Bad Books for Bad People

Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre composed the 32-novel saga of Fantômas in the three years between 1911 and 1913. Over the course of the series, France's elusive master criminal commits a litany o…

Coldheart Canyon brings together two amazing tastes--horror icon Clive Barker and Hollywood decadence--and the results are... maybe not what one would expect. Set in the 21st Century Hollywood of bl…

Jack and Kate look at what they've been reading and watching so far in 2019 and make some recommendations in the world of books and beyond. The rules of engagement are simple: the hosts each choose …

The pulp paperback boom of the 70s and 80s delivered an occasional genre gem, and Ken Greenhall's Childgrave is a prime example of a book whose back cover premise actually undersells its uncanny cree…

Jack and Kate make a return trip into the realms of best selling author Anne Rice under the literary guise of A. N. Roquelaure. The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty is Rice's pseudonymous experiment to c…

Pat Walsh’s The Crowfield Curse and The Crowfield Demon are two novels for young readers that take us back to the Middle Ages for a tale of the mysterious supernatural circumstances surrounding a mo…

The Humans, a 2015 comic by Keenan Marshall Keller and Tom Neely, finds a recipe for far-out action by combining grimy vintage biker pulp with Planet of the Apes fantasy. Prepare yourself for drugge…

The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Eddison is considered to be a classic of the fantasy genre, rediscovered during the 1960s as the canon of modern fantasy was developed in a post-Tolkien world. Drawing its…

Caitlin R. Kiernan's Black Helicopters is an atmospheric, ultra-dark fantasy novella that manages to do modern-day Lovecraftiana oh-so-right. Creepy twins, cosmic horror, and shadowy conspiracies co…

For better or for worse, 2018 is one for the history books. Jack and Kate take some time to recommend some of media they enjoyed during the year that hasn't been discussed on the podcast. The rules …

During his lifetime, Jim Thompson's masterful novels of crime, obsession, and dark Americana were published as pulp novels. Intervening years have seen a reassessment of his work, with Stephen King …

Jack and Kate go off-mission for this very special episode in which they work through their feelings about the Luca Guadagnino-helmed Suspiria remake. Risk the boop of death and join your hosts on t…

Jack and Kate dive right into the deep end of the Guy N. Smith Crabsiverse with book six in the cult (?) horror (?) series, Crabs: The Human Sacrifice, a book that combines killer crustaceans, ecote…

Jack and Kate celebrate the Halloween season with a visit to R.L. Stine's fictional town of Shadyside, a suburban hamlet with more than its fair share or spooky teen-centric violence. For their firs…

Katie Skelly's graphic novel My Pretty Vampire blends an array of 60s and 70s references to create a brightly-colored, deceptively sweet-looking comic that explores repressed desires, poisonous rela…

William S. Burroughs' The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead is a psychedelic, stylized journey through a near-future world where roving gangs of gay youth are on a mission to destroy Western civilizatio…

At the time when they were published, Seabury Quinn's stories for Weird Tales were among the publication's most popular titles, but today, his name has been eclipsed by his contemporaries H.P. Lovec…

In Richard Matheson's Hell House, the ultra-haunted Belasco House is described as "the Mount Everest of Haunted Houses" and boy howdy, does it ever live up to that moniker. Matheson's horrifying sho…

Octave Mirbeau's 1899 novel The Torture Garden is a notorious and extreme work of French decadence. The book pulls no punches in its discussion of political corruption, sexual deviancy, and body hor…

Cameron Pierce's 2009 novella Ass Goblins of Auschwitz has a stand-out title even in the outrageous world of bizarro fiction, a subgenre of fantasy that uses that uses elements of absurdism, pop-cul…