Halloween Special 2025 – SLUGS by Shaun Hutson

As voted for by our dear patrons, the subject for this year’s Halloween Special is SLUGS!

Shaun Hutson’s breakthrough best seller has been on the poll list for three or four years, but 2025 was its year. So, join Graham, Phil and me as we evaluate Shaun Hutson’s entry into that classic and most pulpy of British horror traditions, the Killer Critter novel. Also, we mull over whether four clefts are just too many, and get disappointed by our initially impressive socialist hero’s basic levels of competence.

Image by Simon Perrins!

The House on the Borderland (Halloween 2024)

We are firmly in our Halloween groove. The eco-horror of Pisces Rising may have given us a light step into the season, but now we’re up to our necks in it and our choices for this year not only include the winner and one of the runners-up from this year’s patron poll, but we’re also taking a look at one that has featured on past polls but never reached the top…

William Hope Hodgson’s classic of weird fiction and cosmic dread… The House on the Borderland.

Author, editor and musician Allister Thompson is back for this one (check out his musical retrospective and his debut novel The Music of the Spheres), and this was a pretty deep reading (by my standards anyway). We also touch on Lovecraft and some musical interpretations, including one by Nostalgia and Borderlands by Tactile, an extract of which can be heard at the end of the show.

JOIN US!

Halloween Special 2023 – James Herbert’s DOMAIN

Miles and Phil brave nuclear Armageddon, mutant rats, zoom meltdowns and horrific rabies treatment to join me in Derry & Toms and check out our patron-selected Halloween double-bill of James Herbert’s Domain and Bruno Mattei’s Rats: Night of Terror.

So paint your windows white, lock the dogs and cats outside, get safely ensconced in your inner sanctum and JOIN US!

… and listen to the Casual Trek Podcast