15 - Sam J. Miller and a Hometown Hot Mess

This week our guest is Sam J. Miller, author of The Blade Between - a novel for anyone who  loves or loathes their hometown. 

It’s a story of small-town ghosts, hidden hatreds and sudden violence. And behind it all looms the issue of gentrification, in all its ugliness and beauty. Listening to Sam talk, you may think differently about that cute little bistro that’s opened down the street. Y’know, the one that took over from that local place that had been there for years . . . 

Sam’s previous works include The Art of Starving (2017) and Blackfish City (2018), both novels that take no truck with easy ideas of genre. They, like The Blade Itself are freewheeling stories, and as you’ll here, Sam is more than willing go down some weird alleyways and to spill his own blood on the page.

He’s also got a lot of things to say about queer identity in horror, about how no-one ever thinks they are the villain in the story, and the worry of how people in your hometown may feel when you savage it in your story.

The Blade Between was published December 1st 2020, by Ecco Books.

Books we mentioned include:

• The Art of Starving (2017), by Sam J. Miller
• Needful Things (1991), by Stephen King
• Drawing Blood (2010), by Poppy Z. Brite
• The Cabin at the End of the World (2018), by Paul Tremblay
• Plain Bad Heroines (2020), by Emily Danforth
• A Spectral Hue (2019), by Craig Lawrence Gibney
• Never Have I Ever (2021), by Isobel Yap
• Homesick (2019) and Finna (2020), by Nino Cipri

Come talk books with us on Twitter @talkscaredpod, on Instagram, or email direct to talkingscaredpod@gmail.com.

Thanks to Terry Smith Audio for sound editing and Adrian Flounders for graphic design.