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. 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’

  2. 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

  3. 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

  4. 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

  5. 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

  6. 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'

  7. Sep 29

    #69: She wants to devour him. She’s also falling in love with him: Gillian Daniels on Horror Novel ‘Jenny Will Eat You Now’

    What happens when a centuries-old river monster meets a human she desperately wants to eat — only to find herself falling in love with him instead? Gillian Daniels’ debut horror novel Jenny Will Eat You Now revolves around Jenny Greenteeth, a centuries-old river dweller who has made her home beneath the streets of Boston and regards humans with a mixture of contempt and appetite. But then she meets a handsome academic and, for reasons she doesn’t entirely understand, finds herself slightly more intrigued than hungry. Romance, body horror and folklore collide with gloriously impolite results in Jenny Will Eat You Now, which turns the conventional monster story on its head and then cheerfully bites into it.  Jenny may be a murderous water spirit with a taste for human flesh, but it turns out that falling in love presents an altogether more complicated problem: how exactly do you maintain a healthy relationship with someone who remains, quite literally, on the menu? To celebrate the book’s release today, September 29, CinemaChords sat down with Daniels to discuss creating Jenny, blending horror and romance in equal measures, the fun of putting a centuries-old river monster in contemporary Boston, and the particular challenge of writing a protagonist who can quite happily eat a person but has absolutely no idea what to do when she starts falling in love with one.

    #69: She wants to devour him. She’s also falling in love with him: Gillian Daniels on Horror Novel ‘Jenny Will Eat You Now’

  8. Sep 28

    #68: Jennifer Thorne Talks New Horror Novel ‘Newbourne Park’: where the country-house weekend goes feral

    Jennifer Thorne made quite an impression with Diavola, turning family dysfunction, Italian sunshine and supernatural horror into one very bad holiday. Now she’s back with Newbourne Park, swapping the Tuscan getaway for 200 acres of extremely expensive English countryside.  Worn out from years of caregiving, 26-year-old Martha Shaw reluctantly agrees to a secret weekend escape at a lavish country estate. It sounds idyllic enough. Then the rightful master of the house returns under cover of night, and Martha finds herself fighting for survival against a vicious, hungry presence stalking the grounds. A deliciously nasty collision of Gothic horror and class warfare, Newbourne Park gives the werewolf myth a distinctly contemporary makeover. Thorne turns familiar tropes inside out to ask whether escaping the food chain is quite the same thing as refusing to join it. To celebrate the book’s release (September 29), CinemaChords spoke to Thorne about class and privilege colliding with Gothic nightmares, the appeal of placing an utterly contemporary protagonist inside an old-fashioned horror story — and the fun of taking familiar Gothic and werewolf trappings and giving them a thoroughly nasty twist.

    #68: Jennifer Thorne Talks New Horror Novel ‘Newbourne Park’: where the country-house weekend goes feral
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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
    75
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Howard Gorman
  • Show Website
    The CinemaChords Podcast

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