Literary Disco launches a new format with a new “Genre Season.” Each episode of this season, we’re going to dive deep into a particular literary genre, exploring what defines it, what makes it work or not work, interviewing authors, talking to fans, scholars, whoever can help us unlock what it is that makes a genre a genre.

With our third episode, we grab a flashlight, head into the dark woods to that house on the hill or just maybe the closet in our own room to creep around the corners, waiting for the tingling sensation in the back of our necks. And we try to find what’s in the darkness as we confront the genre of horror.

This episode’s special guests include Jeff Jerome, Curator Emeritus of the Poe House and Museum; Susan Scarf Merrell, author of Shirley based on the life of Shirley Jackson; and novelist and screenwriter C. Robert Cargill, who wrote the films Sinister, Doctor Strange, and The Black Phone.

On how horror stories help us gain access to a more grown-up world:

Rider: It seems like it always starts in childhood, right? It always starts with wanting to read these. I mean, for me … Stephen King was sort of a gateway drug to reading for me, but I don’t remember really being scared by Stephen King. I think it was more like I remember being scared of books like Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark when I was six or seven. Those sort of folk tales are really predictable, but they’re still so effective. They’re still such great stories even if those scary stories are really basic. You know, it’s all about dread. It’s all about the setup. You’re getting a scary story. The whole point is to scare you, the whole point. And so you’re sitting around a campfire or your parents are putting you to bed or some situation where you want to be scared. So you’re setting up this situation of dread and then there’s usually repetition. There’s a scratching at the car door or the high beams are shining from the car behind you. And it builds and builds and you’re just waiting for something. And all of those Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, they always end with the worst ending. It’s always like, and then it was you. And then ou’re supposed to literally jump. It’s like a physical thing to make you scared, you know, shock you, or it has a plot twist that just chills you with its meaning, right? Like the scratching noise was the hook and it was there, or the hitchhiker that you picked up was actually the dead girl. And it’s like you have to go back and realize, Oh my God, I was talking to a dead person or holding a dead person’s hand. So those were the ones that really scared me. The short stories, the sort of carnival ride of fiction by the time I started reading Stephen King,

I realized just recently I was talking to a friend whose son had seen The Ring. He was only 11 and he was really freaked out. And his parents are not horror movie people at all, and they couldn’t understand why he was really scared by it. But then he kept coming back and wanting to talk to them about it and kept wanting to see The Ring Two. I started thinking about it and I found myself explaining to them that for me, reading Stephen King and then eventually watching horror films was a way to sort of gain access to a grown up world that was being kept from me, that if I knew that if I was willing to go to the scary places that these books promised, I would also get a glimpse into something that was more grown up.

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Jeff Jerome on the reality in Edgar Allan Poe’s stories:

Jeff Jerome: Poe was famous for reading the newspaper and taking topics out of that. He didn’t write about werewolves or Frankenstein. He wrote about things that could happen to you, and people could relate to that. And I think that’s the one thing that really captured the public. You know, what happened to Uncle Bob? He got buried alive. When I heard about this, I heard that you could be murdered. And like you said, they had horrific murders in that time period. Right. And I remember first reading about The Tell-Tale Heart, how people would read that, and they would look down at the floor, because that’s where people kept their money, their treasures beneath the floorboards. Okay. And I can just see Poe thinking, gee, where am I going to put that heart and the body parts? In the floorboards, because people can relate to that because that’s where they keep their money. I can just see reading The Tell-Tale Heart looking down at the floor going, all right. So I think he wrote about things that really could happen and they were realistic, people going crazy. And I think that’s one reason why people in his time period really were attracted to his stories. And even today, you’re talking about the middle school students. They love Poe, and that’s when they teach Poe, at least here in the Maryland areas, during middle school. And I would love going to the schools and talking to the students. And it was like, Yeah, man, people got buried alive.

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To listen to the rest of the episode, as well as the whole archive of Literary Disco, subscribe and listen on iTunes or wherever else you find your favorite podcasts.

Literary Disco launches a new format with a new “Genre Season.” Each episode of this season, we’re going to dive deep into a particular literary genre, exploring what defines it, what makes it work or not work, interviewing authors, talking to fans, scholars, whoever can help us unlock what it is that makes a genre a genre.

With our second episode episode, Julia, Rider, and Tod find a body, a clue or two, maybe even some justice, as they undoubtedly confront the darkness and the human heart as they talk crime. This week, their special guests are private investigator Lee Lofland, author of Police Procedure & Investigation: A Guide for Writers; Melissa Chadburn, author of A Tiny Upward Shove; and writer Ross Angelella.

Why there are less cop novels right now:

Rider: It’s always about justice being served. Law and Order is probably the best example of it, the soothing message that somebody is out there fighting justice for America and the world and they’re going to get the killer or the criminal and bring them to justice. That’s a big part of the crime genre, making us feel better about the world, that something is being fixed.

Somebody pointed out to me that the private detective as opposed to the police procedural is all about police corruption.

Tod: The failure.

Rider: Right, because the idea is that it’s a failure of the police to be able to do their job, so there needs to be a private detective out there saving the day or serving justice, which is justice is obviously not always the course.

Julia: Others can serve justice in more creative ways.

Tod: It’s impossible for us to ignore, you know, the elephant in the room, which is that we are living in a time where because of technology, we have seen the failure of police work. From Rodney King up to George Floyd and then everything that’s happened beyond that point, where too often if you’re a black man and you’re pulled over by a cop for whatever you’re being pulled over for, there’s a real chance you’re going to die.

That has changed the way books are written, too. I mean, you’re seeing a lot less cop novels, a lot less cop procedurals, because I think there’s an inherent disbelief in the goodness of the police right now. The cops have a lot of work to do to gain the public’s trust back in that, but I think what you’re seeing because of that, too, in fiction is a larger examination of the social reasons crime is committed.

So it’s not enough just that a crime has been committed and a cop or detective or whatever goes out and tries to solve it. I think we want to know now why this shit is happening. Why do people do the things that they’re doing? It’s not just about they need money for drugs. There’s something larger culturally and socially that that has changed the nature of crime.

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Melissa Chadburn on how crime stories never have an ending:

Melissa Chadburn: What do you do when something like [a murder close to home] happens? Can you figure out how it happened to make you feel better? What else can you do to make the world a better place?

I had to trouble my ideas of carceral justice, too. I don’t think, like, somebody gets locked up and then it’s over, which is normally the trajectory in a thriller or a true crime, or in a podcast. You’re trying to figure out what happened and then the person goes to jail and it’s not over, really. He had like 200 guns in his house and was super pro-NRA. And a lot of those guns were not the kind that you should be able to own. That to me seemed like way more interesting than the story that he got drunk and shot his wife, you know. The end of the story wasn’t about this person and his wife. For me, I felt like there is a larger instrument here.

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Ross Angelella on processing his own crime through writing:

Ross Angelella: For a long time … after the robbery, I remember being resentful that I wasn’t shot.

Tod: Your own survivor’s guilt in a way, you know what I mean?

Ross Angelella: And so processing that through writing, that’s where that divide took place between the me playing all the wild stuff on the page and trying to tell a story that was going to shock you rather than tell a story that was going to move you.

Tod: That’s the key about fiction, right? The difference between shock you and move you.

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To listen to the rest of the episode, as well as the whole archive of Literary Disco, subscribe and listen on iTunes or wherever else you find your favorite podcasts.

Literary Disco launches a new format with a new “Genre Season.” Each episode of this season, we’re going to dive deep into a particular literary genre, exploring what defines it, what makes it work or not work, interviewing authors, talking to fans, scholars, whoever can help us unlock what it is that makes a genre a genre.

With our inaugural episode, Julia, Rider, and Tod discover our long lost lineage. hop on Pegasus, and fly to the far reaches of fantasy with special guests actor and writer Will Friedle, fantasy author Brandon Sanderson, and Dungeons & Dragons game designer Kate Welch.

Why Moby-Dick is not a fantasy novel:

Will Friedle: Well, there’s I would I would argue that almost any genre, no matter what genre you have, has some level of world-building, which is what fantasy is really known for is the intricacy of the world-building. So you could argue that any novel has that type of world-building. That being said, Moby-Dick is based entirely on our world. There are no magical elements whatsoever. There are no mythical creatures whatsoever because Moby-Dick was actually based on a true story.

So there were whales that were attacking boats. So that takes it out of the fantasy genre in that, again, yes, there is some world-building, but it is not any sort of magical system. That would be the first thing I would say is there is some sort of a magical system.

Tod Goldberg: The anthropomorphizing of the whale and giving it actual agency. Doesn’t that create—

Rider Strong: It’s not like Jaws. The book doesn’t go into the whale’s point of view with inner dialogue.

Tod Goldberg: But the whale has agency the whales doing shit. It has purpose.

Julia Pistell: I love Moby-Dick—

Tod Goldberg: Put that on a shirt.

Julia Pistell: —but we don’t go into the whale’s mind, and the whale isn’t making choices. The book is about Ahab and the sailors interpreting normal whale behavior, and their anthropomorphizing of the whale is part of the novel.

Will Friedle: Just anthropomorphizing an animal does not a fantasy make. Put that on a shirt.

Brandon Sanderson on what is fantasy:

Brandon Sanderson: The really great fantasy novels mix in these real human stories, these stories about people. But they would do it in this fantastical environment where I got adventure and wonder with my human stories. Like Dragonsbane is the book that got me. It’s a lesser known book by Barbara Hambly, and it’s really about a woman having a midlife crisis.

Rider Strong: Well, it’s so interesting, because what I what I feel like you’re saying is that … fantasy allowed you to find more humanity than Old Yeller. The so-called more realistic books were actually less relatable to you.

Brandon Sanderson: Well, here’s the thing. My mom graduated first in her class in accounting in a year where she was the only woman in most of her accounting classes. She was valedictorian. She got offered a bunch of scholarships. And she actually delayed her career because she was pregnant with me. She eventually went on and became the city accountant and all these things. But when I was young, she stayed home with me and then my brother, which as a young teen, you’re like, Well, of course she did. Look at me. I’m awesome. I deserve all that..

And yet I’m reading this book and I’m like, You could be a wizard woman. Leave the kids. Kids will figure it out. Go off and be a wizard. And I get done with this book and I’m like, this book is about my mom. And I read a story about slaying a dragon and with all sorts of cool fantasy elements. And at the end, I understood my mother better. And that’s fantasy. That’s what makes fantasy click. I really don’t want to downplay the value of seeing yourself in the fiction you’re reading.

Kate Welch on the joys of being a Dungeon Master:

Kate Welch: A good Dungeon Master is ready to pivot. You know, okay, my group is going in a totally different direction. This is classic, oh, my group ruined my plans for me. I’m like, Oh, now it’s going to get interesting.

The fact that now we’re getting to a thing that I had no idea we were going to do. That’s when it gets exciting for me. That’s when I get to improvise and I get to be a part of the game now. It’s not just me reciting my great novel that I’ve written for you all to listen to. Actually being able to be a performer and a writer on this is just the best.

Rider Strong: When does it go wrong?

Kate Welch: When does it go bad? You know, in my experience, the only bad moments that have happened in Dungeons and Dragons are ones where the players just were not aboard the train. There has to be a good faith. I say this a lot. There’s so much vulnerability and creativity and multiply that by a factor for the vulnerability that comes in improvising. So when you are exposing your creativity in an improvisational setting, you’re just ripping your organs out for everybody to see. And so as a Dungeon Master, it’s a very, very vulnerable place to be…

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To listen to the rest of the episode, as well as the whole archive of Literary Disco, subscribe and listen on iTunes or wherever else you find your favorite podcasts.

On this episode of Literary Disco, Julia, Rider, and Tod head reflect on ten years of producing the podcast and what’s changed over the years in literature.

From the episode:

Rider: I was thinking about what has changed for me from the beginning of the show—and this is probably just getting older, but also having been reading books and discussing books and being part of a sort of literary community like this for ten years—is being able to see trends, being able to see the rise of the Instagram poet, the rise of the sort of self-conscious intellectual literature like Ben Lerner and Sheila Heti. To just see trends in the literary world. I mean, think about how many white male authors we were thinking about and talking about for the first ten episodes. Now, we’ve read such diverse authors and it’s like, right, because they weren’t getting published before.

That goes hand in hand with the way I approach Literary Disco when we started, which part of it was a critical project to reach a definitive conclusion about “good literature or bad literature.” And now, that whole idea is just gone. It’s like instead, I’m much more interested in engaging with literature endlessly. It’s going to be it’s going to be a constant give-and-take of cultural trends and things of that I’m only going to have perspective on for probably ten more years and no longer feeling like I want to reach that point where I’m like, Well, this is a good book and this is a bad poem, and that’s it forever. It’s like, shit is going to keep changing and people are going to keep writing in response. It is a conversation. It is a constant cultural conversation as opposed to like reaching any sort of definitive conclusion about literature, and that is more exciting because it means that this project is never going to end in my life.

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To listen to the rest of the episode, as well as the whole archive of Literary Disco, subscribe and listen on iTunes or wherever else you find your favorite podcasts.

On this episode of Literary Disco, Julia, Rider, and Tod head back to school with special guest Bree Rolfe, a teacher from Austin, Texas, where she helps high school students discover literature and creative writing. She is also a poet, whose collection Who’s Going to Love the Dying Girl is out now. She is also a dear friend of Literary Disco, a fellow graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars and exactly one semester ahead of the rest of us. Bree was involved in a lot of the late-night drinking and debating sessions that became this very podcast.

For today’s discussion, Bree had us read three short stories that she assigns to her students: “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid, “New Boy” by Roddy Doyle, and “Today Is Costa Rica” by Assaf Gavron.

From the episode:

Bree: I have students who love to read, but the majority of my students in my academic classes do not enjoy reading.

Julia: I think meeting them where they are and admitting that is obviously why you’re connecting with them. And choosing pieces that are both up to your literary standards and something that can connect with them, and short enough to get through reading in one class period—that is a trifecta that is really admirable.

Bree: It’s super difficult.

Tod: Finding good short pieces like that—for me as a young person who first had trouble reading because I was so profoundly dyslexic, a short piece like that that moves me makes me want to go find more stuff that moves me, you know? So it’s really smart to pick something that a kid can read in 30 minutes and have such a profound effect. I mean, your students are going to remember “New Boy” for the rest of their lives. That’s going to stick with them, which is cool.

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To listen to the rest of the episode, as well as the whole archive of Literary Disco, subscribe and listen on iTunes or wherever else you find your favorite podcasts.

On this episode of Literary Disco, Julia, Rider, and Tod tackle the incredibly popular, enduring, and surprisingly diverse world of the horse girl. We have read a classic of the genre, Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry, and have read a new collection of essays edited by Halimah Marcus entitled Horse Girls: Recovering, Aspiring, and Devoted Riders Redefine the Iconic Bond, in which female writers delve into horses and the horse girl phenomenon.

From the episode:

Rider: Well, the phrase that I think is it in the introduction, but it actually comes up … in a couple of the essays, is the idea of borrowed freedom. And then someone else in another essay calls it borrowed beauty. I love that idea. When you own a horse, a lot of the essays sort get at this : why do I love this so much? Why is there such a thing? And it ends up always being about the connection with this animal. A really personal loving connection that is both super powerful and empowering, but also inherently sad because they either are going to have to say goodbye to this thing that they love so much, either via death or selling the horse because they can’t afford to keep it anymore and so it can have a better life somewhere. Or just the knowledge that you’re never going to be able to completely control this thing. It is an animal. It has its own existence. That’s baked into the relationship.

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To listen to the rest of the episode, as well as the whole archive of Literary Disco, subscribe and listen on iTunes or wherever else you find your favorite podcasts.

On this episode of Literary Disco, Julia, Rider, and Tod take on John Steinbeck’s classic epic novel East of Eden, which centers on the Salinas Valley of California and tells the story of several generations of the Trask and Hamilton families.

From the episode:

Julia Pistell: I feel like it’s easy to say, this book is so black and white. But when I think about morality lately with writing, like with most fantasy these days and a lot of Y.A. is grappling with morality. This is a debate among my friends. Like, is Harry Potter just complete garbage specifically for the reason that you’re sorted into your category and that determines your whole personality type of thing, and like Game of Thrones and everything in the fantasy world. It’s just addictive to be like, what house am I? What family am I? But this book goes there for like 400 pages, but then I really do think it’s arguing against it because Adam and Aaron suck. They’re sad, annoying people who are so good that they can’t function. Their greatness is like a yoke around their necks. It’s not something to aspire to. With the aspiration in this book is, even if you are Cain and you are marked by God by your own original sin …the burden is on you guys, sons and daughters of Cain. You still have to be good even though you’re so evil inherently. It’s kind of turning from this European feudal thing to a more American thing of, we all suck, but we got to live together, right?

Tod Goldberg: But it’s also coming down to personal choice. So Abra loves both men and she’s a good person, but she does things that would generally be considered aberrant, right? But she’s doing it by choice. She’s ruled by choice. So she doesn’t easily fall into those categories that everyone else does. Then by the same token, Adam, who is awfully good at all those things, has lied to his children their entire lives … and neglected them. … There are these clear binaries, but it also, like you said, the last third or so of the book, as the onset of modernity comes into the novel, the onset of personal choice and deciding who you want to be. So hoping for a war so you make more money off of beans, that’s not a good thing. But by the same token, you’re trying to make money. … So all of a sudden, you get a lot of shades of gray … but Cal is trying to make his father’s life better. He’s just doing it in a really fucked up way.

Julia Pistell: I mean, several times during this book, I was just imagining that old experiment where they took the monkeys away from their moms and then they had to cling to wire monkeys. That’s what this book is. It’s just neglected children clinging to nothing. It’s very, very sad in that way, too.

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To listen to the rest of the episode, as well as the whole archive of Literary Disco, subscribe and listen on iTunes or wherever else you find your favorite podcasts.

On this episode of Literary Disco, while Rider’s off camping, Tod and Julia talk about their philosophy of pool reads—and why they’ll read books at the pool that they’d never be caught reading anywhere else.

From the episode:

Tod Goldberg: At no time when I’m sitting at home have I ever—like, I have four thousand books on my bookcases. At no time when I’m reading for pleasure at home am I like, “You know what, I’m gonna find me a John Grisham novel.” Never. I have to not be wearing underpants, be by a pool, and have flip flops somewhere near me, and then it is on.

Julia Pistell: Wow. Okay. I mean it’s true, almost nothing beats a good courtroom scene, I think that’s the American in us. We like seeing our government at work.

Tod Goldberg: Or we like seeing how we can defraud our government.

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To listen to the rest of the episode, as well as the whole archive of Literary Disco, subscribe and listen on iTunes or wherever else you find your favorite podcasts.

On this episode, Rider, Tod, and Julia discuss Lauren Shapiro’s 2020 poetry collection, Arena.

From the episode:

Rider Strong: The use of bodies in this collection is really interesting. She talks about her father’s body in the opening, and that poem [about movie extras posing as dead bodies] obviously sets up the whole idea of bodies and dead bodies, whether they’re real dead bodies or fake dead bodies. But then also, it feels to me that using the word body over and over again, she keeps reminding us of the corporeality of our existence. Because there’s a tension there. She keeps almost forgetting that she has a body or that there is a body. And I feel that way oftentimes, that most of my existence these days is in a mental place or an online space or a social space, and you have to be reminded, no, no no, there’s a body somewhere, and that body is you, or that body is your father. It’s a really weird thing that she keeps doing, and every time it pops into a poem, I was like, right, right—there’s a tension there between thought and body, or existence or identity and body itself. And it’s jarring every time it comes in.

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To listen to the rest of the episode, as well as the whole archive of Literary Disco, subscribe and listen on iTunes or wherever else you find your favorite podcasts.

On today’s episode, Julia, Rider, and Tod talk about three articles from Alta Magazine, the publication based in California that focuses on news, history, literature, and culture, with a decidedly western bent: “The Accident on the Pacific Crest Trail” by Louise Farr, about the tragic death of a hiker; “When the Mafia Came to Lodi” by Andrew Dubbins, about the mafia’s attempt to infiltrate California and the undercover case that took them down; and, “The Search of a Lifetime” by Julian Smith, about a woman investigating a cold case of her grandfather’s murder.

From the episode:

Tod: Particularly for literature, the LA Times Book Review doesn’t exist anymore. On Sundays, they might run three reviews. They used to have a full book section. The book reviewing that happens in America, in a large way, is the New York Times and The Washington Post, and to a lesser extent there is USA Today, where I write, because they run a review every single day. But the LA Times is not a player in the literature world until the book festival comes back.

Rider: What about San Francisco?

Tod: San Francisco has a little bit in the Chronicle on Sundays, but nothing to the level of the New York Times and has no bearing on sales.

I’ll tell you guys an interesting personal story. For me, in the sales cycle of my new book, the biggest week was release week. The second biggest week was when the LA Times reviewed my book. The third biggest week for me was when I appeared on a show called Literary Disco. When you think about where people consume literary criticism, specifically, or just general arts and culture, of course a lot of it is podcasts. But in the West Coast if you want to move books, the LA Times book review helps but you have to find other places, and Alta has become one of those places when David Ulin, after taking it over, has just increased over the last few months the amount of book reviewing and book talk.

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To listen to the rest of the episode, as well as the whole archive of Literary Disco, subscribe and listen on iTunes or wherever else you find your favorite podcasts.