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Louisa was raised in isolation in a cottage deep in the woods by a mysterious witch. It sounds like the start of a fairy tale, but this story takes twists and turns as Louisa leaves her home for the outside world. She’s no princess…and this is no fairy tale. This is a Gothic tale with plenty of intrigue, led by a rather unusual heroine. Join us as we discuss Tanith Lee’s “Louisa the Poisoner.”

Recommended in this episode: Deanna Raybourn’s Veronica Speedwell series

UP NEXT: What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

Tanith Lee tribute anthology:  https://tanithleestoryteller.com/

Buy Toil and Trouble here!

 

We made it to 100 episodes!  

Join us as we look back at the writing of the book and as we look to the future of the podcast!

UP NEXT: Tanith Lee’s “Louisa the Poisoner”

Buy Toil and Trouble here!

 

We are on hiatus for the December holidays. Please enjoy this classic episode from our archives. 

We will be back in 2024 with a brand new season and a special celebration of our 100th episode. 

Have a happy holiday season, from Lisa and Mel. 

Please enjoy this classic episode from our archives. 

Enjoy your holiday season, and we will be back in 2024 with a brand new season and a special celebration of our 100th episode. 

 

 

A young doctor is called into the home of a wealthy man, but rather than seeing the sick patient he is expecting, he is greeted with a seemingly healthy man, who offers him a thousand pounds to attend a death bed. The doctor, who isn’t a rich man himself, reluctantly accepts the strange request. Of course, this is a ghost story, so the doctor doesn’t know exactly what he is in for…Join us as we discuss Ada Buisson’s “The Ghost’s Summons.”

 

Story originally published in Belgravia (January 1868); Collected in The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories: Volume One (edited by Tara Moore, 2016)

 

Recommended in this episode: Candy Cain Kills by Brian McAuley and the holiday episodes of Doctor Who

 

UP NEXT:  Our next episode is our 100th episode. We want to celebrate this milestone, but since it is the holiday season, we will be taking a hiatus to be with family. We will rerun some of our favorite past holiday episodes, but we will be back in January, to kick off Season 5 and celebrate 100 episodes of Monster, She Wrote. We hope you will join us.

 

Have a happy holiday season, from Lisa and Mel!

 

Buy Toil and Trouble here!

 

Exactly two years after she disappeared, Julie mysteriously comes back, with no memory of where she’s been. To celebrate her return, Julie’s friends get together for a girls’ weekend away at a remote hotel. Things, however, are not all wonderful–Julie doesn’t seem like herself at all. Something else, something more sinister and dangerous, is hiding beneath the surface, and it all comes out over the course of the trip.

Recommended in this episode: Elizabeth Hand's A Haunting on the Hill and Patrick Stewart's autobiography Making It So

UP NEXT: Ada Buisson's "The Ghost's Summons" in The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories: Volume One

Buy Toil and Trouble here!

 

Sarah Clayborne is a widow, living alone in an old and stately manor house called Whitegates. One Halloween, Sarah takes a walk and slips on a frozen puddle, injuring her ankle. She takes to bed in her old and lonely home. Her painful broken foot is the least of her troubles, however, as she finds herself in the center of a good old fashioned ghost story. 

Recommended in this episode: Netflix's The Fall of the House of Usher

UP NEXT: Rachel Harrison's The Return 

We will be back in two weeks when we discuss Rachel Harrison’s The Return.

Buy Toil and Trouble here!

Happy Halloween from the Monster, She Wrote podcast!

UP NEXT: "All Souls" by Edith Wharton

Buy Toil and Trouble here!

Ramon left his home in Mexico a long time ago, settling first in California and then in Vancouver. But now, he worries that his past may have followed him, in the form of a homeless woman, a woman he is convinced is a La Llorona. Read the story here. 

Recommended in this episode: CJ Leede’s Maeve Fly

 UP NEXT: A Halloween special episode 

Buy Toil and Trouble here!

 

When Dr. Beverly Crusher’s grandmother passes away, she visits her home planet, a place made to look like old world Scotland on Earth, in order to pay her respects. As it turns out, she gets much more than a sad goodbye. Her grandmother had a secret life, complete with a young lover named Ronin, a man who takes an interest in Dr. Crusher. Ronin, however, is much more than he seems, and Dr. Crusher finds herself in the middle of a ghost romance. Or is it more like ghost possession? 

Recommended in this episode: Lisa Tuttle’s Riding the Nightmare and Kate Mulgrew’s memoir Born with Teeth

UP NEXT: Reading Recommendations for Spooky Season 

Buy Toil and Trouble here!

 

Rosalind Ashe’s Moths (1976) was marketed as a book for fans of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. And there are some similarities: a beautiful old estate with a crumbling wing. A young wife who moves in determined to make it her own. And a dead woman haunting the home that was once hers. But what would happen if Rebecca had possessed the body of the new wife? That’s what Ashe’s book posits. So join us as we discuss Moths.

Recommended in this episode: Mary: An Awakening of Terror by Nat Cassidy

UP NEXT: Star Trek’s “Sub Rosa”

 

Buy Toil and Trouble here!

 

Phillip has lived with his guardian Ambrose Ashley on Ambrose’s manor in the English countryside since Philip was a child and his parents’ death left him orphaned. Philip’s idyllic life is upturned, however, when Ambrose leaves for Italy, where he meets a mysterious woman named Rachel and swiftly marries her. Things take a dark turn when Ambrose dies suddenly–leaving letters behind that suggest perhaps Rachel was to blame. Following the tragedy, Rachel travels to the manor house, where she further turns Philip’s life upside down. But the question remains: is Rachel a scheming villain or an innocent widow? In this episode, we’re discussing Daphne Du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel (1951).

 

Recommended in this episode: The Righteous Gemstones

 

UP NEXT: My Cousin Rachel (the 2017 film adaptation)

 

Buy Toil and Trouble here!

 

Dirk has lost his wife, Joan, and he is devastated by grief. Joan was a pilot who crashed during a routine flight, and he knows there isn’t any hope of her survival because he was talking to her on the radio when she crashed. He knows she went down in the ocean with no land in sight, and he knows the search was futile. But, despite all evidence to the contrary, he still feels like there’s a chance she’s alive. He feels like there is a compass in his mind telling him precisely where to find her. He hires a plane and two pilots and begins a search of his own. What he finds, however, is beyond anything he could have imagined. There may have been an island near Joan’s crash site, and it has a very mysterious reputation among travelers. 

 

Margaret St. Clair’s story “The Island of the Hands” was originally published in Weird Tales Magazine in 1952.

 

Recommended in this episode: Renfield and Star Trek: Picard

 

UP NEXT: Nadia Bulkin’s “Wish  You Were Here” 

Buy Toil and Trouble here! And see the Valancourt selection of Monster, She Wrote books here.

Ghosts come in many forms. In Chesya Burke’s story “Haint Me Too,” this ghost is of the angry kind. She haunts the Myrtle House, a Southern plantation home, inhabited by “the Perfect Southern American Dream” (“father, mother, three boys and two girls”). Young Shea, the daughter of a Black sharecropping family living on the land, witnesses the haint that lives in Myrtle House. She sees its terror–and its power. And soon, events unfold that force Shea to seek out that exact power. Read Hex Life for this story.

 

Recommended in this episode: Showtime’s Yellowjackets and Root Magic by Eden Royce

 

UP NEXT: R. A. Busby’s “Not the Man I Married”

Mel and Lisa wrote a second book! Buy Toil and Trouble here!

In her short story “The Debt,” Ania Ahlborn weaves a modern fairytale. Karolin is an 11 year old girl, supposedly visiting her grandmother in Poland for the first time, but her grandmother is nowhere to be found. She’s traveled there with her father, both of them still reeling from the death of Karolin’s mother one year earlier. Karolin is enchanted by the quaint town and the lush dark green forest that surrounds it. The forest is a magical place, but that magic turns dark when Karolin loses her way and can’t find her way out. Can she survive the forest and the evil that lurks there?

 

Recommended in this episode: Swarm on Amazon Prime and Lockwood and Co. on Netflix

 

UP NEXT: Chesya Burke’s “Haint Me Too” from the same anthology Hex Life

 

Read more about Mel’s thoughts on fungal horror here. Or read more Baba Yaga stories here. To vote for 13 Minutes of Horror: Sci-Fi Horror (or see the Rondo award finalists), see this list here. Voting ends April 23, 2023. 

Buy Toil and Trouble here!

 

Following the Mexican War of Independence, Beatriz finds her life in ruins: her father has been executed and she is left to take care of her family. Her only hope is a good marriage–so she marries the wealthy but mysterious Don Rodolpho, following the death of his first wife. Beatriz moves into Rodolpho’s aging home, the Hacienda San Isidro. But that is only the start of Beatriz’s troubles. There’s something supernatural and evil in San Isidro, something that doesn’t want Beatriz there. With the help of the local priest Andres, Beatriz begins a fight for her life. 

Recommended in this episode: Daphne du Maurier's Don't Look Now

UP NEXT: Ania Ahlborn “The Debt“ in Hex Life

Buy Toil and Trouble here!

 

Wednesday Addams is a well-known and much beloved character in the horror genre. We all know her trademark macabre attitude, all-black goth dress with the white collar, and of course, her pigtail braids. Much less is known about Lisa Loring, the first actress to portray the original Wednesday on television. Loring recently passed, so today’s episode is dedicated to her.

Recommended in this episode: YOU on Netflix 

UP NEXT: The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas

Buy Toil and Trouble here!

 

Coppelius’s Toyshop is one of the busiest stores in New York during the Christmas season. With life-sized toy soldiers on either side of the entrance and characters straight out of fairy tales roaming the aisles filled with toys, it’s a paradise for kids of all ages. It’s not a paradise, however, for Connie Willis’s narrator, who is late for a Knicks game and just learned his new girlfriend has a kid that needs to be watched until her friend can pick him up from the toy store. To make matters worse, the narrator hates kids, and he hates the toy store. Unfortunately, when the little boy has to use the restroom in the store, the narrator will see all of Coppelius’s wares as he tries unsuccessfully to find the boy, make the handoff, and get to his basketball game. All the while, he hears the store’s music on repeat and the comforting refrain, “Come to Dr. Coppelius’s/ Where all is bright and warm,/ And there’s no fear/ For I am here/ To keep you safe from harm.”      

A reminder: We will take a brief holiday hiatus later in December, but we will return in January for our fourth season, when we read Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi.

Christmas is not always the easiest time of year for people. There’s often the headache of travel through busy airports, the annoyance of trying to plan a meal that will accommodate everyone’s schedules, and of course, the pressure to put your best foot forward in your annual Christmas card. All of that becomes much more complicated, however, when pod people begin to overtake your town, which is exactly the predicament the main character faces in Connie Willis’s story “Newsletter.” Recommended in this episode: Stephen King's Firestarter and the second season of White Lotus on HBO We will be back in two weeks when we re-run a classic Monster, She Wrote episode on a Christmas ghost story. The podcast will take a brief holiday hiatus later in December, but we will return in January for our fourth season, when we read Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi. Buy Toil and Trouble here or at your favorite local bookstore!

This Priya Sharma story was published on Tor.com in July of 2015, and collected in her 2018 collection All the Fabulous Beasts. Here is the description from Tor: “'Fabulous Beasts' by Priya Sharma is a horror novelette about a strange woman living in luxury with her lover, but irrevocably tied to her childhood of deprivation and dark secrets in northwest England. The woman recalls the unravelling of the family upon her uncle’s release from prison." The story is still available to read on Tor.com.

CW/TW: Please be warned that this story deals with difficult content and themes, including child abuse, incest, and rape.

Recommended in this episode: Suburban Hell by Maureen Kilmer

UP NEXT: A Christmas (surprise) story from Connie Willis's collection A Lot Like Christmas