Neil McRobert

Hello and welcome to Talking Scared.

I'm your host, Neil McRobber, and we come to my final author interview of 2026.

Thankfully, we're going out with a big bang rather than a whimper, because we're graced by a true rising star of horror, Jane Schoenbrun.

They're best known as the writer-director of the movies We're All Going to the World's Fair...

I wish they stuck around for me and for you, but that's not to be ungrateful.

I am very grateful I got to speak to them at all.

And their publicist was very, very nice in telling me, OK, wrap it up now, Neil.

Hence how rushed I got at the end there.

Hello and welcome to Talking Scared.

I'm your host, Neil McRobert, and this is the 300th author interview episode of Talking Scared.

Thank God it's focused on a genuinely good book, so I can celebrate authentically.

My guest is Dorian Ravenscroft, a phenomenal name for a writer of historical gothic and their debut is one of my favourite things I've read all year.

Years later, one of these survivors is hanged for a grisly double murder he claims no memory of.

Enter Harry Lambert, who is an ambitious London newsman who, he doesn't believe the story that the survivors told when they came back, and he is determined to find out what really happened.

So he sets out to interview them, and ultimately we get this mix of conflicting stories and then sort of ghostly stuff happening in london but that's the general premise of it

yes there's some properly grisly things that happen in the monstery ice uh but yeah that's that's the basic premise and and god i found it so fascinating also before we go any further the hms melpemony is it melpemony is that the right way melpomony melpomony

[gentle music] Hello and welcome to Talking Scared.

I'm your host, Neil McRobert, and are you ready for a nice old-fashioned English ghost story? Yeah? Sorry, that's not what you're getting.

Our guest this week is Wil McLean, and his new novel, Solace House, is far more interesting than that.

It's the story of a group of university students in the early '90s whose summer job renovating an old mansion unearths dark secrets and mind-shattering possibilities.

James Her- James Herbert went to art college there.

Um, there's lots of other connections to it as well.

Rosemary Timperley, who was, in her day, was one of the great ghost story editors and writers.

She's from here.

I'm Eric Molinsky.

Neil McRobert is the host of a podcast about horror fiction called Talking Scared.

He is also a huge Stephen King fan.

He was very excited when King agreed to be a guest on the show.

On the one hand, makes communities close-knit, but also means people keep their distance also from each other and don't always look out for each other, which is the lesson of Salem's Lot and It, and a lot of these small Maine communities can also be kinda nasty.

Stephen King's stories are famous for being set in Maine, and even if they're set elsewhere, he's often writing about remote places instead of major cities.

As a British fan, Neil McRobert thinks that there's something uniquely American about the way King writes about these small towns.

The epic scale of America, and then this small town in the middle of all of that epic scale, I mean, that goes back to, like, frontier stories.

[gentle music] Hello and welcome to Talking Scared.

I'm your host, Neil McRobert, and this has been a week of big highs and crushing lows.

Stephen King is back on the podcast and that's about as high as a high gets for an uber fan like me, to talk to my literary hero for the third time about the third and final book in the Talisman series, Other Worlds Than These.

It's a saga that means so much to me and has ever since I was a heartbroken 12 or 13-year-old reading The Talisman in my grandmother's front yard and weeping for all that is lost.

A- as ever, I'm gonna jump straight in with you, 'cause I have just too much to ask you and too little time.

So I'll, I'll just dispense with the small talk.

Neil, it's, it's all small talk.

[laughs]