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.
#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 (https://jasonrekulak.com/) returns with Look What the Cat Dragged In (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250895875/lookwhatthecatdraggedin/), 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/
13 Oct 2026
#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! (https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/This-B-Just-Wont-Die!/Tanya-Pell/9781668087398) (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
13 Oct 2026
#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 (https://www.stephengrahamjones.com/) returns to the Blackfeet reservation of The Only Good Indians with its follow-up, Off the Reservation (https://titanbooks.com/73406-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/
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