186 – Stephen Graham Jones & The Last Stand of the Final Girls

Alas, we come to the end!

Stephen Graham Jones’s The Angel of Indian Lake brings the most important horror trilogy of the century to its conclusion. For one last time we return to Proofrock, Idaho – to watch Jade Daniels do battle with monsters in the wood and the demons in her head. 

SGJ also comes back to Talking Scared to finish our adjacent trilogy of conversations about these books. We talk about slashers and final girls for sure, but as ever with Stephen, these are windows onto something more profound – and he gives us his insight into how horror, justice, violence and luck operate in fiction.

This all sounds very profound. It is. But in the coolest way possible. The man is a rock star….

… but I STILL manage to freak him out with a ghost story.

Enjoy – it’s been a ride!

The Angel of Indian Lake was published on March 26thth by Saga Press and Titan Books

Other books mentioned:

• Where the Red Fern Grows (1961), by Wilson Rawls
• Marvel Superheroes Secret Wars #10 (1984), by Jim Shooter
• In Cold Blood (1965), by Truman Capote
• Morphology of the Folktale (1928), by Vladimir Propp
• The Red Badge of Courage (1895), by Stephen Crane
• The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991), by Jean Baudrillard
• The Name of the Rose (1980), by Umberto Eco
• The Hollow Kind (2022), by Andy Davidson
• Piranesi (2021), by Susannah Clarke
• A Tale of Two Cities (1859), by Charles Dickens
• The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s ‘Lost Highway’ (2000), by Slavoj Žižek
• The Warm Hands of Ghosts (2024), by Katherine Arden
• The Bear and the Nightingale (2017), by Katherine Arden
• The Others of Edenwell (2023), by Verity Holloway
• “A Fish Story” (2002), by Gene Wolfe

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