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Fearsome Fiction Podcast: The Devil’s Wood Journal Begins
A walking stick. A skull. A bullet. A curse.
Buried for in the Pennsylvania woods, something has been waiting. When a young boy uncovers what’s been hidden beneath the leaves, he sets loose a curse that’s about to find its way back into the world — and into the hands of a man who has no idea what he’s just brought home.
Enter the Devil’s Wood.
Two new entries drop every week, exclusively on the Fearsome Fiction Podcast — subscribe so you don’t miss the story as it unfolds.
Discover more of the mythology, characters, and world of Devil’s Wood at TheDevilsWood.com
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True Crime Tuesdays on the Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Belle Gunness, The Black Widow of La Porte
It’s another True Crime Tuesdays on Fearsome Fiction. This episode heads back to the turn of the last century, to a farmhouse at the end of a quiet road in La Porte, Indiana — where a Norwegian immigrant named Belle Gunness placed lonely-hearts ads in the newspaper, invited her suitors to bring their savings and “come prepared to stay forever,” and made sure they never left. This is the story of the Black Widow of La Porte.
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Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Bram Stoker’s Classic ‘The Judge’s House
This week on Fearsome Fiction we’re sharing a rare gem. “The Judge’s House” buy Bram Stoker follows Malcolm Malcolmson, a student who rents a remote, cheap old house in the fictional town of Benchurch to study for exams in isolation. Locals warn him the house has a bad reputation, but he ignores them and moves in.
The house once belonged to a notoriously cruel hanging judge. As Malcolmson settles in, he notices strange things: a persistent rat that keeps drawing his eye to an old alarm bell rope, and an oppressive sense of being watched. Eventually he realizes there’s a chair in the room that seems to move on its own toward the fireplace whenever his attention lapses.
The story builds toward a chilling climax involving the judge’s portrait, the bell rope, and Malcolmson’s fate. It’s a classic “isolated scholar in a cursed house” setup that plays well for a horror reading, with Stoker’s knack for slow dread. And now, The Judge’s House.
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True Crime Tuesdays on the Fearsome Fiction Podcast: The Case of the Giggling Granny
Welcome to True Crime Tuesdays on Fearsome Fiction. Today we’re going to talk about “The Giggling Granny,” a woman who baked prune cake, read romance magazines, giggled at her own arrest, and murdered at least eleven people—most of them her own family.
Her name was Nannie Doss. The press called her the Giggling Granny, the Lonely Hearts Killer, the Black Widow, and Lady Bluebeard. She was a small, cheerful, grandmotherly woman from Alabama who seemed like the last person in the world you’d suspect of anything. Which, of course, is exactly why she got away with it for so long.
Her weapon of choice was arsenic—rat poison, mostly, the kind you could pick up at any hardware store in the American South in the 1920s through the 1950s. She put it in whiskey, in coffee, in stewed prunes, in prune cake. She put it in the food of husbands, grandchildren, her own mother, her sister, her mother-in-law. She did it over and over again for nearly thirty years, and nobody suspected a thing—until the very last one. Because Nannie Doss was always smiling. And you don’t suspect the woman who’s smiling.
This is her story. Narration provided by Wondervox.
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Fearsome Fiction Podcast: A Very Strange Bed, by Wilkie Collins
This week we present “A Terribly Strange Bed” by Wilkie Collins, first published in 1852 in Household Words, the celebrated literary magazine edited by Charles Dickens. A young Englishman in Paris visits a disreputable gambling house, breaks the bank at Rouge et Noir, and makes the mistake of accepting a bed for the night. What follows is one of the most gripping sequences in Victorian fiction—methodical, claustrophobic, and chilling in the way only the best suspense can be.
Wilkie Collins is best remembered for The Woman in White and The Moonstone, but this early story reveals the master at work long before those landmarks. He thought enough of it to adapt it for live readings later in his career. Once you’ve heard it, you’ll understand why.
No ghosts. No monsters. Just a room, a bed, and the slow, silent certainty of something descending.
Narrated in the Fearsome Fiction tradition—atmospheric, unhurried, faithful to the original text.
Story: “A Terribly Strange Bed” by Wilkie Collins (1852) — Public DomainSubscribe for new episodes every week.
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A Fearsome Fiction Interview with Comedy Horror Author Rick Gualtierie
I recently interviewed Rick Gualtieri, the bestselling New Jersey author behind the Tome of Bill series, for Fearsome Fiction. Rick has built one of indie horror-comedy’s most beloved franchises around Bill Ryder, a dateless gamer who gets turned into a vampire and becomes the undead world’s most reluctant savior—more than a dozen novels deep and still going strong.
We talked about his origin story, his writing process, the art of making horror funny without defanging it, and why comedy and horror belong together. It’s a great conversation for fans of the genre and anyone curious about what it takes to build a long-running indie series from scratch.
Listen wherever you get Fearsome Fiction.
