04 - Jo Kaplan and What Makes a Great Haunted House?

Send us a text

This week’s guest is up-and-coming horror extraordinaire, Jo Kaplan. Jo’s new haunted house novel, It Will Just Be Us is a tour-de-force of chills, thrills and things that kill. It’s got everything you could possibly want: creepy old house – check, mysterious locked room – CHECK, a witch who lurks in a swamp – CHECK!!!! It’s also got some of the best female relationships I’ve read in horror for a while, enough to pass the Bechdel test with flying colours.

Jo and I talk about Freud’s uncanny and the infamous Winchester House, how to research her locations (or not), and how to make a ghost feel like something new. This chat feels like getting in at the ground floor of what will be a skyscraper career. Listen now, and you can say you were there at the start!

 The books we discussed this episode include:

• The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson (1959)
• “Jordan’s End”, by Ellen Glasgow, in The Shadowy Third (1923)
• The Gone World, by Tom Sweterlitsch (2018)
• House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski (2000)
• Don’t Turn Out the Lights:  A Tribute to Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, edited by Jonathan Mayberry (2020)
• The Only Good Indians, by Stephen Graham Jones (2020)
• Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno Garcia (2020)

Come talk books with us on Twitter @talkscaredpod or email direct to [email protected].

Thanks To Terry Smith Audio for sound editing.

Support the show

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices