The CinemaChords Podcast

Howard Gorman
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  • TV & Film

Bringing you up close and personal with the voices shaping film, music, and storytelling today. Each episode dives into candid chats with filmmakers, actors, musicians, and authors — from rising talent to industry icons — as they share the stories behind their work, the challenges they’ve faced, and the sparks that keep their creativity alive.

  1. 6h ago

    #77: John Scalzi on ‘Monsters of Ohio’: small-town blues, corporate beasts and things that go bump in the Midwest

    John Scalzi has never been particularly interested in playing it safe with his fiction. The bestselling author of the likes of Redshirts and the Old Man’s War series has built a readership on stories that take familiar ideas in totally unexpected directions, often with a healthy dose of irreverence. With his latest novel, Monsters of Ohio, he turns his attention to his home state, where the troubles facing one small town are about to get significantly stranger. The book follows Mike Boyd, who returns to his hometown of Richland after losing his job, only to find a community struggling with economic uncertainty and the impending closure of its local meat-processing plant. The company behind the proposed closure, meanwhile, is busy organising a Monster Mash festival to improve its public image. But corporate damage control soon becomes the least of the town’s worries when a neighbour’s cow explodes, followed by the neighbours themselves, with the resulting transformations giving a whole new meaning to the term small-town monster. As the bizarre incidents spread to Mike’s own family, he joins forces with an old friend and a local festival organiser to get to the bottom of what’s going down. To mark the book’s release today, November 7, CinemaChords sat down with Scalzi to examine the real-world concerns underpinning his fantastical premise: the economic decline of small-town America, the grip of corporate power and the complicated relationship between communities and their past. We also discuss the role of political conviction in fiction, the interplay between horror and comedy, and what our ideas of monstrosity reveal about the way we judge one another.

    #77: John Scalzi on ‘Monsters of Ohio’: small-town blues, corporate beasts and things that go bump in the Midwest

  2. 6h ago

    #76: Bloodlust, Motherhood & Broken Wi-Fi: Caitlin Starling on Milkteeth

    Bestselling horror author Caitlin Starling is back with Milkteeth, a darkly seductive new novel that sinks its teeth into vampire mythology to explore the horrors of motherhood, bodily transformation and the suffocating expectations placed on those tasked with caring for others. Milkteeth centres on Beatrice, a broodmother responsible for nursing newly made vampires through the first years of their unlife. Living in an abandoned warren of office space beneath her patron’s skyscraper, she raises two difficult, hungry fledglings in a society governed by secrecy and rigid hierarchies. But when she takes on a third, the fragile balance of her existence begins to collapse. Her hunger grows beyond her control, her body starts to change, and the very role she has been assigned threatens to turn her into something even more monstrous. Desperate to understand what is happening to her, Beatrice seeks help from a mortal obstetrician and gynaecologist. Yet opening herself up to an outsider could expose the secrets of her vampiric coven, placing not only her own life but also the safety of her dependent children in jeopardy. In a world where the smallest revelation could prove fatal, Beatrice must confront the price of being truly seen. Milkteeth is a deliciously twisted piece of literary horror that takes the vampire novel somewhere far more unsettling than the usual bloodsucking business. Starling uses the broodmother’s predicament to probe the pressures of maternal duty, the alienation of living in a body that no longer feels like your own, and the power structures that demand conformity while punishing anyone who dares to step outside their prescribed role. There is a wicked streak of dark comedy, too, in the sight of an ancient creature of the night grappling with the mundane indignities of modern domestic life. A fresh bite of vampire fiction, a sharp examination of maternal expectations and a queasily compelling study of bodily transformation, Milkteeth makes familiar trappings monstrous all over again. With Milkteeth out now in the UK and arriving in the US on 10 November, CinemaChords spoke to Caitlin Starling about using vampire mythology to explore maternal burnout, bodily alienation and the pressures of conformity. We also discussed the dangers of breaking a culture of secrecy, the cost of putting personal truth before collective safety, and why even an ancient creature of the night might need help connecting a tablet to Wi-Fi.

    #76: Bloodlust, Motherhood & Broken Wi-Fi: Caitlin Starling on Milkteeth

  3. Oct 13

    #75: Something Wicked This Way Purrs: Jason Rekulak on New Horror Novel ‘Look What the Cat Dragged In’

    After turning imaginary friends into a source of terror in Hidden Pictures and unsettling domestic life in The Last One at the Wedding, Jason Rekulak returns with Look What the Cat Dragged In, a supernatural chiller that asks just how much trouble one seemingly innocent cat can bring through the cat flap. The book follows twenty-seven-year-old Philadelphia cartoonist Penny Padgett, who agrees to pet-sit Godfrey, a rather peculiar cat that quickly becomes her constant companion. But her nightmares soon turn violent, insects overrun her basement, and her once-cute illustrations take on a dark, surreal life of their own. As Penny’s health deteriorates, she begins to suspect that Godfrey is no ordinary cat — and that whatever has followed him home may be coming after her. As with Hidden Pictures, Jason Rekulak makes deft, inventive use of prose and artwork, their interplay lending the creeping horror an unsettling visual life of its own. The result is a deliciously imaginative chiller that proves just how much more terrifying a story can become when words and images work in perfect concert. To celebrate today’s release, CinemaChords sat down with Rekulak to discuss a protagonist whose semi-autobiographical comics take a sinister turn as she unwittingly draws disturbing images that foreshadow the horrors to come, and whether his own books serve as a kind of creative scrapbook. We also talked about the various cinematic influences behind Look What the Cat Dragged In, from the supernatural thrills and chills of Gremlins and Ghostbusters to the bleak humour and horror of touchstones such as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, before discussing how original artwork can take a horror story somewhere words alone simply cannot.Buy your copy of Look What The Cat Dragged In via the following link: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250895875/lookwhatthecatdraggedin/

    #75: Something Wicked This Way Purrs: Jason Rekulak on New Horror Novel ‘Look What the Cat Dragged In’

  4. Oct 13

    #74: Author Tanya Pell Talks ‘This B Just Won’t Die!’: A darkly funny, blood-soaked love letter to slasher movies

    Tanya Pell’s latest shocker of a novel, This B Just Won’t Die! (out today) is a darkly funny, blood-soaked love letter to slasher movies, horror fandom and the women Hollywood refuses to let move on.The book relates how, twenty years after becoming famous as the star of the Mirror horror franchise, aging scream queen Barbra Jacobs is still trapped by the role that made her name. Now making a living signing old photographs at horror conventions, Barb sees a chance to reinvent herself when she’s approached to host a new horror docuseries. But when fans begin dying in ways that mirror the kills from her films, she finds herself back in familiar territory: running for her life as the Final Girl.To celebrate the book’s release today, CinemaChords caught up with Pell to discuss horror conventions, the pressures of being forever boxed into one identity, the slasher genre’s feminist potential, and why audiences remember the killer but tend to forget their victims.Buy the book now via the following link: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/This-B-Just-Wont-Die!/Tanya-Pell/9781668087398

    #74: Author Tanya Pell Talks ‘This B Just Won’t Die!’: A darkly funny, blood-soaked love letter to slasher movies

  5. Oct 13

    #73: Stephen Graham Jones Talks ‘Off the Reservation’: A Journey to Bring the Dead Home Opens Old Wounds from the Past

    Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Award-winning author Stephen Graham Jones returns to the Blackfeet reservation of The Only Good Indians with its follow-up, Off the Reservation, a supernatural shocker in which the ghosts of America’s past refuse to stay buried. Blending a breakneck road trip with Indigenous history, cultural reckoning and visceral horror, Jones sends a fractured group of Blackfeet activists on a mission to bring home the remains of a child lost to history.Five years after the events of The Only Good Indians, Nathan Yellow Tail is struggling to rebuild his life following an accident that has left him badly injured and his best friend Sebby fighting for survival. When an opportunity arises to help Sebby and find some measure of redemption, Nate joins three older Blackfeet companions in a battered camper van bound for the site of the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Their mission is to repatriate the bones of a Blackfeet boy who died there. But something far more sinister comes back with them.To celebrate the book’s release today, CinemaChords caught up with Jones to discuss returning to the world of The Only Good Indians, this time around dismantling the conventions of possession horror and harnessing the restless energy of a supernatural road trip, drawing on the history of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and using visceral horror to explore grief, guilt and the consequences of unresolved injustice. Get your copy of the book now via the following link: https://titanbooks.com/73406-off-the-reservation/

    #73: Stephen Graham Jones Talks ‘Off the Reservation’: A Journey to Bring the Dead Home Opens Old Wounds from the Past

  6. Oct 13

    #72: Author Brian Evenson on New Novel ‘Phantom Limb’ and the Horrors of What People Are Willing to Forfeit in the Search for Wholeness

    There’s no denying that author Brian Evenson has never been particularly concerned with bodily integrity or the comforts of a stable reality. In the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy Award-winning author’s latest novel, Phantom Limb, he returns to the gruesome theological logic of Last Days, where the path to spiritual enlightenment is paved with severed limbs and the pursuit of transcendence proves a decidedly flesh-and-blood affair. The novel follows Kline, the battered survivor of Evenson’s Last Days, who is left badly burned after destroying the headquarters of an underground amputation cult and now finds himself behind bars. Hoping to secure a shorter sentence, he enlists the help of an ex-cop, only to become entangled with a splinter sect carrying on the cult’s work. As a series of ritualistic murders draws him deeper into its orbit, Kline must investigate a world he thought he had left behind without becoming part of it once again.To celebrate the book’s release today, CinemaChords sat down with Evenson to discuss returning to Kline’s world and the disturbing logic of a cult that equates physical loss with spiritual advancement, the unlikely buddy-cop dynamic between Kline and Frank from the original book, and the challenge of following up a novel as distinctive as Last Days.Phantom Limb is available to buy at the following link: https://coffeehousepress.org/products/phantom-limb

    #72: Author Brian Evenson on New Novel ‘Phantom Limb’ and the Horrors of What People Are Willing to Forfeit in the Search for Wholeness

  7. Oct 13

    #71: Author Delilah S. Dawson Talks Horror Novel ‘Monstera’: When Love Takes Root and Horror Blossoms

    Plants are meant to make a house feel more like a home, yet in Delilah S. Dawson’s Monstera, their presence is rather less reassuring. A New York Times and USA Today bestselling author and Stoker Award winner, Dawson has published more than 40 books across a range of genres, alongside dozens of comics and short stories. With her latest novel, Monstera, she turns the prospect of a fresh start into fertile ground for botanical and body horror, exploring what happens when desire takes root and the urge to flourish gives way to an unexpected pernicious propagation. The novel follows 24-year-old Lucy McClintock, who escapes the control of her overbearing grandfather to start afresh in a dreamy Victorian house in Savannah. There, she finds herself fascinated by Saskia, her strong, secretive downstairs neighbour, whose apartment is a verdant jungle of plants and artwork. But as their attraction grows, Lucy quickly realizes that both women share more than she could have imagined — and that beneath the promise of new beginnings, something sinister is pushing through. To celebrate today’s release of Monstera, CinemaChords sat down with Dawson to discuss blending sapphic romance with botanical body horror, flipping traditional coming-of-age story tropes on their head, and why plants make such unsettling horror material when they’re perfectly capable of getting on with things without us.You can buy Monstera at the following link: https://titanbooks.com/72852-monstera/

    #71: Author Delilah S. Dawson Talks Horror Novel ‘Monstera’: When Love Takes Root and Horror Blossoms

  8. Sep 29

    #70: Cassandra Khaw Interview: When Death Comes Calling as a Black Dog | The Year's Most Vital Horror Novel 'Find Me Where It Ends'

    What if Death came to your door not bearing a scythe, but as a black dog — and turned out to be rather good company? That’s the moving, melancholy premise at the centre of Cassandra Khaw’s latest novel, Find Me Where It Ends.The story follows Antigone, who is no stranger to death. For the women in her family, it has always arrived as a black dog, and when her own spectral companion finally appears, she invites it inside. What begins as an unsettling encounter gradually becomes something much more intimate, as Antigone is forced to reckon with the life she has lived, the parts of herself she has hollowed out for others and the bone-deep exhaustion that has followed her through it.Find Me Where It Ends makes a strange companion of Death, turning the black dog at Antigone’s door into something less like a harbinger than a confidant. Khaw’s real sleight of hand is to make survival feel tangible: not some grand revelation, but a messy accumulation of people, memories and tiny reasons to keep going.CinemaChords spoke to Cassandra Khaw about the new book, the folklore and symbolism behind its central black dog, the complicated relationship between mortality and the people who keep us here, and why the smallest details of a life can sometimes provide the strongest reasons to stay.

    #70: Cassandra Khaw Interview: When Death Comes Calling as a Black Dog | The Year's Most Vital Horror Novel 'Find Me Where It Ends'
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About

Bringing you up close and personal with the voices shaping film, music, and storytelling today. Each episode dives into candid chats with filmmakers, actors, musicians, and authors — from rising talent to industry icons — as they share the stories behind their work, the challenges they’ve faced, and the sparks that keep their creativity alive.

Information

  • Creator
    Howard Gorman
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    77
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Howard Gorman
  • Show Website
    The CinemaChords Podcast

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