The Monster She Wrote Podcast: Recent Episodes
Lisa Kroger and Melanie R. Anderson
Lisa Kroger and Melanie R. Anderson, authors of MONSTER, SHE WROTE (Quirk Books), discuss women in the horror genre.
In Linda Hamilton's The Fourth Wife, Hazel Russon finds herself in an arranged marriage to Jacob Manwaring, a man who lives in the Utah wilderness in the crumbling Manwaring manor with his three other wives and their children. Hazel doesn't know what to expect of her new life, but she never expected a manor home full of mysterious sounds, specters of women, and a terrifying attic that holds too many secrets.
For more from author Linda Hamilton, including her research into Mormon history, check out her Substack.
Recommended in this episode: Neil McRobert's Good Boy and Pretty Evil by Rebekah and David Ian McKendry
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: An interview with author Jennifer McMahon!
Buy our books here, including Monster, She Wrote and our newest Toil and Trouble.
In Darcie Little Badger's "The Scientist's Horror Story," three friends at a scientific conference meet up and tell ghost stories. One is pure fiction and one is not: which one is scarier?
This short story can be found in the anthology Never Whistle at Night. (The sequel Never Whistle at Night: Part 2 Back for Blood is available for preorder now and will be out in bookstores this August.)
Recommended in this episode: Becky Spratford's Why I Love Horror and T. Kingfisher's The Hollow Places
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: The Fourth Wife by Linda Hamilton
Buy our books here, including Monster, She Wrote and our newest Toil and Trouble.
TW: This novel includes depictions of death by suicide and harm/death to an animal. We mention it in this episode but do not discuss in depth. Be advised.
What happens when a horror author moves into the suburbs? Murder, of course. In Lindy Ryan's novel Dollface, new resident Jill finds herself at the heart of a slasher plot, straight out of one of her novels.
Recommended in this episode: the Veronica Speedwell series and Bitter Karella's Moonflow
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: "The Scientist's Horror Story" by Darcie Little Badger (found in the anthology Never Whistle at Night)
Buy our books here, including Monster, She Wrote and our newest Toil and Trouble.
In This House Will Feed by Maria Tureaud, Maggie, a young woman trying to survive the Great Hunger in Ireland, is rescued from a workhouse by the enigmatic Lady Catherine, who brings Maggie back to her estate home. She promises Maggie a roof over her head, food to eat, and, eventually, a shockingly ample plot of land to call her own–with one catch. Maggie must pretend to be Lady Catherine's daughter Wilhelmina. It seems too good to be true–and Maggie may be in more danger than she realizes.
Recommended in this episode: Widow's Bay on Apple TV and The Other Bennet Sister on BritBox
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
HUGE CONGRATULATIONS TO DANIEL KRAUS ON HIS PULITZER WIN!
UP NEXT: Dollface by Lindy Ryan
Buy our books here, including Monster, She Wrote and our newest Toil and Trouble.
Join us as we interview author Maria Tureaud on her Irish Gothic This House Will Feed.
Maria Tureaud is an editor and acclaimed author of middle grade and adult fiction. Born and raised in County Clare on the west coast of Ireland, she now lives with her husband and son in New Jersey and can be found online at AuthorMariaTureaud.com.
Recommended in this episode: The Eyes Are the Best Part and The Devil and Mrs. Davenport and the ultimate Gothic novel Jane Eyre
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: This House Will Feed by Maria Tureaud
Buy our books here, including Monster, She Wrote and our newest Toil and Trouble.
In "Perdita" by Hildegarde Hawthorne, Silvia and Jack settle into their newlywed lives on Alfalfa Ranch, owned by Silvia's Aunt Agnes. Things would be perfect, except for the little ghost child who can't quite leave them alone.
More on Hildegarde here.
Recommended in this episode: The Macabre by Kosoko Jackson
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: This House Will Feed by Maria Tureaud
Buy our books here, including Monster, She Wrote and our newest Toil and Trouble.
In Anne Rivers Siddons's The House Next Door, Colquitt and Walter Kennedy are living their dream life. They have flourishing careers, a thriving social life, and a home they love in an affluent Southern suburb. But when an architect builds a house on the lot next door, immediately Colquitt worries that their quiet life will be disrupted. Unfortunately, the house has something much worse in store for the Kennedys–and anyone else who dares to step inside its walls.
Recommended in this episode: Paul Tremblay's Horror Movie: A Novel
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: "Perdita" by Hildegarde Hawthorne
Buy our books here, including Monster, She Wrote and our newest Toil and Trouble.
In Liz Moore's The God of the Woods, the idyllic setting of the Adirondack mountains conceals something sinister. One child going missing is a tragedy–but two children–and from the same family is a disturbing pattern. A young investigator is pretty sure that the wealthy Van Laar family is concealing something, if only she can get close enough to the family to find out what they are hiding.
Recommended in this episode: Trad Wife by Saratoga Schaefer and preorder Tananarive Due's newest Mazywood (out in September)
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: Anne Rivers Siddons's The House Next Door
Buy our books here, including Monster, She Wrote and our newest Toil and Trouble.
Heads up, listeners. The ghosts of Hill House invaded this recording, so you might hear some audio glitches.
In Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, Eleanor Vance has just buried her ailing elderly mother when she is invited to be part of a psychic investigation at a notoriously haunted house. The plan is to rent the home out for the summer and see what evidence of ghosts they can collect. What could possibly go wrong?
Recommended in this episode: Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and We Love You, Bunny by Mona Awad
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
Buy our books here, including Monster, She Wrote and our newest Toil and Trouble.
In Mo Moshaty's short story "Dandelion Wine" in her collection Clairviolence, a long married couple have a fight over a plum cake won in a bingo game that just might be the end for the two of them.
Recommended in this episode: Lindy Ryan's Dollface, Gwendolyn Kiste's In These Gilded Ghostly Hearts (preorder), and Jane Harper's The Survivors
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: The Haunting of Hill House with special guest and podcast favorite Crystal O'Leary Davidson
Buy our books here, including Monster, She Wrote and our newest Toil and Trouble.
In Play Nice by Rachel Harrison, carefree Clio Barnes's life is interrupted when her estranged mother dies, and she and her sisters inherit their childhood home. Her plans to renovate the old place and sell it quickly fall apart when the demons from her past refuse to be ignored.
Recommended in this episode: Good Boy, streaming on Shudder
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: Mo Moshaty's short story "Dandelion Wine" in her collection Clairviolence
Buy our books here, including Monster, She Wrote and our newest Toil and Trouble.
In Sarah Orne Jewett's short story "The Landscape Chamber," a woman travelling alone, in search of adventure, finds herself off the beaten path. When her horse is injured, she seeks help at an old manor tucked away in the country, seemingly forgotten by time. There, she meets an old man and his lonely daughter. While they welcome her in, it seems that something in the home does not want her there.
STORY LINKED HERE: "The Landscape Chamber"
Recommended in this episode: Sam Raimi's Send Help and Jennifer McMahon's The Night Sister
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: Play Nice by Rachel Harrison
Buy our books here, including Monster, She Wrote and our newest Toil and Trouble.
In Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Gothic horror The Bewitching , three different women across three timelines are interconnected by mysterious disappearances, murder, and dark magic. In 1998, graduate student Minerva researches the real events that inspired Beatrice Tremblay's most famous novel. In 1932, Beatrice Tremblay is caught up in the disappearance of her friend and roommate. And in 1908, Minerva's great-grandmother Alba has to fight for her family when a witch takes control of her life.
Recommended in this episode: God of the Woods by Liz Moore and Bless Your Heart by Lindy Ryan
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses. And check out this list of Latino-owned bookstores to support.
UP NEXT: "The Landscape Chamber" by Sarah Orne Jewett
Buy our books here, including Monster, She Wrote and our newest Toil and Trouble.
In Melanie Tem's Prodigal, eleven-year-old Lucy is grappling with the mysterious death of her older brother–a suspected drug overdose–when her older sister Rae mysteriously disappears. The losses alone are too much for her family, but now Lucy is visited by the ghost of her brother, leading her into a dangerous supernatural world.
Recommended in this episode:
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman and Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno Garcia
Buy our books here, including Monster, She Wrote and our newest Toil and Trouble.
Marjorie Bowen's short story "The Crown Derby Plate" opens as "three elderly, cheerful women" sit around a fire for a cozy Christmas. They talk of a nearby estate that is rumored to be haunted when one of the women remembers that they had beautiful Crown Derby china that she wants for her antique shop. So, she makes the journey to the house, only to discover a little more than she bargained for.
Recommended in this episode: Eiren Caffall's All the Water in the World
Listen to Lisa on the Lost Ladies of Lit podcast, discussing the Valancourt re-release of Rosalind Ashe's Moths.
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: Melanie Tem's Prodigal
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
In E. Nesbit's story "The Shadow," a vibrant Christmas party has gone late into the night, and everyone stays over at the manor house, given the late hour. Three women are sitting up around the fire with cocoa in hand, gossiping about boys and telling spooky stories. One woman, though, has an especially frightening tale to tell.
Read "The Shadow" here.
Recommended in this episode: Sally Thorne's Angelika Frankenstein Makes Her Match
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: "The Crown Derby Plate" by Marjorie Bowen
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
SPOILERS ABOUND as we discuss Mariko Koike's The Graveyard Apartment. Be forewarned!
A young married couple has found the perfect apartment for their growing family. It's beautiful and spacious. It's close to shopping, the train, and their daughter's school. The only problem? It is surrounded by a cemetery. A bit weird, yes, but not a problem–until strange and troubling events begin forcing out the tenants one by one, leaving the Kano family to fight by themselves.
Recommended in this episode: Beard by Kelly Foster Lundquist and The Broken Girls by Simone St. James
ALSO: Charlotte Riddell is in the news!
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: "The Shadow" by E. Nesbit (Read online here)
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
In Mary Wilkins Freeman's short story "Luella Miller," a tale is told about a woman named Luella, who is prone to hysterics and drains the energy from everyone around her. Is she just a woman in need of help? Or something much, much more sinister?
Read Freeman's story on the Library of America "Story of the Week" site or listen to it via the Podcastle podcast, here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/podcastle-650-luella-miller/id276266378?i=1000496354075
Recommended in this episode: Rachel Harrison's Play Nice and Lora Senf's The Nighthouse Keeper
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: The Graveyard Apartment by Mariko Koike
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
Last episode, we welcomed author Jen Julian on podcast. And this episode, Mel and Lisa discuss her book Red Rabbit Ghost in more detail.
College Freshman Jesse Calloway returns to his hometown of Blacknot in North Carolina after receiving mysterious anonymous texts in a college social media app with clues about his mother's unresolved death. She died when he was an infant, so he doesn't remember much of her–and he will do anything to learn more. Unfortunately, layers of secrets cover this small town tragedy (and other aspects of its past as well), and it will be hard for Jesse to uncover the truth while simultaneously facing his unresolved loss.
Recommended in this episode: Clairviolence by Mo Moshaty
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: Mary Wilkins Freeman's "Luella Miller"
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
Today, we welcome writer Jen Julian to discuss her book Red Rabbit Ghost.
Jen Julian is a writer from Eastern North Carolina. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Missouri, Columbia, and an MFA in Fiction from UNC Greensboro.
Her short story collection, Earthly Delights and Other Apocalypses, was the winner of the Press 53 Fiction Prize and was published in 2018, and her debut novel, Red Rabbit Ghost, is out now through Orbit/Redhook, 2025. Recent work has appeared in Gulf Coast Magazine, The Harvard Advocate, swamp pink, hex, Bourbon Penn, Third Coast Magazine, Wigleaf, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among other places. She has won numerous awards, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net, and had her work recognized as notable in The Best American Short Stories 2023.
Recommended in this episode: Alisa Alering's Smothermoss and Rebecca Baum's forthcoming The Brood
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: We discuss Red Rabbit Ghost in more detail.
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
In Elizabeth Hand’s A Haunting on the Hill, Holly Sherwin is living every writer's dream. She has grant money to finish her new play, which she uses to rent a mansion in the woods so that she can work in peace. The only problem? The mansion is Hill House, a living, breathing bad place that promises to turn Holly’s dream into a nightmare.
Recommended in this episode: Laura Purcell’s The Silent Companions
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: Interview with author Jen Julian
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
“She looks through water, / She looks through air,
She leaps at the moon / And she looks in.
Give her silver, Give her gold, / And bind her eyes
With a brick and a pin.”
“Where All Things Perish” by Tanith Lee was first published in Weird Tales #325 (Fall 2001). It’s available in full on Weird Fiction Review’s website, which also links to an interview with Lee by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer.
Recommended in this episode: The Butchering Art by Lindsey Fitzharris
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: The Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
We are on a summer hiatus, but we will be returning with brand-new episodes soon! Please enjoy this classic episode on "The Summer People" by Shirley Jackson.
Shirley Jackson once again proves that she is the queen of creepy short stories, this time with her story “The Summer People.” The story starts idyllic, like many of Jackson’s stories. The Allisons are a wealthy older couple who summer in a cabin by a lake in rural New England. Their picturesque existence quickly turns nightmarish, however, when they decide to extend their trip and stay past Labor Day.
We are on summer hiatus! So please enjoy this MSW Classic episode on Tanarive Due's "Ghost Summer"
Tananarive Due’s “Summer” (from her story collection Ghost Summer) is set in her fictional town of Gracetown, Florida, where the humid and murky swamps hide bodies and demon leeches. It’s not a place to raise a baby–or maybe it is.
Author of WORDS MADE OF FLESH, the eco-horror YOU WILL SPEAK FOR THE DEAD, and the Stoker-nominated story “Ten Thousand Crawling Children,” R.A. Busby spends her spare time running in the desert with her dog and thinking about weird things to write about.
Recommended in this episode: “Ten Thousand Crawling Children” and WORDS MADE OF FLESH by R. A. Busby
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: Summer HIATUS!
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
Every year, two children from one of twelve districts in Panem are chosen to participate in the Hunger Games, where they will fight each other to the death for the entertainment of the Capitol–and the chance to bring undreamt of wealth back to their poor families. When young Primrose is chosen as one of the tributes, her older sister Katniss sacrifices herself to go in her place. But now, 16-year-old Katniss must learn how to survive–and how to kill.
Recommended in this episode: Julia Bartz’s The Writing Retreat and Paulette Kennedy’s The Devil and Mrs. Davenport
Thanks to Fox and Wit for sending us their Nightshade Fox and Wit book box.
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: Summer HIATUS! We will be back with new episodes soon!
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
Please enjoy this re-run of a classic Monster, She Wrote episode.
Author of the novella Corporate Body and the Shirley Jackson Award-winning story "Not the Man I Married," R.A. Busby spends her spare time running in the desert with her dog and finding weird things to write about.
Tracy Cross is a dealer in dark fiction, her gripping stories featured in a range of podcasts and anthologies. Her debut novel, the gripping "Rootwork" (Dark Hart Publishing, November 2022), explores the strong bonds of family and draws on her own heritage in hoodoo. This is followed by "A Gathering of Weapons" (October 2024), the second book of the Rootwork series. Tracy resides in Washington, DC, where she is an active member of the Horror Writers Association. When she's not busy writing scary stories, she's dancing to disco. Keep up with her news and musings at her blog: tracycwritesonline.com. You can also follow her on Instagram @tracycrosswrites, on Bluesky @tracycrosswriter.bksy.social, and on Threads: @tracycrosswrites.
Recommended in this episode: Rootwork and A Gathering of Weapons by Tracy Cross
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
Banned Books Week (launched in 1982) is normally in September/October, but given the state of things, we thought it was a relevant topic. Buying physical copies of books, when you can, seems to be a smart thing to do.
PEN estimates that book bans have doubled in the past year; here’s where to fight that by sending a letter to state lawmakers.
Some of our sources: Data from the ALA; Unite Against Book Bans; National Coalition Against Censorship; PEN America; Authors Against Book Bans
Recommended in this episode: B.R. Myers’s The Third Wife of Faraday House and Clay McLeod Chapman’s Wake Up and Open Your Eyes
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: Tracy Cross
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
We are rerunning the classic episode to celebrate the upcoming release of Moths through Valancourt Books as part of their Monster, She Wrote series. Preorders open now, shipping in July 2025!
Rosalind Ashe’s Moths was marketed as a book for fans of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. And there are some similarities: a beautiful old estate with a crumbling wing. A young wife who moves in determined to make it her own. And a dead woman haunting the home that was once hers. But what would happen if Rebecca had possessed the body of the new wife? That’s what Ashe’s book posits. So join us as we discuss Moths.
UP NEXT: an episode on banned books and then an interview with horror author Tracy Cross
In “The End of the Voyage,” a short story in Bora Chung’s collection Your Utopia , a group escapes a pandemic here on Earth by jumping into a spaceship. As they search for a safe place to live, their trip takes a dark turn.
Recommended in this episode: Beach Read by Emily Henry
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: Banned Books
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
In So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison, Sloane Parker HATES birthday celebrations, but her husband and best friend Naomi conspire to give Sloane a weekend away at a posh lakeside cottage. The girls’ weekend away takes a dark and bloody turn, however, after a wild night out with some mysterious strangers.
Recommended in this episode: Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Canas and A Perilous Undertaking by Deanna Raybourn
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: “The End of the Voyage” in Your Utopia by Bora Chung
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
Linghun by Ai Jiang is set in the mysterious HOME, a suburb of Toronto, where the residents live among the ghosts. Winqi, a high school senior, must navigate her new town, where grief cuts everyone off from the rest of the world.
Recommended in this episode: “The Center for Immortality Research” in Your Utopia by Bora Chung) and Mike Chen’s Here and Now and Then
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
Last episode, we read the Gothic horror You’ll Like My Mother by Naomi A. Hintze, which was recently re-released with Valancourt Books. In it, a pregnant widow named Francesca is trapped in her mother-in-law’s home and must escape. This episode, we are discussing The 1972 film adaptation of You’ll Like My Mother, starring Patty Duke.
Recommended in this episode: Barstow by David Ian McKendry and Rebekah McKendry, Forget This Ever Happened by Cassandra Rose Clarke, and The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: Linghun by Ai Jiang
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
Pregnant Francesca finds herself a widow at a young age after her husband is sent to Vietnam. Without support from her family, she embarks on a cross-country journey to her late husband’s family home in Ohio. While she’s never met her mother-in-law, she hopes that she will be welcomed in. His childhood home, though, is nothing like she was told it was–and her new mother-in-law might be more dangerous than she anticipated.
Recommended in this episode: Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros and The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: The 1972 film adaptation of You’ll Like My Mother, starring Patty Duke
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
Mel and Lisa are busy gearing up for a new season in this new year! In the meantime, enjoy this classic episode of the podcast, perfect for the Gothic feeling that is January.
UP NEXT: Season 6 kicks off with Naomi A. Hintze's You'll Like my Mother.
Enjoy this classic podcast episode and have a happy and safe holiday season!
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
More info about the Canadian museum exhibit here: https://www.orillia.ca/en/visiting/exhibits.aspx?_mid_=28224 (Opening October 5 until December 20, 2024 - Temporary Exhibit)
UP NEXT: The holiday season is approaching, and we are going to take full advantage. So the podcast will be on hiatus for the remainder of 2024. We will run a few of our favorite holiday episodes from years past. We will be back in 2025 with a brand new episode.
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
Enjoy this classic podcast episode and have a happy and safe holiday season!
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
More info about the Canadian museum exhibit here: https://www.orillia.ca/en/visiting/exhibits.aspx?_mid_=28224 (Opening October 5 until December 20, 2024 - Temporary Exhibit)
UP NEXT: The holiday season is approaching, and we are going to take full advantage. So the podcast will be on hiatus for the remainder of 2024. We will run a few of our favorite holiday episodes from years past. We will be back in 2025 with a brand new episode.
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
In Jenny Kiefer’s This Wretched Valley, there is a bad place just off a highway in a secluded forest in Kentucky. When a small group made up of geology grad students and rock climbers set up camp there to document a previously unknown rock wall, they find more than they bargained for. The place is old. And it isn’t always what it seems.
Recommended in this episode: Grady Hendrix’s Witchcraft for Wayward Girls
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
More info about the Canadian museum exhibit here: https://www.orillia.ca/en/visiting/exhibits.aspx?_mid_=28224 (Opening October 5 until December 20, 2024 - Temporary Exhibit)
UP NEXT: The holiday season is approaching, and we are going to take full advantage. So the podcast will be on hiatus for the remainder of 2024. We will run a few of our favorite holiday episodes from years past. We will be back in 2025 with a brand new episode.
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
Jenny Kiefer is a debut author, avid rock climber, and Kentucky resident. She also owns and manages Butcher Cabin Books, a horror bookstore in Louisville, KY, with her mother. Her background is in copywriting and journalism, and she is the recipient of the Miracle Monocle Editor’s Award for Emerging Writers and four Society of Professional Journalism Awards. She was a 2021 Pitch Wars mentee and is a member of the Horror Writers Association.
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
More info about the Canadian museum exhibit here: https://www.orillia.ca/en/visiting/exhibits.aspx?_mid_=28224 (Opening October 5 until December 20, 2024 - Temporary Exhibit)
UP NEXT: This Wretched Valley
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
For Toil and Trouble, our book, we did a deep dive into research of the witch. And since the witch is a mainstay of this time of year, we thought it would be fun to do a little bit of a different episode today. We watched the first two episodes of Disney Plus’s Agatha All Along.
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
More info about the Canadian museum exhibit here: https://www.orillia.ca/en/visiting/exhibits.aspx?_mid_=28224 (Opening October 5 until December 20, 2024 - Temporary Exhibit)
Recommended in this episode: We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer and Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix (available for preorder)
UP NEXT: An interview with Jenny Keifer. Her new book This Wretched Valley is available on our Bookshop!
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
In this episode, we are discussing Christa Carmen’s meta Gothic novel The Daughters of Block Island with special guest Crystal O’Leary-Davidson.
Crystal O’Leary-Davidson, writing as C. O. Davidson has published fiction in PseudoPod, Cemetery Gates, and in anthologies, most recently Hard to Find: An Anthology of New Southern Gothic. Her story, “The Mark,” in Vastarien, was recognized by editor Ellen Datlow in her anthology of The Best of Horror of the Year, Vol. 15 as one of the works of “notable dark fiction in 2022.”
An English professor at Middle Georgia State University, she teaches classes in the Gothic, the Weird, and slasher horror films, and she co-edited a book of critical essays, Monsters of Film, Fiction, and Fable. Currently she is writing on the American mall in teen horror.
Davidson serves on the board of Broadleaf Writers, and is one of the founding members of the Atlanta Chapter of the Horror Writers Association.She makes her home in Georgia amongst the pine trees with her husband, the novelist Andy Davidson, and their clowder of beloved cats.
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
Recommended in this episode: B.R. Myers’s A Dreadful Splendor and I Saw the TV Glow
UP NEXT: a very special Halloween episode!
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
About The Unmothers: After the death of her husband, journalist Marshall is sent to the small town of Raeford to investigate a clearly ridiculous rumor—that a horse has given birth to a human baby. As she's pulled deeper into the town and its guarded people, she realizes Raeford may be harboring more dark secrets than she expected.
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
Recommended in this episode: The Night Guest by Hildur Knútsdóttir
UP NEXT: The Daughters of Block Island with special guest Crystal O’Leary-Davidson
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
Leslie J. Anderson has spent much of her life riding, training, and caring for horses. Her collection of poetry, An Inheritance of Stone, was nominated for an Elgin Award. She has a master’s in creative writing from Ohio University and lives in Ohio with her family.
The Unmothers is her debut novel.
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
UP NEXT: The Unmothers
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
Joyce Carol Oates’s story “The Long-Legged Girl” (collected in Night-Gaunts) is part horror story, part cozy mystery…after all, the plot of the story revolves around a teapot. That tea contains poison, of course, but the sentiment is there nonetheless. Our story begins as a frustrated housewife hosts her professor-husband’s young, gorgeous, and yes, long-legged student at their home.
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
Recommended in this episode: I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones and Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson
Bonus Recs: Let Me Tell You and Come Along With Me
UP NEXT: Interview with Leslie J. Anderson (The Unmothers)
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
Join Mel and Lisa as we discuss Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory. When 12-year-old Robert Stephens is sent to Gracetown School For Boys, a reformatory, he finds himself in a nightmare. Like many children in Gracetown, Florida, he has a special ability to see ghosts, a “talent” which the warden exploits, charging Robbie with the task of getting rid of the “haints” of the boys who died because of the warden’s cruel treatment.
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
Recommended in this episode: Stephen Graham Jones’s I Was a Teenage Slasher and Julia Alvarez’s The Cemetery of Untold Stories
UP NEXT: “The Long Legged Girl” by Joyce Carol Oates (collected in Night-Gaunts)
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
Join Lisa and Mel as they discuss Lora Senf’s The Clackity. Young Evie lives with her aunt in Blight Harbor–a seemingly quiet small town where everyone knows each other and looks out for each other. There’s just one small problem: it is the seventh most haunted town in America. Nearly everywhere you go, there are ghosts. Most are friendly. Still, there are some places everyone avoids. Like the abattoir. But now Evie must go there to save her aunt, who has gone missing.
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
Recommended in this episode: Catriona Ward’s Looking Glass Sound
UP NEXT: The Reformatory by Tananarive Due
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
We have a bookshop.org shop set up. Now you can shop for all of your favorite horror books by women. You’ll find Lisa's books, Mel’s books, and the books you hear about on this podcast. Plus, bookshop helps small bookstores.
Find all of our favorite books at Bookshop.org shop now!
Mothers come in all shapes and sizes. Some are good, caring, and loving. And some are a bit more complicated. Sometimes it feels like a mother can be out to absolutely destroy your world–the mother at the heart of Gwendolyn Kiste’s story “Your Mother’s Love is an Apocalypse” (from the Mother Knows Best anthology) is of the latter ilk. Kiste explores the difficult mother-daughter relationship and asks the question: when does the responsibility of the daughter to take care of the mother end?
NEWS: We have a Bookshop.org shop now! Find all of our favorite books at our shop–and help out small businesses.
Recommended in this episode: Simone St. James’s Murder Road and the anthology Mother Knows Best (which includes the story “Your Mother’s Love is an Apocalypse”)
UP NEXT: Lora Senf’s The Clackity
Buy our books here, including our newest Toil and Trouble.
SPOILERS ABOUND! This novel contains a TWIST you don’t want to ruin, so listen at your own risk.
Vesper Wright left home at eighteen to escape her family, who has been entrenched in a religious cult community for decades, and she hasn’t looked back. That is, until she gets a wedding invitation for her childhood best friend’s marriage to her high school love. She doesn’t know who sent the invitation or if she is even welcome back home, but she finds that curiosity is too overwhelming and decides she has to attend. Whoever said you can’t go home again must not have had such a toxic upbringing…
Recommended in this episode: T. Kingfisher’s What Feasts at Night
UP NEXT: “Your Mother’s Love is an Apocalypse” by Gwendolyn Kiste (the last story in the anthology MOTHER KNOWS BEST, which includes Lisa Kroger’s own story “Almonds”) Buy the anthology at your favorite local bookstore or online here.
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
Tananarive Due’s “Summer” (from her story collection Ghost Summer) is set in her fictional town of Gracetown, Florida, where the humid and murky swamps hide bodies and demon leeches. It’s not a place to raise a baby–or maybe it is.
Recommended in this episode: Shirley Jackson’s Sundial and Netflix’s Bridgerton
UP NEXT: Rachel Harrison’s Black Sheep
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
Sisters Anna and Jennie live in a big house right on the Chicago river, where they are dealing with the grief following the aftermath of a family tragedy and the dead bodies that keep floating to the surface of the water. So join us as we discuss Cynthia Pelayo’s Forgotten Sisters, a novel that is part ghost story, part fairy tale, and part real-life Chicago history.
Recommended in this episode: Abigail
UP NEXT: Tananarive Due’s “Summer”
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
Cynthia Pelayo is a Bram Stoker Award® winning and International Latino Book Award winning author and poet. She is the author of Children of Chicago, The Shoemaker’s Magician, Loteria, Santa Muerte, The Missing, and Poems of My Night, all of which have been nominated for International Latino Book Awards. Poems of My Night was also nominated for an Elgin Award. Her collection of poetry, Into the Forest and All the Way Through explores true crime, that of the epidemic of missing and murdered women in the United States. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism, a Master of Science in Marketing, a Master of Fine Arts in Writing, and is a Doctoral Candidate in Business Psychology. Cynthia was raised in inner city Chicago, where she lives with her husband and children.
To learn more about her visit: www.cinapelayo.com and follow her on Instagram @cynthiapelayoauthor and TikTok @cynthiapelayoauthor
UP NEXT: We discuss Pelayo’s novel Forgotten Sisters!
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
If you ever thought to yourself, “I wish Beauty and the Beast had aliens in it,” then today’s story is for you. In her short story “Beauty,” Tanith Lee takes the classic fairy tale out of the castles and forests and into the stars.
Recommended in this episode: Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake
UP NEXT: Interview with author Cythia Pelayo
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
The mysterious Velkwood Vicinity is an occult and paranormal marvel, occupying the interest of scientists and conspiracy theorists alike. But for three friends, Talitha, Brett, and Grace, the Velkwood Vicinity is their painful past. It’s the neighborhood they grew up in, and where their families still live–as ghosts. But now, Talitha returns, hoping for answers and maybe closure. The past is never really dead, though, and it may be more than she bargained for.
Recommended in this episode: The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo
UP NEXT: Tanith Lee’s short story “Beauty”
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
Join Lisa and Mel as we talk with author Gwendolyn Kiste about her newest novel, The Haunting of Velkwood.
Gwendolyn Kiste is the three-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rust Maidens, Reluctant Immortals, Boneset & Feathers, Pretty Marys All in a Row, and The Haunting of Velkwood. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in outlets including Lit Hub, Nightmare, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, CrimeReads, Tor Nightfire, The Lineup, and The Dark. She's a Lambda Literary Award winner, and her fiction has also received the This Is Horror award for Novel of the Year as well as nominations for the Premios Kelvin, Ignotus, and Dragon Awards. Originally from Ohio, she now resides on an abandoned horse farm outside of Pittsburgh with her husband, their excitable calico cat, and not nearly enough ghosts. Find her online at gwendolynkiste.com
Purchase The Haunting of Velkwood here.
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
This episode is a little different from our usual format, but we promise you'll love it. It's all about book recommendations and what Mel and Lisa are loving right now.
UP NEXT: An interview with author Gwendolyn Kiste!
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
A rogue adventurer meets a woman with snakes for hair, and he falls under her seductive spell. Luckily, a friend gives our hero a heads up: don’t look in her eyes for that leads only to certain doom. No, we aren’t talking about the legend of Perseus and Medusa. This is a space adventure story set on Mars, and written by C L Moore.
Recommended: Starling House and Never Whistle at Night
UP NEXT: A recommendation episode!
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
Kelly Link’s “Stone Animals” begins with an unspoken question, immediately throwing readers into an ambiguous but nightmarish journey as a family moves into a new home, where nothing is as it should be. Rabbits are taking over the yard. The children are eating grass and complaining of haunted items. And the husband never wants to come home. But is it really a haunted home? Or has this family made it that way by moving their own baggage into this contested domestic space?
Recommended in this ep: Carissa Orlando’s The September House; The Haunting of Velkwood by Gwendolyn Kiste
UP NEXT: C.L. Moore’s “Shambleau”
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
What Moves the Dead is T. Kingfisher’s retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” More than that though, it’s the tale of Alex Easton, a retired soldier, who visits their dying friend, Madeline, at her family manor. Something very sinister is going on, and it’s up to Alex, along with their newfound friends, a mycologist and a doctor, to figure it out before it’s too late.
Recommended in this episode: The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno Garcia
UP NEXT: Kelly Link’s “Stone Animals”
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
Louisa was raised in isolation in a cottage deep in the woods by a mysterious witch. It sounds like the start of a fairy tale, but this story takes twists and turns as Louisa leaves her home for the outside world. She’s no princess…and this is no fairy tale. This is a Gothic tale with plenty of intrigue, led by a rather unusual heroine. Join us as we discuss Tanith Lee’s “Louisa the Poisoner.”
Recommended in this episode: Deanna Raybourn’s Veronica Speedwell series
UP NEXT: What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
Tanith Lee tribute anthology: https://tanithleestoryteller.com/
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
We made it to 100 episodes!
Join us as we look back at the writing of the book and as we look to the future of the podcast!
UP NEXT: Tanith Lee’s “Louisa the Poisoner”
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
We are on hiatus for the December holidays. Please enjoy this classic episode from our archives.
We will be back in 2024 with a brand new season and a special celebration of our 100th episode.
Have a happy holiday season, from Lisa and Mel.
Please enjoy this classic episode from our archives.
Enjoy your holiday season, and we will be back in 2024 with a brand new season and a special celebration of our 100th episode.
A young doctor is called into the home of a wealthy man, but rather than seeing the sick patient he is expecting, he is greeted with a seemingly healthy man, who offers him a thousand pounds to attend a death bed. The doctor, who isn’t a rich man himself, reluctantly accepts the strange request. Of course, this is a ghost story, so the doctor doesn’t know exactly what he is in for…Join us as we discuss Ada Buisson’s “The Ghost’s Summons.”
Story originally published in Belgravia (January 1868); Collected in The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories: Volume One (edited by Tara Moore, 2016)
Recommended in this episode: Candy Cain Kills by Brian McAuley and the holiday episodes of Doctor Who
UP NEXT: Our next episode is our 100th episode. We want to celebrate this milestone, but since it is the holiday season, we will be taking a hiatus to be with family. We will rerun some of our favorite past holiday episodes, but we will be back in January, to kick off Season 5 and celebrate 100 episodes of Monster, She Wrote. We hope you will join us.
Have a happy holiday season, from Lisa and Mel!
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
Exactly two years after she disappeared, Julie mysteriously comes back, with no memory of where she’s been. To celebrate her return, Julie’s friends get together for a girls’ weekend away at a remote hotel. Things, however, are not all wonderful–Julie doesn’t seem like herself at all. Something else, something more sinister and dangerous, is hiding beneath the surface, and it all comes out over the course of the trip.
Recommended in this episode: Elizabeth Hand's A Haunting on the Hill and Patrick Stewart's autobiography Making It So
UP NEXT: Ada Buisson's "The Ghost's Summons" in The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories: Volume One
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
Sarah Clayborne is a widow, living alone in an old and stately manor house called Whitegates. One Halloween, Sarah takes a walk and slips on a frozen puddle, injuring her ankle. She takes to bed in her old and lonely home. Her painful broken foot is the least of her troubles, however, as she finds herself in the center of a good old fashioned ghost story.
Recommended in this episode: Netflix's The Fall of the House of Usher
UP NEXT: Rachel Harrison's The Return
We will be back in two weeks when we discuss Rachel Harrison’s The Return.
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
Happy Halloween from the Monster, She Wrote podcast!
UP NEXT: "All Souls" by Edith Wharton
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
Ramon left his home in Mexico a long time ago, settling first in California and then in Vancouver. But now, he worries that his past may have followed him, in the form of a homeless woman, a woman he is convinced is a La Llorona. Read the story here.
Recommended in this episode: CJ Leede’s Maeve Fly
UP NEXT: A Halloween special episode
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
Today, we are doing things a little differently. Since this is our first episode in October–the best month of the year if you ask us–we thought we’d do an extended recommendations episode, all with the intent of getting you ready for spooky season.
UP NEXT: “Lacrimosa” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Read it here at Nightmare Magazine
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
When Dr. Beverly Crusher’s grandmother passes away, she visits her home planet, a place made to look like old world Scotland on Earth, in order to pay her respects. As it turns out, she gets much more than a sad goodbye. Her grandmother had a secret life, complete with a young lover named Ronin, a man who takes an interest in Dr. Crusher. Ronin, however, is much more than he seems, and Dr. Crusher finds herself in the middle of a ghost romance. Or is it more like ghost possession?
Recommended in this episode: Lisa Tuttle’s Riding the Nightmare and Kate Mulgrew’s memoir Born with Teeth
UP NEXT: Reading Recommendations for Spooky Season
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
Rosalind Ashe’s Moths (1976) was marketed as a book for fans of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. And there are some similarities: a beautiful old estate with a crumbling wing. A young wife who moves in determined to make it her own. And a dead woman haunting the home that was once hers. But what would happen if Rebecca had possessed the body of the new wife? That’s what Ashe’s book posits. So join us as we discuss Moths.
Recommended in this episode: Mary: An Awakening of Terror by Nat Cassidy
UP NEXT: Star Trek’s “Sub Rosa”
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
Last week, we discussed Daphne Du Maurier’s novel My Cousin Rachel. Today, we thought it would be fun to look at the 2017 film adaptation, starring Rachel Weisz and Sam Claflin.
Recommended in this episode: Nineteen Claws and a Blackbird
UP NEXT: Rosalind Ashe’s Moths
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
Phillip has lived with his guardian Ambrose Ashley on Ambrose’s manor in the English countryside since Philip was a child and his parents’ death left him orphaned. Philip’s idyllic life is upturned, however, when Ambrose leaves for Italy, where he meets a mysterious woman named Rachel and swiftly marries her. Things take a dark turn when Ambrose dies suddenly–leaving letters behind that suggest perhaps Rachel was to blame. Following the tragedy, Rachel travels to the manor house, where she further turns Philip’s life upside down. But the question remains: is Rachel a scheming villain or an innocent widow? In this episode, we’re discussing Daphne Du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel (1951).
Recommended in this episode: The Righteous Gemstones
UP NEXT: My Cousin Rachel (the 2017 film adaptation)
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
In Margaret St. Clair’s “Flowering Evil," Amy Dinsmore is quite the gardener. She loves tending to her collection of Martian and Venusian plants, flowers, and succulents. But one plant, in particular, is a little bit more than she bargained for. Originally published in Planet Stories vol 4 num 7, Summer 1950, this story can be found in audio format
in Pseudopod (825, August 2022) and in text via an archive.
Recommended in this episode: Cherie Dimaline’s VenCo
UP NEXT: Daphne DuMaurier’s My Cousin Rachel
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
Sadie Hartmann aka Mother Horror is the co-owner of the horror fiction subscription company, Night Worms and the Bram Stoker Awards® nominated editor of her own horror fiction imprint, Dark Hart. Her non-fiction book about horror books titled, 101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered for Page Street Books is coming, August 2023.
She lives in the PNW with her husband of 20+ years where they stare at Mt Rainier, eat street tacos, and hang out with their 3 kids. They have a Frenchie named Owen.
Preorder Sadie’s book here.
UP NEXT: “Flowering Evil” by Margaret St. Clair
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
In Nadia Bulkin’s story “Wish You Were Here,” Dimas is escorting American tourists on a city tour in Bali. He’s only trying to do his job, but the tourists become much more than a simple annoyance when they begin to ask about Jelankung, an Indonesian way of contacting the spirits of the dead.
Read the story here and the interview with Nadia Bulkin here.
Recommended in this episode: Anne Serling’s As I Knew Him: My Father, Rod Serling
UP NEXT: An interview with Sadie Hartmann
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
Dirk has lost his wife, Joan, and he is devastated by grief. Joan was a pilot who crashed during a routine flight, and he knows there isn’t any hope of her survival because he was talking to her on the radio when she crashed. He knows she went down in the ocean with no land in sight, and he knows the search was futile. But, despite all evidence to the contrary, he still feels like there’s a chance she’s alive. He feels like there is a compass in his mind telling him precisely where to find her. He hires a plane and two pilots and begins a search of his own. What he finds, however, is beyond anything he could have imagined. There may have been an island near Joan’s crash site, and it has a very mysterious reputation among travelers.
Margaret St. Clair’s story “The Island of the Hands” was originally published in Weird Tales Magazine in 1952.
Recommended in this episode: Renfield and Star Trek: Picard
UP NEXT: Nadia Bulkin’s “Wish You Were Here”
Buy Toil and Trouble here! And see the Valancourt selection of Monster, She Wrote books here.
Get to know Mel and Lisa: reader edition!
Recommended in this episode: Shirley Jackson’s short stories
UP NEXT: Margaret St. Clair’s “The Island of the Hands”
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
Author of the novella Corporate Body and the Shirley Jackson Award-winning story "Not the Man I Married," R.A. Busby spends her spare time running in the desert with her dog and finding weird things to write about.
Buy Corporate Body here (or anywhere books or sold).
Recommended in this episode: Queen of Teeth by Hailey Piper
UP NEXT: Get to know Mel and Lisa’s reading styles!
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
TW: Domestic Violence/Abuse
The narrator of “Not the Man I Married” has a happy life. She lives in a big house with her husband, Charles, and their two children, Bella and baby Charlie. Everything seems wonderful…until one day a man comes home who looks like Charles, walks like Charles, and even talks like Charles. Only this isn’t Charles at all. It’s a monster wearing Charles’s body like some kind of horrible wet suit. So begins the terrible and strange fight for her family’s life.
Read the story here. Read the article mentioned in “Good News” segment here.
Recommended in this episode: Jane, Unlimited by Kristin Cashore and Jackal by Erin E. Adams
UP NEXT: Interview with R A Busby
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
Ghosts come in many forms. In Chesya Burke’s story “Haint Me Too,” this ghost is of the angry kind. She haunts the Myrtle House, a Southern plantation home, inhabited by “the Perfect Southern American Dream” (“father, mother, three boys and two girls”). Young Shea, the daughter of a Black sharecropping family living on the land, witnesses the haint that lives in Myrtle House. She sees its terror–and its power. And soon, events unfold that force Shea to seek out that exact power. Read Hex Life for this story.
Recommended in this episode: Showtime’s Yellowjackets and Root Magic by Eden Royce
UP NEXT: R. A. Busby’s “Not the Man I Married”
Mel and Lisa wrote a second book! Buy Toil and Trouble here!
In her short story “The Debt,” Ania Ahlborn weaves a modern fairytale. Karolin is an 11 year old girl, supposedly visiting her grandmother in Poland for the first time, but her grandmother is nowhere to be found. She’s traveled there with her father, both of them still reeling from the death of Karolin’s mother one year earlier. Karolin is enchanted by the quaint town and the lush dark green forest that surrounds it. The forest is a magical place, but that magic turns dark when Karolin loses her way and can’t find her way out. Can she survive the forest and the evil that lurks there?
Recommended in this episode: Swarm on Amazon Prime and Lockwood and Co. on Netflix
UP NEXT: Chesya Burke’s “Haint Me Too” from the same anthology Hex Life
Read more about Mel’s thoughts on fungal horror here. Or read more Baba Yaga stories here. To vote for 13 Minutes of Horror: Sci-Fi Horror (or see the Rondo award finalists), see this list here. Voting ends April 23, 2023.
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
Following the Mexican War of Independence, Beatriz finds her life in ruins: her father has been executed and she is left to take care of her family. Her only hope is a good marriage–so she marries the wealthy but mysterious Don Rodolpho, following the death of his first wife. Beatriz moves into Rodolpho’s aging home, the Hacienda San Isidro. But that is only the start of Beatriz’s troubles. There’s something supernatural and evil in San Isidro, something that doesn’t want Beatriz there. With the help of the local priest Andres, Beatriz begins a fight for her life.
Recommended in this episode: Daphne du Maurier's Don't Look Now
UP NEXT: Ania Ahlborn “The Debt“ in Hex Life
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
Wednesday Addams is a well-known and much beloved character in the horror genre. We all know her trademark macabre attitude, all-black goth dress with the white collar, and of course, her pigtail braids. Much less is known about Lisa Loring, the first actress to portray the original Wednesday on television. Loring recently passed, so today’s episode is dedicated to her.
Recommended in this episode: YOU on Netflix
UP NEXT: The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
When Hilton James’s wife, the only elected African American judge in Dade County, FL, begins receiving racist hate mail threatening her and Hilton and their two children, he understandably becomes obsessed with discovering who the culprit is and protecting his family from them. However, this crisis is not the only one he is facing. After years of feeling that he had moved on from a childhood trauma involving his grandmother, he is once again facing disturbed sleep and weird nightmares, both when he sleeps and while waking. As he negotiates these two monstrous situations, one external and one internal (and possibly supernatural), he faces the terrifying possibility that he could stop the stalker and still lose his family, and maybe even his own sense of self.
Recommended in this episode: Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Grady Hendrix's How to Sell A Haunted House
UP NEXT: Lisa Loring and the Wednesday Addams legacy and Isabel Cañas's The Hacienda
Buy Toil and Trouble here!
When Edith Porter’s friend Abby sends her a cutting from a cactus she found while on a trip in Mexico, Edith decides to try to bring it back to life among her collection of cactus plants. To her surprise and delight, it turns green and begins to grow. And grow. And grow. It’s the fastest growing cactus she’s ever seen, and it doesn’t really look exactly like any other cactus, either. As the cactus gets bigger, Edith’s previously sedate life becomes increasingly strange, and although it seems absurd at first, she begins to wonder if the cactus is dangerous.
Recommended in this episode: A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers and Cassandra Peterson’s Yours Cruelly, Elvira
NEXT EPISODE: The Between by Tananarive Due
Archived version of "The Cactus" can be found here.
Buy TOIL AND TROUBLE here.
Join Lisa and Mel as they share their favorite books, television shows, and movies from 2022.
Next Episode: Mildred Johnson’s “The Cactus” (Weird Tales story)
Buy Toil and Trouble wherever you get books!
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Coppelius’s Toyshop is one of the busiest stores in New York during the Christmas season. With life-sized toy soldiers on either side of the entrance and characters straight out of fairy tales roaming the aisles filled with toys, it’s a paradise for kids of all ages. It’s not a paradise, however, for Connie Willis’s narrator, who is late for a Knicks game and just learned his new girlfriend has a kid that needs to be watched until her friend can pick him up from the toy store. To make matters worse, the narrator hates kids, and he hates the toy store. Unfortunately, when the little boy has to use the restroom in the store, the narrator will see all of Coppelius’s wares as he tries unsuccessfully to find the boy, make the handoff, and get to his basketball game. All the while, he hears the store’s music on repeat and the comforting refrain, “Come to Dr. Coppelius’s/ Where all is bright and warm,/ And there’s no fear/ For I am here/ To keep you safe from harm.”
A reminder: We will take a brief holiday hiatus later in December, but we will return in January for our fourth season, when we read Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi.
Christmas is not always the easiest time of year for people. There’s often the headache of travel through busy airports, the annoyance of trying to plan a meal that will accommodate everyone’s schedules, and of course, the pressure to put your best foot forward in your annual Christmas card. All of that becomes much more complicated, however, when pod people begin to overtake your town, which is exactly the predicament the main character faces in Connie Willis’s story “Newsletter.” Recommended in this episode: Stephen King's Firestarter and the second season of White Lotus on HBO We will be back in two weeks when we re-run a classic Monster, She Wrote episode on a Christmas ghost story. The podcast will take a brief holiday hiatus later in December, but we will return in January for our fourth season, when we read Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi. Buy Toil and Trouble here or at your favorite local bookstore!
This Priya Sharma story was published on Tor.com in July of 2015, and collected in her 2018 collection All the Fabulous Beasts. Here is the description from Tor: “'Fabulous Beasts' by Priya Sharma is a horror novelette about a strange woman living in luxury with her lover, but irrevocably tied to her childhood of deprivation and dark secrets in northwest England. The woman recalls the unravelling of the family upon her uncle’s release from prison." The story is still available to read on Tor.com.
CW/TW: Please be warned that this story deals with difficult content and themes, including child abuse, incest, and rape.
Recommended in this episode: Suburban Hell by Maureen Kilmer
UP NEXT: A Christmas (surprise) story from Connie Willis's collection A Lot Like Christmas
Annie’s life has been turned upside down. Her boyfriend broke up with her after nearly a decade together, and she can’t afford to live in New York City without his help splitting the rent. Without many options, she accepts a teaching job in a small town of Rowan. Her life changes when she meets the mysterious and magical Sophie. Sophie seems wonderful, but the townspeople seem to fear her. And her huge manor is haunted by vengeful ghosts and spiders that can grow to the size of dogs. Is Sophie a friend to Annie? Or a powerful foe?
Recommended in this episode: Tender is the Flesh by Augustina Bazterrica
UP NEXT: “Fabulous Beasts” by Priya Sharma
Our second book TOIL AND TROUBLE is out in the world! Buy from your favorite local bookstore or check it out at your library!
Rachel Harrison is the author of Cackle and The Return, which was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. Her short fiction has appeared in Guernica, Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, and as an Audible Original. She lives in Western New York with her husband and their cat/overlord. Her newest book is Such Sharp Teeth.
Recommended in this episode: They Drown Our Daughters by Katrina Monroe
UP NEXT: We discuss Harrison's book Cackle
TOIL AND TROUBLE is out OCTOBER 25. PREORDER NOW!
12-year-old Harper Raine and her family have moved from New York City to a suburb of Washington, D.C., for a new start. Harper is trying to work through wounds left by a traumatic series of events in her past that harmed her physically, mentally, and emotionally and left her with gaps in her memory. Her parents, however, have unknowingly picked the worst new home for Harper to live in: the Grady House. Harper quickly learns from her new friend Dayo that the house has a bad reputation and a creepy history. When Harper starts experiencing cold spots, hearing strange noises, and having dreams and visions, she wonders if something evil from the house’s past is lingering in her family’s present. And then there’s her little brother’s new imaginary friend, who is definitely not imaginary and far from friendly.
Recommended in this episode: Toil and Trouble--Preorder now!
UP NEXT: An interview with Rachel Harrison about her newest book Such Sharp Teeth
For those interested in the women from Monster, She Wrote, you can read Francis Stevens's The Citadel of Fear, out now!
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In Elizabeth Walter’s story “The Sin-Eater,” Clive Tomlinson gets more than he bargained for on a trip to the Welsh Border to see and sketch an old pre-Reformation church. On his way back to his hotel, he is waylaid by a couple on a farm who are oddly insistent that he visit their ill son, Eddie. Clive quickly realizes that Eddie is dead, and he rushes through drinking some wine and eating a scone under pressure from the older couple. Later, he learns he took part in a sin-eating ritual, something the modern world has left behind. But, since he was unaware of what he was doing and doesn’t believe in it, he couldn’t possibly be affected by the ritual, could he?
Recommended in this episode: Labyrinth Lost by Zoraida Cordova
UP NEXT: Ellen Oh’s Spirit Hunters #1
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You know her as Uhura from the Star Trek universe, but her impact went far beyond the sci-fi world. Born in 1932 in Illinois, she had many careers before working with Gene Rodenberry. She was a model, a singer, a dancer, most notably working with Duke Ellington. Robert Heinlein dedicated his novel Friday (about a female artificial human) to her, she received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in the 90s, and she garnered numerous awards, including The Life Career Award at the 42nd Saturn Awards. But we are here to talk about her work with NASA.
Recommended in this episode: Hocus Pocus! and Ellen Oh's Spirit Hunters
UP NEXT: “The Sin Eater” by Elizabeth Walter
LINKS:
The "Scully Effect"
Nichelle Nichol's speech at NASA
Woman In Motion documentary
Gwendolyn Kiste is the three-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rust Maidens, Reluctant Immortals, Boneset & Feathers, And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe, Pretty Marys All in a Row, and The Invention of Ghosts. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Vastarien, Tor's Nightfire, Black Static, The Dark, Daily Science Fiction, Interzone, and LampLight, among others. Originally from Ohio, she now resides on an abandoned horse farm outside of Pittsburgh with her husband, two cats, and not nearly enough ghosts. Find her online at gwendolynkiste.com.
BUY Reluctant Immortals (OUT NOW!)
Link to "The Eight People Who Murdered Me" by Gwendolyn Kiste at Nightmare Magazine
Recommended in this episode: Le Femme Grotesque
Up Next: A special episode dedicated to Nichelle Nichols
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
WARNING FOR THIS EPISODE: We do discuss sexual assault as it relates to the plot of the story.
Shudder-to-Think, Pennsylvania, is a dying coal town. People don’t stay around for long because it isn’t safe for those who live there. Friends El and Octavia learn that the hard way when they wake up one evening in a movie theater with no memory of what has happened. Their subsequent quest for understanding leads them to the strange creatures in the deep, dark woods and the even stranger history of their town.
Recommended in this episode: T. Kingfisher's What Moves the Dead
UP NEXT: Interview with Gwendolyn Kiste
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
PREORDER OUR NEW BOOK, TOIL AND TROUBLE!
We are back from our brief hiatus, and in this episode, we welcome writer and academic Crystal O'Leary Davidson! Make sure to check out her short fiction.
In Donna Tartt’s The Secret History Richard Papen recounts his ill-fated time at Hampden College in Vermont. A second-year transfer from California, Richard, middle class and awkward amongst his privileged peers, becomes fascinated with a group of students studying under the mysterious Julian Morrow, a Professor of Classics. At first, Richard is denied entry into Julian’s Classics curriculum. Julian is extremely selective. But after Richard has a serendipitous encounter with the group translating in the library, Julian allows Richard to join his classes. Richard’s fellow students, the twins, Camilla and Charles Macaulay, Francis Abernathy, Edmund “Bunny” Corcoran, and the brilliant Henry Winter, have formed an insular group that further constricts when four of them take their studies too far. The fall-out from this accident leads to the murder of Bunny Corcoran. This isn’t a spoiler. Richard reveals the murder and the murderers at the beginning of the novel. What follows is an exploration of why Bunny was killed and how evil begets evil, until all is infected and ruined. As Richard tells us in the prologue’s conclusion: “I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.”
Recommended in this episode: comfort Star Wars watches and Catriona Ward novels (also discussed: The Once Upon A Time At Bennington podcast)
UP NEXT: Carmen Maria Machado’s The Low Low Woods
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
NEWS: Mel and Lisa are taking a brief hiatus so the next episode will be four weeks away instead of two...WE WILL BE BACK!
Samantha Heather Mackey is an MFA student at the prestigious Warren University located somewhere in New England. She splits her time between hanging out with her mysterious friend Ava in a ramshackle house in town and taking workshop classes with the rest of her all-female fiction cohort on campus. She prefers the company of Ava to her writing peers, however. The other four students have bonded into an extremely codependent, cult-like hivemind, who, instead of using names, call each other “Bunny.” They wear a lot of pink, use a lot of emojis, and love anything miniature and cute. Samantha finds this behavior repulsive, but she still gets sucked into the Bunnies’ unorthodox off-campus extracurriculars, and then things really get weird.
Recommended in this episode: Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline
UP NEXT: The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Link to Shirley Jackson readings from "Good News" segment: https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/shirley-jackson-the-lottery-rare-recording
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
When his six year old son says he saw a man outside their home, Dr. Holland thinks it is a case of overactive imagination. Mister Mole, as his son calls his new friend, wants to take the young boy for a walk. What could be so sinister in that? Turns out a lot. When another boy in the neighborhood turns up dead, though, Dr. Holland begins to wonder if there isn’t more to Mister Mole after all. Harding's story archived: https://archive.org/details/Weird_Tales_v42n01_1949-11
Recommended in this episode: Carmen Maria Machado's graphic novel The Low, Low Woods
UP NEXT: Bunny by Mona Awad
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
The narrator in Cynthia Asquith’s “The Corner Shop” has a relatable problem: he needs to buy a wedding gift. So, one foggy, cold London night, he stops into a little antique shop and finds exactly what he needs. He enjoys the shop so much that he returns again. This time, though, he buys something for himself: a little jade frog. The frog turns out to be more than he bargained for, and the narrator finds himself pulled into a family drama and maybe the center of a ghost story.
Recommended in this episode: Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories
UP NEXT: Allison V. Harding’s “The Underbody”
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
In Rosemary Timperley’s 1955 story “Harry,” a mother finds herself terrified of her daughter’s new imaginary friend named Harry. At first, it irritates Mrs. James to see 5-year-old Christine chatter away to someone who is not there when she plays by the rose bush in the yard. However, she becomes more distressed when Christine becomes increasingly attached to Harry. Mrs. James’s husband and the family doctor tell her this is normal behavior for children, especially when they haven’t met many other kids yet, but she decides to start an investigation into the past. As she learns more, she realizes that Harry is most certainly not just an imaginary friend.
Recommended in this episode: Louise Erdrich's LaRose
UP NEXT: “The Corner Shop” by Cynthia Asquith
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds” imagines a world that has been ravaged by a disease. The illness ravages the brain especially, attacking the ability to process and use language. For our protagonist, who used to be a history professor, losing the ability to read and write has hit especially hard.
Recommended in this episode: Ruth Ware audiobooks and Outer Range
NEXT UP: “Harry” by Rosemary Timperley
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
Wolves are a staple of horror literature and fairy tales alike. They are fierce creatures that walk the woods, reminding us of the dangers that lurk once we leave the confines of comfortable and safe civilization. In her short story “The Company of Wolves,” Angela Carter retells the familiar tale of "little red riding hood," examining the very real world danger that women often navigate every day.
Recommended in this episode: Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw and The Institute by Stephen King
UP NEXT: “Speech Sounds” by Octavia Butler****
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
Two words: Goth Byron
The narrator of Everil Worrell’s “The Canal” is a man who enjoys long walks at night on the edge of the city. Really, what could go wrong? As it turns out, a lot. Narrator Morton comes across a mysterious woman who is living on a half-sunken boat, on the far edge of a disused canal. He only speaks to her for a short while, but it is enough. Morton is enamored of this secretive beauty, and he agrees to do whatever it takes to be close to her. He will live to regret that decision, as he may have unwittingly unleashed an unspeakable evil upon the city. Listen to Worrell's story on Pseudopod.
Recommended in this episode: Hulu's FRESH and Dorothy Quick’s “Strange Orchids” (Weird Tales 1937)
UP NEXT: Angela Carter's “The Company of Wolves”
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
“The advent of the artist and the door was almost simultaneous. I have always wondered if the one would have been as sinister without the other.” Thus begins Dorothy Quick’s story “The Artist and the Door,” first published in Weird Tales in November 1952. The narrator, who is a successful author, lays out an innocent situation. She purchased a fixer-upper Elizabethan farmhouse and painstakingly restored it. In search of the perfect door, she attended an auction and found just the thing for her home. The only problem is that the house the door used to be a part of was haunted and had to be exorcized by a priest. But that’s just superstition, right? Could a door possibly be evil? This story is available on the Pseudopod podcast.
Recommended in this episode: Allison V. Harding stories from Weird Tales and Severance on AppleTV+.
UP NEXT: Everil Worrell’s “The Canal”
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
Nalo Hopkinson’s “The Easthound” tells the story of twins, Millie and Jolly, as they navigate the dangers of a post-apocalyptic world. A pandemic has taken most of the adults, and now, the children must fend for themselves. There’s danger of starvation and disease, but there is also danger in simply growing up. Millie and Jolly cannot stay children forever, and this story is about how they deal with pending adulthood and what that means in this new world.
Recommended in this episode: Gemma Files's Experimental Film
UP NEXT: Dorothy Quick’s “The Artist and the Door” (Pseudopod 750, March 2021)
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
“The Prayer of Ninety Cats” by Caitlín R. Kiernan is a story about a film critic watching a film, specifically a fictional film about Elizabeth Bathory, the Blood Countess. Through the description of this experience, however, Kiernan moves the reader beyond the spectacle of the theater and film to explorations of film history and critique, discussions of representation and illusion, and questions of how and why we adapt histories and legends for the screen. Recommended in this episode: Thornhill by Pam Smy
UP NEXT: Nalo Hopkinson’s “The Easthound”
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
Poppy, Zack and Alice are three friends who meet after school to play a game of fantasy and imagination. They use dolls and action figures to tell an elaborate story involving pirates, mermaids, and other adventurers. The main story involves the Great Queen, a bone-china doll who lives in the glass cabinet at Poppy’s house. Zach wants to stop the game, because his father believes middle school is too old to play make-believe, but Poppy brings the friends together one last time. She’s been dreaming of the ghost inside of the china doll–and the ghost won’t rest until the doll is buried in her grave.
Recommended in this episode: The Book of Boba Fett and Wolf Like Me
UP NEXT: “The Prayer of Ninety Cats” by Caitlín R. Kiernan
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
12 year-old Maggie has been moved from boarding house to boarding house. She’s never quite fit in anywhere, as every new school has labeled her “impossible to handle.” Maggie is sent to live at the former Adelphi Hills Academy, a large manor house that looks more like an institution, with her only living relatives, her great aunts Lillian and Harriet, who are cold, severe women obsessed with health and good manners, and her great uncle Morris, who tries his best to bond with the sickly Maggie–to no avail. Maggie is lonely at Adelphi Hills–until she begins to hear the voices coming from behind the walls.
Recommended in this episode: The Other Black Girl and The Last House on Needless Street
UP NEXT: DOLL BONES
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
While spending time with her Aunt Clare in her grandparents’ old house, 12-year-old, going on 13, Amy Treloar makes a startling discovery in the attic. A dollhouse that is an exact replica of the house she is staying in! At first, she is excited about the possibilities of the dollhouse–she loves miniatures–but her excitement quickly turns to terror when she realizes it isn’t a typical dollhouse. At certain times, the dollhouse lights up, and the dolls are never in the places she leaves them.
Recommended in this episode: Cruelly Yours by Cassandra Peterson and Artie and the Wolf Moon, a YA graphic novel by Olivia Stephens
UP NEXT: Behind the Attic Wall
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
Elizabeth de Wynt and Cecilia Montresor are friends, writing letters back and forth, sharing news of their lives as friends do. Elizabeth is traveling, while Cecilia is getting settled into a new house in London. The house is perfect, but it did come with startingly cheap rent for the city. Cecilia’s letters turn darker and more suspenseful as the story progresses, and it becomes clear that something sinister lives within the walls of the house at number 32 in May Fair.
Recommended: Louise Erdrich's The Sentence
Next Episode: Betty Ren Wright's The Dollhouse Murders and horror for children
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
In Rosemary Timperley’s story “Christmas Meeting,” two lonely people find company during the holiday season. [Story can be found in Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories (1983)]
Recommended: Yellowjackets on Showtime; Ruth Ware’s The Turn of the Key
NEXT EPISODE: “The Truth, The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth” by Rhoda Broughton
Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
You know the most famous Christmas ghost story of them all. A miserly, miserable man must learn the true meaning of Christmas by meeting with three appropriately themed holiday specters. There have been many spins and takes on Dickens’s famous tale, but one of our favorites is Connie Willis’s “Adaptation.” In Willis’s story, a divorced father confronts the Spirit of Christmas Future at a bookstore.
Recommended: Stephen Graham Jones's The Only Good Indians
UP NEXT: Rosemary Timperley's "Christmas Meeting”
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
The narrator of Jeanette Winterson’s “Dark Christmas” will be celebrating Christmas at Highfallen House with friends. No one seems to know who owns the house and is letting them stay there, but that doesn't seem to matter. The narrator goes ahead to spend a night alone in the house before picking up their friends from the train station. After a warm meal and a bottle of wine, they hear strange noises from the attic above, but ignore them. The next day, the narrator’s friends do not show and send a cryptic text message instead. They don’t show the following day either. And the narrator is seeing things and hearing things, and it’s getting colder and snowing more and more. Read the story here.
Recommended in this episode: Peter Straub's Ghost Story and Neil Gaiman's Coraline (audiobook version)
NEXT EPISODE: Connie Willis's "Adaptation"
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
Following our discussion of Elsa Lanchester and her iconic role as The Bride of Frankenstein, we wanted to take another look at another one of her iconic films, this time, Bell, Book, and Candle. In the film, Gillian is a shop owner--and a secret witch. Using her occult powers (and her cat familiar, Pyewacket), Gillian sets out to woo her neighbor, the handsome and engaged Shep, using a love spell. Elsa Lanchester stands out in her role as Gillian’s magical Aunt Queenie.
Recommended in this episode: Stephen Graham Jones's The Only Good Indians, Stephen King's The Long Walk, and the classic Mary Shelley novel Frankenstein
UPCOMING ON NEXT EPISODE: “Dark Christmas” by Jeannette Winterson
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
She’s one of the most recognizable women in classic horror as the Bride of Frankenstein in the 1935 film. And her iconic moment was only for the last five minutes of the movie. Elsa Lanchester was an actress who knew how to command a screen, even with no lines. So, join us, as today we discuss the actress and her starring role.
Recommended in this episode: Rachel Harrison's Cackle
Next Episode: Bell, Book, and Candle
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
In Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Mina Harker makes it to the final battle against the vampire, even though she fell victim to his bite along the way. Her best friend Lucy Westenra wasn’t that lucky. A vivid character in her own right, she succumbs to Dracula and becomes a vampire. Even more disturbingly, she preys upon children. The methods the men use to stop her are gruesome: she is staked, and her head is removed. To top it all off, the men seem more disgusted by her forward and unladylike behavior as a monster than by her vampiric exploits. In Gwendolyn Kiste’s story “The 8 People Who Murdered Me (Excerpted from Lucy Westenra’s Diary),” we get Lucy’s story from her perspective. She breaks down how she became a victim and almost “a footnote in a story that’s not my own,” but it turns out that Lucy may use her immortality to take control of a life that wasn’t necessarily hers while she was mortal.
Links mentioned in ep:
The story:
https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/the-eight-people-who-murdered-me-excerpt-from-lucy-westenras-diary/
On Lucy Westenra's character:
https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/why-do-so-many-dracula-adaptations-screw-over-lucy-westenra
Recommended in this episode: W. Scott Poole's Wasteland
On the next episode: Elsa Lanchester and The Bride of Frankenstein
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
In this 1988 horror comedy, Cassandra Peterson plays her best known role, the Gothic horror host queen, Elvira. In this film (which was co-written by Peterson), Elvira must move to a conservative small town in Massachusetts in order to take care of the affairs of a recently deceased aunt. Elvira’s scandalous ways soon shake up the town, and not everyone wants--including the evil Chastity Pariah--wants her around. Join us as we discuss the movie classic Elvira: Mistress of the Dark.
Recommended in this episode: LulaRich, Malignant, and Vivien Chien's Noodle Shop Mysteries
Up Next: "The Eight People Who Murdered Me (Excerpted from Lucy Westenra’s Diary)” by Gwendolyn Kiste
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
You know these women. You know their long black dresses, usually with dangerously plunging necklines. You know their jet black hair and “vampy” makeup. You know their sinister sense of humor. They are the horror hosts who made B-Movies on television a fun, and sometimes scandalous, affair. That’s right, today, we are discussing Maila Nurmi and Cassandra Peterson, the women better known as Vampira and Elvira.
Recommended in this episode: The Chair on Netflix; Vampira: Dark Goddess of Horror by Scott Poole and Yours Cruelly, Elvira by Cassandra Peterson
NEXT EPISODE: Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (1988 film)
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
Laura Hunt has been murdered, her body disfigured by a close range shotgun blast. When Detective McPherson joins the murder investigation, he becomes fascinated by the murder victim, and he quickly collects a small group of four suspects. One is Waldo Lydecker, the man who claims he made Laura, from her career to her personal appearance; one is Shelby Carpenter, the shiftless man she might have been about to marry; and one is her aunt, Ann Treadwell, who was in love with the scoundrel Laura was about to marry. The fourth suspect is Laura Hunt, because, spoiler alert, Laura is alive.
Recommended in this episode: The White Lotus and T. Kingfisher's The Hollow Places
Next Up: Horror Icon Vampira
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
Content Warning: We do discuss sexual assault and murder in this episode, but not in great detail. Still, we wanted to place a warning for those who might be triggered by such content. Here's the number for the Sexual Assault Hotline, for those who may need it: 1-800-656-4673.
We all know the words: “In the criminal justice system, sexually based offenses are considered especially heinous. In New York City, the dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad known as the Special Victims Unit. These are their stories.” That’s, of course, the famous opening to Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, the television show that introduced us to the characters Stabler and Benson. In her novella, “Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law and Order SVU,” author Carmen Maria Machado takes Stabler and Benson through a cosmic horror nightmare. It’s a full 12-season journey, with ghosts.
Recommended in this episode: Kaiju movies (Gamera!) and Ted Lasso, season 2
Up Next: the 1944 film Laura, based on the novel of the same name by Vera Caspary
Women in horror short film fest: www.13minutesofhorror.com
Please rate and review us, or better yet, tell a friend.
Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
Justina Ireland’s book DREAD NATION has been called “Gone With the Wind with Zombies,” a description that we think does Ireland’s work a great disservice. It is a book about zombies, but it is so much more than that. We thought we’d let Justina Ireland herself describe the book and its sequel, Deathless Divide. The following quote is the author describing her inspiration, found in an interview that can be found online at Blackgirlnerds.com. Ireland says: “The original idea for Dread Nation and Deathless Divide came about in response to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I was reading that book and thinking: How could women who didn’t even dress themselves suddenly become zombie fighting machines? If anything, I thought, they would’ve had ladies’ maids to do the zombie-killing for them. And as I considered what that would look like in the United States, the first draft of Dread Nation was born. It featured Negro girls who went to special combat schools to better themselves, similar to the Indian boarding schools of the late nineteenth century. Soon, I had a book about zombies and pretty girls fighting the dead in fancy dresses with lovely blades. Cute boys showed up to complicate things and voila! It seemed like a great young adult novel. One part intrigue, one part survival, a dash of romance, shake until blended and serve chilled.”
Recommend in this episode: Grady Hendrix's The Final Girl Support Group, Timothy Zahn’s original Star Wars Thrawn series (early 90s) Heir to the Empire and Dark Force Rising, and Netflix's Sweet Tooth
Next Episode: "Especially Heinous" by Carmen Maria Machado
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
Tananarive Due’s novella “Ghost Summer” takes place in the fictional town of Gracetown, Florida. Gracetown is the kind of small town where everyone knows everyone because the families go back to the town’s founding. But Gracetown is different in one significant way: ghosts come out on hot summer nights. And those ghosts can only be seen by children. Now, most young boys and girls would run away from a town full of ghosts, but narrator Davie is not most kids. He’s a budding ghost hunter, who can’t wait for his summer among the spirits.
Recommended in this episode: Ring Shout (2020) and Elatsoe (2020)
Up next: Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation
Please rate and review us, or better yet, tell a friend.
Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
Patricia Highsmith, author of novels like The Talented Mr. Ripley, Strangers on a Train, and The Price of Salt, was the daughter of artists, born in Fort Worth, Texas, and raised in New York City by her mother and stepfather, whose last name she adopted. She graduated from Barnard and had dreams of a writing career, which she pursued relentlessly. She also had a fondness for snails, and at one point, bred about 300 of them in her garden (and is rumored to have brought them to cocktail parties in her purse). So it is any surprise that today, we are talking about her giant snail story, The Quest for Blank Claveringi.”
Recommended in this episode: Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers by Sady Doyle and V. E. Schwab's The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
Carmen Maria Machado on Highsmith (warts and all):
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jan/09/twisted-brilliance-patricia-highsmith-at-100
Next Episode: Tananarive Due’s novella Ghost Summer
Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
Francis Stevens (1883-1948) was the pen name of Gertrude Barrows Bennett, aka “the woman who invented modern American dark fantasy.” Her story “Unseen--Unfeared,” an early example of weird fiction, was published in the February 10, 1919 issue of People’s Favorite Magazine. Like Tanith Lee’s “Yellow and Red,” in “Unseen--Unfeared,” we have yet another lesson about the horrors of photography. This time, however, we have a scientist trying to develop color plates, who unwittingly discovers the right shades of lighting to illuminate some rather nasty creatures. These horrifying-looking creatures are invisible to the naked human eye, yet they live in the world all around us, and, at times, may even be touching us. So, we invite you, listeners, to: See the Great Unseen! Come in! This means you! It is free to ALL!
Recommended in this episode: American Hysteria podcast and Pam Grossman's Waking the Witch
On the next podcast episode: “The Quest for Blank Claveringi” by Patricia Highsmith
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
The film Black Sunday (1960) is about a witch/vampire hellbent on revenge returns from the grave in 1830s Moldavia. She’s beautiful and deadly--and she has a doppelganger conveniently close to her old stomping grounds. The witch and her victim are both played by the arrestingly beautiful Barbara Steele, and this is the film that launched her career as a horror icon. It’s also the film that cemented Italian director Mario Bava as one to watch.
Barbara Steele biography on TCM can be found here.
Recommended in this episode: Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s and Joan Samson’s The Auctioneer
Next Episode: “Unseen--Unfeared” by Francis Stevens
Please rate and review us, or better yet, tell a friend. Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
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Shirley Jackson once again proves that she is the queen of creepy short stories, this time with her story “The Summer People.” The story starts idyllic, like many of Jackson’s stories. The Allisons are a wealthy older couple who summer in a cabin by a lake in rural New England. Their picturesque existence quickly turns nightmarish, however, when they decide to extend their trip and stay past Labor Day.
Recommended in this episode: Caroline Kepnes's You series and Providence; also Netflix's The Irregulars
Next Episode: Tanith Lee’s story “Yellow and Red” (in the Vandermeer's The Weird anthology)
Please rate and review us, or better yet, tell a friend.
Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
In the story “Patient Zero,” readers find themselves privy to a few months of a boy’s journal. Jay is 10 years old; he loves football and his favorite player is Dan Marino; he loves to run and play and climb ropes; he excels at reading and needs a little help with math; and he loves to watch the movie Big. He seems like every other kid at that time and that age, but he’s not. He is the only known American survivor of a virus that is sweeping the world.
NEXT EPISODE: Shirley Jackson's "The Summer People"
Recommended in this episode: Claudia Gray's Bloodline (a Star Wars novel) and We Believe the Children by Richard Beck (nonfiction)
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
Margaret St. Clair’s story “The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles” is a tale inspired by the Lord Dunsany story “How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles.” St. Clair’s tale is a wonderful update. The gnoles are still horrible creatures of fantasy, but the main character is completely mundane. The hero of the story is Mortensen, a hapless salesman, who only wants to meet his sales quota and maybe get “a special mention at the annual sales-force dinner.” Does it matter that these are dangerous monsters? Not really, because as any good salesman knows, adaptability is key.
Suggested: WandaVision and Stacy Schiff's The Witches
Next Episode: Tananarive Due’s short story “Patient Zero”
Please rate and review us, or better yet, tell a friend. Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
The Gorgon, a 1964 film, was directed by Terence Fisher, and starring Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and Barbara Shelley, who we discussed in an earlier episode. The film tells the story of a mysterious monster, who is lurking around an isolated village, turning victims to stone.
Recommended in this episode: The Upstairs House by Julia Fine
Next episode: "The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles"
Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
With fangs, fake bats, and lots of spooky organ music, The Brides of Dracula seemed a natural choice following our Women of Hammer Horror episode. Set in Transylvania--and no actual Dracula in sight--this 1960 Hammer classic tells the story of Marianne, a young student teacher, who finds herself in a mysterious castle, and unwittingly releases the vampiric baron on the local village. In typical Hammer fashion, there are lots of beautiful women in nightgowns, dangerous but handsome villains who lurk in the shadows, and Technicolor blood.
Recommended in this episode: Behind Her Eyes and the fiction of L. T. Meade
Next episode: THE GORGON
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
So much has been written about the final girl that the term has become shorthand for the feminine role in horror. But the trope of the final girl, which rose to fame in the 1970s and 80s, doesn’t represent all women in horror. The final girl is a fighter, who uses her intellect and cunning to survive the movie villain’s massacre. The problem, though, is that the final girl is so named because she is the only one left standing; the rest of the women fall to the murderer’s knife, or weapon of choice. But, if we rewind horror history just a decade or two, we see a broader range of female characters. Hammer Horror was famous for its actresses, most of them fitting a certain image: wide-eyed, buxom, often blonde. Beyond the “look,” these women played a wide range of characters. From conniving villains to sharp-toothed monsters to fierce fighters, the women of Hammer Horror were a bright spot in Horror History.
Recommended in this episode: 12 Hour Shift
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
In The Twisted Ones, T. Kingfisher turns a hoarder’s home into a cosmic nightmare. Part haunted house story and part folk horror, The Twisted Ones tells the story of a woman who goes by the nickname “Mouse,” who goes to her grandmother’s house to clean it out after her death. However, nothing could prepare her for what she finds. There’s piles of junk to clear, including a room full of lifelike baby dolls. And there’s a strange journal from Mouse’s step-grandfather, who wrote a series of strange entries about the twisted ones. “I made faces like the faces on the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones, and I lay down flat on the ground like the dead ones…”
Recommended in this episode: Women Make Horror, edited by Alison Pierse
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
Greye La Spina’s short story “Antimacassar” first appeared in Weird Tales in 1949, and since then, has been anthologized many times. The tale is a vampire story at heart, but what sets it apart from other vampire tales is its setting. La Spina trades traditional Transylvania castles for a cozy home atmosphere, in this case an old Pennsylvania Dutch farmhouse. Don’t be fooled, though; the vampire in this story is not a cozy creature. Rather, the tale is one of cold-blooded murder.
Recommended in this episode: The Return by Rachel Harrison
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
We will start with the simple sentence: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
This is officially our first episode of Season 2 (as well as the first episode of 2021), so we thought we would visit the 2020 Rebecca adaptation (since we started this podcast at beginning of 2019 with our discussion of Daphne Du Maurier).
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
Coppelius’s Toyshop is one of the busiest stores in New York during the Christmas season. With life-sized toy soldiers on either side of the entrance and characters straight out of fairy tales roaming the aisles filled with toys, it’s a paradise for kids of all ages. It’s not a paradise, however, for Connie Willis’s narrator, who is late for a Knicks game and just learned his new girlfriend has a kid that needs to be watched until her friend can pick him up from the toy store. To make matters worse, the narrator hates kids, and he hates the toy store. Unfortunately, when the little boy has to use the restroom in the store, the narrator will see all of Coppelius’s wares as he tries unsuccessfully to find the boy, make the handoff, and get to his basketball game. All the while, he hears the store’s music on repeat and the comforting refrain, “Come to Dr. Coppelius’s/ Where all is bright and warm,/ And there’s no fear/ For I am here/ To keep you safe from harm.”
RECOMMENDED READING: Connie Willis's short story collection A Lot Like Christmas
Please rate and review us, or better yet, tell a friend. Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
The Christmas ghost story was a staple of winter festivities in Victorian and Edwardian England, so we thought we’d discuss one of the most famous ones: Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story.” The story is told in first person. The nurse, now an older woman, is speaking to a little girl about when her mother was a little girl. The nurse, then a young woman, found herself in a creepy old manor house in the middle of a cold and snowy winter, the only caretaker of the little girl, who had recently lost both her parents. The manor house belonged to a relative, and in Gothic fashion, secrets abound in the old home. No one ever enters the east wing, which has been permanently closed. And there is also the troubling presence of a little ghost child, who appears outside at windows during snow storms. Is she begging to be let into the warm house, or is she beckoning the nurse’s charge out into the cold?
Recommended in this episode: Valancourt Book's collections of Christmas Ghost Stories and T. Kingfisher's The Twisted Ones
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.
On Christmas Eve, while his family is sharing ghost stories around the fireplace, Arthur Kipps remembers his own horrible encounter with a haunting. Kipps, when he was a young and eager lawyer, was sent to Eel Marsh house to sort through the papers of the recently deceased widow, Mrs. Drablow. It should be a rather easy job, except Mrs. Drablow apparently didn’t throw anything away. Even worse, none of the locals will help him or answer any of his questions, their fear of the house is so great. Added to this is the location of the home that is completely cut-off at high tide. All of this is confusing and annoying for Kipps. However, to make matters worse, he soon learns why the locals avoid the house and avoid speaking about it. Eel Marsh House is haunted by its painful past from the nursery to the surrounding marshes, including those pesky bumps and footsteps in the night, the ghostly cries of a dying child on the marshes, and, of course, the Woman in Black.
Recommended in this episode: the graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler's Kindred
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini.
Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” is a coming-of-age story, featuring Gan, a young man living on a faraway planet--which at some point in the distant past was colonized by humans. The planet is home to a sentient giant worm-like people. When the humans first arrived, they tried to kill the worms. The worms, in turn, tried to enslave the humans, as they could be used to incubate their own young. But now, it seems, the planet has reached a kind of precarious balance. The humans and the worms are able to live side-by-side. The worms protect the humans by giving them lands to live on, away from worm society. In exchange, the humans--specifically the boys and men--are used as breeding stock for the worm eggs.
Recommended in this episode: Lisa Tuttle's short fiction
Some extra reading on "Bloodchild":
https://www.tor.com/2018/09/06/why-men-get-pregnant-bloodchild-by-octavia-e-butler/
https://bookriot.com/is-it-possible-to-misread-octavia-butler/
Please rate and review us, or better yet, tell a friend.
Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini.
Catherine House is a kind of utopia. The graduates of the prestigious school go on to be the world’s top doctors, lawyers, and politicians. Basically, the kind of people who run the world have come from Catherine House. Even better, tuition is completely free. Students at Catherine House have every need provided for them--all at no cost. The catch? You can’t leave the campus for three years. Each student must cut ties with their “old” lives. There’s no trips home, no outside influences like music or television, and there’s no contact with the outside community. It is an experiment in the perfect community. But just how perfect is it?
Recommended in this episode: The Haunting of Bly Manor and the ghost stories of Henry James
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini.
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.
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. 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
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. 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
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. 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
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. 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
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. 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 monsterwrote@gmail.com. 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 monsterwrote@gmail.com. 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.
A list of black-owned independent bookstores:
https://lithub.com/you-can-order-today-from-these-black-owned-independent-bookstores/
An archive of black women in horror:
https://www.graveyardshiftsistersarchive.com
The black horror documentary on Shudder called Horror Noire:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/feb/07/horror-noire-documentary-black-horror
A link to the Nightlight Pod website, which features audio horror by black writers:
https://nightlightpod.com
Today we have a special guest joining us. Jill E. Anderson is a professor of English in Nashville, TN. She's currently at work on her book about domestic horror narratives from the Atomic Age, and, like us, she’s a big fan of Shirley Jackson’s work, especially her 1958 book The Sundial, which will be the topic of today’s discussion.
The novel begins with a mother returning home with her family from the funeral of her son, a son she most likely murdered in order to have controlling interest in the family home and property. What follows is a darkly comic domestic novel about a deeply dysfunctional family facing a possible apocalypse. Complicating matters is that the end of the world has been predicted by a ghost who will only speak to the most vulnerable and unreliable member of the family, but no one wants to ignore an opportunity to gain points and shore up power in the New Order. The apocalyptic prophecy is most likely a grand delusion. But what if it’s not?
Also discussed: dream casting and Lizzie Borden
Jill and Mel have a book coming out soon on Shirley Jackson, more information here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/shirley-jackson-and-domesticity-9781501356667/
Tananarive Due’s The Good House details the history of the Toussaint family and their house in Sacajawea, Washington, the titular “Good House,” which has been in the Toussaint family for three generations. After the death of Elijah Goode, the house passed into the hands of Marie Toussaint, a practitioner of voodoo, who used her skills to heal a young girl’s possession. The powers that exist in the space of spirits around the Good House are not all good, however, and for present-day protagonist Angela Toussaint, Marie’s granddaughter, the house holds a painful past. First, her mother’s death haunts her, and then, tragedy strikes when her teenage son, Corey, shoots himself in the home’s basement. Now, Angela is back at the Good House, hoping to sell the home and rid herself of old demons. Unfortunately, before she can do that, she has to learn about the past, and she has to face the destructive spirit that was awakened twice: first, by her grandmother’s anger and then again by Corey’s curiosity.
Recommendations: Acorn TV's Deadwater Fell and Charlaine Harris's Harper Connelly series
Discussed: https://www.tor.com/2018/03/08/uses-of-enchantment-tananarive-dues-the-good-house/
Good News: https://bookshop.org
In The Gilda Stories, first published in 1991, Jewelle Gomez draws a lush portrait of Gilda, a woman who was turned vampire in the mid-nineteenth century. With the character of Gilda, Gomez challenges the traditional trope of the vampire, as Gilda is a woman of color and a lesbian, but also one who is interested in both a moral code and female empowerment, especially as that concept shifts over the decades. Gomez’s novel also offers an interesting look at America’s past, present, and future, as Gilda travels through time. The story begins in the midst of slavery in Louisiana, as a young girl (the soon-to-be-named Gilda) escapes her bonds. She is aided by women at a brothel, who take care of the young girl and eventually introduce her to the vampire life. The novel then progresses to take readers on a trip through time, seeing such places as turn-of-the-century life in new city San Francisco, a hair salon in 1950s Boston, the theatre scene in 1971 New York City, and a glimpse into 2050.
Octavia E. Butler published science fiction from the 1970s until her death in 2006. She studied at the Screenwriter’s Guild Open Door Program and the Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop, where she met other science fiction writers, like Harlan Ellison, and began publishing her stories, the first of which was 1971’s “Crossover.” She influenced numerous women of color currently writing science fiction and fantasy such as Jewelle Gomez, N. K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Nisi Shawl, and Nalo Hopkinson, to name a few. She was the first science fiction writer to win a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, one among many awards and honors she received, including multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards and a Locus Award. She is probably best known for her 1979 novel Kindred and her 1985 novella “Bloodchild,” both of which are often taught in literature classrooms. Her novels Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) are eerily prescient explorations of post-apocalyptic dystopia. Her final novel Fledgling (2005) was her take on vampires and the topic of today’s discussion.
Oyinkan Braithwaite’s 2018 novel My Sister, the Serial Killer is the story of two sisters, Korede and Ayoola, who live in Lagos, Nigeria. Korede is a hard working nurse, who cares deeply about her patients and her family, in particular her sister, who she feels protective of after a difficult childhood. It could be a sweet family novel, except for the small fact that Ayoola can’t stop killing her boyfriends. And dutiful Korede is always there to help her clean up the mess. Life, however, becomes much more complicated when Ayoola begins dating a doctor at Korede’s hospital, someone Korede has deep romantic feelings for. And so begins the story of My Sister, the Serial Killer.
Interview with Braithwaite from Politics and Prose:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcfCcOfpF08&app=desktop
We decided this week to revisit podcast favorite Daphne du Maurier, specifically her story “Kiss Me Again, Stranger,” which first appeared in her collection The Apple Tree in 1952 (the UK version; the US version was released in “The Birds and Other Stories” in 1963).
TV Episode of Suspense (1953)
To our listeners,
Our hearts are with all of you in this crazy time. Most of us are at home, social distancing in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. We hope our podcast is bringing a bit of joy and fun into your life right now.
Stay safe!
From, Lisa and Mel
“This is the true story of a man and a gun and a car.”
Actually, this is the true story of Ida Lupino, called early in her career the English Jean Harlow, who is thought to be the first woman to direct a film noir, and one with an all-male cast, no less. She also was the only woman to have directed an episode of The Twilight Zone, with the episode “The Masks,” and the only person--male or female--to have both directed and starred in an episode of The Twilight Zone with “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine,” both episodes are personal favorites of ours.
Episode Notes:
Billy "Cockeyed" Cook
More female film directors from Hollywood history listed here and here.
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Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini.
In this episode, Mel and Lisa discuss Daphne du Maurier's short story "The Birds" and examine the Hitchcock adaptation.
Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson are the authors of Monster, She Wrote, available now through Quirk Books or your favorite book retailer.
Theme Music by Nicolas Gasparini.
Welcome to episode one of the Monster, She Wrote podcast! Get to know Melanie and Lisa as they discuss women in horror. Also included a discussion of Daphne du Maurier and Hitchcock and the problem of creative ownership.
Lisa Kroger and Melanie R. Anderson are the authors of Monster, She Wrote, available on the Quirk Books website.
Theme music by Nicolas Gasparini.