do.

Deena Helm is a mixed American-Palestinian author, who’s debut novel, Our Cut of Salt, puts all the power of the Gothic to use in framing the occupation and oppression of Palestine. It takes place before the ongoing genocide, but offer a chance to consider how horror fiction can play its part in framing that obscenity.

That all sounds heavy, and it rightfully is – but this book also has a frightening, tragic and murderous house at its core… so there’s (our kind) of fun to be had as well.

This is an important episode for the show. I hope you listen and enjoy.

Other books mentioned:

White is for Witching (2009), by Helen Oyeyemi

Tell Me I’m Worthless (2021), by Alison Rumfitt

Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013), by Ahmed Saadawi

Mornings in Jenin (2006), by Susan Abulhawa

Behind You is the Sea (2024), by Susan Muaddi Darraj

Gentle Things (2026), by Danielle Giles

Hungerstone (2025), by Kat Dunn

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Home is where the horror is this week, with Chris Panatier and Worry Box!

This latest offering from Panatier’s uniquely strange mind is a complete revision of the haunted house as we know it. It’s a house that means well, but understands little. Couple that with a family in flux and a child suffering intrusive thoughts, and you have a recipe for terrible, no-good disaster.

In short, it’s 400 pages of slowly tightening dread!

I hope you enjoy.

Other books mentioned:

• The Redemption of Morgan Bright (2024), by Chris Panatier
• This House isn’t Haunted but We Are (2025), by Stephen Howard
• Our Cut of Salt (2026), by Deena Helm
• Pet Semetary (1983), by Stephen King
• The Library at Mount Char (2015), by Scott Hawkins
• Gideon the Ninth (2019), by Tamsyn Muir
• Gormenghast (1950), by Mervyn Peak
• Angel Down (2025), by Daniel Kraus
• Chimera Skin (2026), by Johnny Compton
• The Butcher of Nazareth (2026), by David Scott Hay

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There are big books and big books. This week we cover a HUGE book.

China Miéville is the guest. The award-winning author of Perdido Street Station, Embassytown, The City & the City, and other modern speculative classics – and he’s back with a book two decades in the making.

The Rouse is an epic of true proportions, a 1300-page saga of the twentieth century, rife with war, atrocity, tragedy, and a secret war fought with ghosts?? That’s the premise but it barely touches the sides of this ginormous undertaking.

This is not just a conversation, it’s a search for answers – in which we plumb the personal, political, and supernatural influences behind this story of shady military conspiracy and ghosts of many strange kinds.

I hope you enjoy, ‘cos I worked my ass off for this one!

Other books mentioned:

• King Rat (1999), by China Miéville
• The City & The City (2009), by China Miéville
• Ducks, Newburyport (2019), by Lucy Ellman
• Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), by Thomas Pyncheon
• Against the Day (2006), by Thomas Pyncheon
• House of Leaves (2000), by Mark Z. Danielewski
• “The Ash Tree” (1904), by M.R. James
• A Dark Corner (1971), by Celia Dale

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James Tynion IV is a modern master of the horror comic. He’s the maniac behind so many contemporary classic series, but perhaps none are such pop-culture behemoths as Something is Killing the Children.

I mean… with a title like that, how could it fail?

With the new omnibus collection out right now, and an in-world novel (co-authored with Kiersten White) coming in October, I thought now was a good time to get James on the show and talk monsters, masks, mythology and the most baddass hero in graphic novels.

Enjoy!

Other books mentioned:

• The Woods (2014-2017), by James Tynion IV
• Memetic (2014-2015), by James Tynion IV
• Hide (2022), by Kiersten White
• At the Mountains of Madness (2019), by Gau Tenabe
• Monster (1994-2001), by Naoki Urusawa

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Wendig is here!! The man my wife refers to as “Chuck Apples” (as opposed to “Chuck Fight Club) is back to talk about his most fun, yet nastiest book to date. The Calamities is what would happen if The Godfather had cenobites, if Logan Roy had made a pact with monsters, it prompts me to ask the questions “who’s your favourite demon Chuck?”

That kinda book.

Chuck tells us how the study of demonology has underpinned almost his entire writing career. We discuss the increasingly tight links between his novels, the influence of D&D structure, and the challenge of making the reader care about some of the worst-behaved characters in the world.

And I drop the C-bomb for the first time on air. That damn baby deserves it.  

Enjoy!

Other books mentioned:

• Staircase in the Woods (2024), by Chuck Wendig
• Daytide (2026), by Chris Panatier
• The Three Body Problem (2008), by Cixin Liu
• Books of Blood (1984-88), by Clive Barker
• Cabal (1988), by Clive Barker
• Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology (2021), by Ed Simon
• Blacktail (2026), by Scott Hawkins

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No one let the Pope listen to this week’s episode.

Our guest is Natasha Pulley, genre-defying author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, The Bedlam Stacks, The Kingdoms, and now, in the The Salt King she pits the Vatican and Catholic Doctrine against something much, much older, lurking in the salt mines of the world.

It leads us to a conversation about faith of many kinds, about reality-adjacent fiction, the horrid truth of Sodom and Gomorrah, dark representations of the Catholic Church, and the challenge of fusing folk horror and global apocalypse.

There are also some holy dick pics.

Enjoy!

Other books mentioned:

• Gentle Things (2026), by Danielle Giles
• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2024), by Susanna Clarke
• The Hill in the Dark Grove (2026), by Liam Higginson
• The Name of the Rose (1980), by Umberto Eco
• Foundation (1951), by Isaac Asimov
• A Canticle for Liebowitz (1959), by Walter M. Miller Jr
• Father Alberto and the Flying Girl (2026), by Timothy X Atack

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Happy Friday! Let’s talk about the end of the world.

Our guest is Ben Bradford, creator and host of Are We Doomed? – the new hit podcast examining the existential risks facing humanity.

“Dammit Neil”, I hear you say “Are we not suffering enough.” To you I reply … sure, Ben and I make talk nukes and rogue AI, climate change and supervolcanoes, but believe me, you’ll feel more optimistic at the end of this episode!

Somehow, the general answer to Are We Doomed seems to be “no, not if we don’t want to be.” So have faith, listen, and have a great weekend.

Enjoy!

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Finally, we dare venture to the darkest land of all. Wales!

After years of avoiding the terror of the Valleys, Liam Higginson takes us to The Hill in the Dark Grove – his debut novel of isolation, folk-memory, and things unearthed from the soil of a mountain farm.

We talk about the link between folklore and nationalism, about marriage and madness (not linked) and why it’s always men who go barmy in these situations.

This is up there with my favourite books of the year.

Enjoy!

Other books mentioned:

• The Shining (1977), by Stephen King
• Incidents Around the House (2024), by Josh Malerman
• The Salt King (2026), by Natasha Pulley
• Small Gods (1992), by Terry Pratchett
• Meet Me at the Surface (2024), by Jodie Matthews
• Boss in the Wall: A Treatise on the House Devil (1998), by Avram Davison and Grania Davis
• North Woods (2023), by Daniel Mason
• Country People (2026), by Daniel Mason

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This may be my scariest episode ever!

We’ve covered non-fiction before, but rarely is the truth more frightening than the stories we tell. This week it just might be… cos Annie Jacobsen is here with Biological War: A Scenario.

It unveils a narrative of speculative reality, in which an engineered pathogen escapes a lab, and runs rampant through our civilisation. Cities fall, millions die, the lights go out.

I dared myself to read it. I dare you to listen to Annie tell us about her research, and the stuff she found that scares the hell out of her.

Enjoy (sort of!)

Other books mentioned:

• Nuclear War: A Scenario (2024), by Annie Jacobsen
• “A Modest Proposal” (1729), by Jonathan Swift
• World War Z (2006), by Max Brooks
• The Deluge (2023), by Stephen Markley
• A Brief History of the Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters (2021), by Andrew H. Knoll

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In our main Wolves of the Calla Deep Dive, we came within touching distance of the Dark Tower’s biggest secret yet. Chris doesn’t know what to think, which is just where Nat and I want him.

 So we stuck around to talk in full-spoiler terms about all the stuff Chris is yet to discover, and our own thoughts on books to come, on choice lines from Calla, and just what that reveal in the final pages really means for the nature of Roland’s world.

Enjoy. But for your father’s sake Do Not Listen if you haven’t read the entire Dark Tower saga!!

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