Hosts Josh and Jamie and special returning guest Mike Thorn kick off SPOOKTOBER by discussing two different eras of largely faithful Stephen King adaptations: Mary Lambert’s playful, colorful and yet still effectively upsetting and morbid realization of PET SEMATARY (1989) and Lawrence Kasdan’s attempt at keeping a straight (expensive Hollywood production) face while King bizarrely remixes many of his career-long obsessions in the painkiller induced fever dream of DREAMCATCHER (2003).
In this interview, we chat with Michael LaPointe about navigating the pipeline between impulse and expression, breaking the genteel picture of literature, finding liberation in failure, and so much more.
Michael LaPointe is the author of The Creep, a novel published by Random House Canada. He has written for The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and he was a columnist with The Paris Review. His work has been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories and Best Canadian Essays, and he lives in Toronto.
Books mentioned in this episode:
Affliction; Continental Drift; Rule of the Bone; The Sweet Hereafter – Russell Banks
Naked Lunch – William S. Burroughs
The Adventures of Pinocchio – Carlo Collodi
Bleak House – Charles Dickens
Play it as it Lays – Joan Didion
The Lover – Marguerite Duras
Middlemarch – George Eliot
American Psycho; Less Than Zero; The Shards – Bret Easton Ellis
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Bad Behavior; Two Girls, Fat and Thin – Mary Gaitskill
In a Lonely Place – Dorothy B. Hughes
Snow Country – Yasunari Kawabata
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination; Sula – Toni Morrison
The Sorrow of War – Bảo Ninh
Inherent Vice – Thomas Pynchon
All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
Voyage in the Dark – Jean Rhys
Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
Last Exit to Brooklyn – Hubert Selby Jr.
Alice James: A Biography – Jean Strouse
The Invisible Woman: The Story Of Nelly Ternan And Charles Dickens – Claire Tomalin
In this interview, we chat with Gemma Files about horny monsters, Lovecraftian Airbnbs, the female gaze, and so much more.
Previously a film critic, journalist and teacher, Gemma Files has been an award-winning horror author since 1999. She’s best-known for her novel Experimental Film (Open Road Media) and her collections of short fiction, including the Bram Stoker Award-winning In That Endlessness, Our End and Blood From the Air (both from Grimscribe). Her next book, Little Horn: Stories, will be out in October from Shortwave. She is the autistic mother of an autistic son. For fun she sings, and doodles pretty monsters.
Books mentioned in this episode:
Empire of the Sun – J. G. Ballard
D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths; Norse Gods and Giants – Edgar Parin d’Aulaire and Ingri Parin d’Aulaire
Black Flame – Gretchen Felker-Martin
The Rotting Room – Viggy Parr Hampton
Barrowbeck; The Loney; Starve Acre – Andrew Michael Hurley
Bright Dead Star; Zoetrope Bizarre – Caitlín R. Kiernan
The Jungle Book; The Second Jungle Book – Rudyard Kipling
In this interview, we chat with S. P. Miskowski about Asian horror cinema, the power of grief, the relentless desire to shape the self, and so much more.
S. P. Miskowski is a recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, for literature and for drama. Her books have been recognized with four Shirley Jackson Award nominations and two Bram Stoker Award nominations. Her stories have appeared in many anthologies including Haunted Nights, Human Monsters, Looming Low I and II, The Madness of Dr. Caligari, Uncertainties III, October Dreams 2, The Best Horror of the Year Vol. 10, and Darker Companions: 50 Years of Ramsey Campbell, and in magazines including Identity Theory, Black Static, Vastarien, Supernatural Tales, and Cosmic Horror Monthly. Her grunge noir novel I Wish I Was Like You was named This Is Horror Novel of the Year 2017 and is available via Audible. An omnibus of her books set in the weird fictional town of Skillute, WA is forthcoming from Broken Eye Books in 2025.
Books and stories mentioned in this episode:
The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales – Alfred A. Knopf, pub.
The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024 – S. A. Cosby, ed.
D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths – Ingrid & Edgar Parin d’Aulaire
Go, Dog. Go! – P. D. Eastman
Rock Paper Scissors – Alice Feeney
The Haunting of Hill House; “Maybe it Was the Car”; “The Summer People”; We Have Always Lived in the Castle; “The Witch” – Shirley Jackson
None of This is True – Lisa Jewell
Audition – Ryū Murakami
“Bluebeard”; “Cinderella” – Charles Perrault
“The Black Cat”; “The Cask of Amontillado” – Edgar Allan Poe
The Last Party – A. R. Torre
The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023 – Lisa Unger, ed.
In this interview, we chat with Nour Abi-Nakhoul about copy editing, creative nonfiction, feverish creations, and so much more.
Nour Abi-Nakhoul is a writer and editor based in Montreal. She is the editor-in-chief of the award-winning quarterly Maisonneuve Magazine. Her short fiction has appeared in Hazlitt and The Walrus. Her debut novel, Supplication, was released by Penguin Random House in 2024.
In this interview, we chat with Kathe Koja about balancing simultaneous projects, resisting online distractions, raising the literary dead, and so much more.
Kathe Koja writes novels and short fiction, and creates and produces live and virtual events. Her award-winning books include The Cipher, Skin, Buddha Boy, Under The Poppy and Velocities, and she is currently at work on the Dark Factory immersive fiction project including Dark Factory, Dark Park and Dark Matter. Catherine the Ghost is her newest novel.
In this interview, we chat with Paula D. Ashe about writer’s block, narrative movement, urban legends, and so much more.
Paula D. Ashe (she/her) is an author of dark fiction. Her debut collection We Are Here to Hurt Each Other (Nictitating Books) was a Shirley Jackson Award winner for Single Author Collection and a Bram Stoker Award Finalist for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection. Recently, she received the Joseph S. Pulver Sr. Weird Fiction Award at NecronomiCon Providence. Paula was also an associate editor for Vastarien: A Literary Journal. She lives in the Midwest with her family.
Books and stories mentioned in this episode:
Supplication – Nour Abi-Nakhoul
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Books of Blood; The Damnation Game; The Hellbound Heart – Clive Barker
Midnight Rooms – Donyae Coles
Blood from the Air – Gemma Files
“each thing i show you is a piece of my death” – Gemma Files & Stephen J. Barringer
Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke – Eric LaRocca