Neil McRobert on Getting Blurbed by Stephen King and Writing Extreme Weirdness Into Daily Life

Welcome back to Scare Me! a weekly horror newsletter. Today, we’re speaking with Neil McRobert, host of the weekly podcast Talking Scared and author of the forthcoming novella Good Boy (out on October 9).

It’s an ordinary day in northern England when Margie sees a man digging a hole in a vacant lot—in the exact spot where a young boy disappeared not long ago. When she confronts the man about his purpose, she discovers a sinister history that’s far older and more chilling than she ever could have imagined.

This is the premise of Good Boy, Neil McRobert’s debut novella. For the past five years, Neil has hosted a weekly podcast, Talking Scared, featuring the biggest names in horror. Over 250+ episodes and a deep well of bonus episodes, Neil has mused, probed, and bantered with horror legends including Paul Tremblay, Tananarive Due, Kirsty Logan, Stephen Graham Jones, Rachel Harrison, and even Stephen King himself.

Neil pushes these conversations into insightful and often unexpected territory. His questions deftly draw out insights into craft and context, while always reveling in this brutal, wonderful genre we can’t help but love. His intuition about people and all the bizarre things that make us tick manifests in his fiction, too: I had the opportunity to read Good Boy ahead of its publication and found it to be a warm-blooded story that balances chilling cosmic horror with true tenderness.

Now, Neil’s about to cross the threshold from interviewer to fellow author. On a recent video call, Neil reflected about crossing this singular threshold, getting blurbed by Stephen King, and the unique weirdness of northwestern England.

This interview has been edited for clarity and concision. All links and emphasis are my own! 

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Michelle Delgado: You’ve been hosting a weekly podcast since 2020; you have a PhD in horror fiction; you've read seemingly everything; and you've gotten to talk craft with the best minds in the business. Now you have your own book, and you're on the other side of this crazy publishing machine. How does it feel, now that you’re on the other side of the microphone?

Neil McRobert: I've realized that interviewing and being interviewed are two entirely separate skill sets. I'm newly impressed by people who have something really interesting and new to say for every person. I'm starting to feel like I'm really boring because I don't have these clever thought-out answers. I just say the truth, which is the same thing to everyone who asks me, you know? It is kind of a skill to be entertaining in an interview. No one has asked that question, so it's the first time I'm saying this.

I still feel like a massive imposter. And I'm not one for imposter syndrome—I'm a bizarrely and ill-advisedly confident person. I have no right to be as confident as I am, but I tend to stumble into most arenas of life and just be like, “It'll be fine. I'm smart. I can work it out!” With this, I still feel like I have to caveat it constantly and say, “Oh, it's only a little book, it's only a novella. It's not a novel.” I’m still separating myself out from what I think of as real writers.

My friend Gemma Amor is a seasoned hand at self promotion, because she's at the prominent edge of indie writing. She's just got her first big five deal. I'm really pleased for her. She's amazing at navigating this terrain. And she sort of took me aside and said, “You're doing a disservice to yourself and your publisher, because they put money behind you to sell your book.” It made me think, yeah, I need to drop the imposter syndrome, even if I feel it.

I still feel like a novel is this impossible terrain. How the hell do you write something big?

I'm glad you said it, because I was going to ask that question! On Talking Scared, you spend every week with these titans of horror publishing. Your guests seem very fond of you—it seems like you've been warmly embraced by the horror publishing community. I’d be shocked if they didn't consider you a worthy peer. But on the flip side, crossing that threshold seems momentous.

My wife keeps getting annoyed at me because she doesn't think I'm sufficiently excited about the book. Because she's so excited about this book coming out. And I never have time for excitement. I'm so busy with all the various things I do to make a living and make the podcast. I will get excited the week before the book comes out, because then it will fit my schedule to be excited.

I'm trying to take some time and reflect on the fact that I've written this thing and some of the people that I respect most in this industry have given me lovely blurbs and been very kind and supportive. I do need to acknowledge that I've crossed that threshold.

It's going to sound really perverse, but I’m kind of looking forward to getting some negative reviews, because I think that will make the good things feel better. It's not that I don't think people are being genuine—I think they are—but I know that people want me to do well. I'm not the slightest bit bothered about bad reviews, and I think that that will make me feel more like it's a real thing and I can reflect upon it.

I don't want to spoil anything for readers, but since this scene happens in the first third of the book, I feel like it's fair game. So many stories delay revealing their creature to build tension and suspense. But you do the complete opposite—you introduce your creature almost immediately, and you really linger on it and absolutely revel in the details. It felt like a “fuck you” to Lovecraft.

It's a very bold structural choice, and it also felt very deliberate. How did you come to that decision?

That is a fantastic question, and I can answer it—but I've got to be honest with you, so much of this book was written on absolute intuition that I'm going to struggle to give a really concise, craft-based answer.

The thing that has made the book work for people, and certainly work for me, is that it fell out of me fully formed—which never happens to me, which is why I get stuck on plot points and letting the perfect get in the way of the good.

I think the simplest answer is I knew that I was trying to tell quite a big story in quite a small word length. The book comes in at about 150 pages, and I am very wordy. I'm not good at concision. I grew up at the knee of Stephen King, where every discursive opportunity is one to be taken. So, I'm not good at brevity, and I knew that I had a lot of story to tell once we got over the initial meeting. I think I wanted to get to it.

And the other thing is this: I don't think it's particularly a horror story. I think it's a monster story. But I was never particularly seeing the monster, the boggart, as the most important thing. I mean, it's kind of a MacGuffin, right? It's a thing that has to exist to let the deeper theme of the story come out.

The thing you said about it being like a fuck you to Lovecraft—that's really interesting. I hadn't thought about that. I hate the thing about, you know, “the thing you can't possibly say, it'll drive you mad!” Like, come on, Howard. Give me a break!

What worried me is that I'd been too vague—because I give all this sensory detail, the way its skin feels, the smell coming out of it. But when I finished writing the story, I turned to my wife, and I was like, “Have I given any reason for this monster to exist or do what it does?” There's one point where it refers to itself in the plural, and I kind of know what I mean by that, but I never really make it clear in the story.

But it's just the thing that is supposed to be this eruption of extreme weirdness in an otherwise humdrum setting. I wanted it to be this glimpse of something on the far side of the fabric of the universe.

My theory is that in most creature horror, the creature is just there, doing what it's doing. It doesn't usually have a big motive—it's just hungry. In Good Boy, it felt like the creature is there to spur the action and put someone in an unusual situation, which for me is why the story works so well.

A question I often ask people on my podcast is: Even though you don't give us the connections and the mythology, do you know what's going on behind the scenes? I asked this of John Langan, for example. This book is very inspired by Langan's The Fisherman and his fiction generally.

Quite often, they'll say no. And I always think, “Liar!” Because why have you written x, y, and zed, if there's not a reason for it? And only in this conversation now with you have I realized that I have never given any thought to what is happening with this creature, and where it goes and what it does and what it wants from this town. So actually, I'm a massive hypocrite. I've done the thing I accuse other people of lying about. I'm going to go and think and work out what it is, but right now I don't know what it's up to beyond what we see.

Praise for Good Boy: “A profoundly moving and genuinely eerie tale about the cruel, persistent horrors of this world, about roads not taken, about love and grief, about courage and sacrifice, about what we do with the time we are given…an extraordinary, utterly unforgettable debut. A beautiful ode to goodness.” —Rachel Harrison, USA Today bestselling author of So Thirsty and Black Sheep

All respect to Jim and Margie, but Riot the dog is the heart of this book. How did you develop Riot’s character? Are there elements of your relationship with your own dog, Ted, that made their way into the book?

Riot is Ted. You couldn't slip a piece of paper between them. I don't think Ted is quite as brave—he's pretty damn brave, but I think Ted is a little bit wiser. But yeah, that's basically it.

The inspiration for the story is that I walk Ted every day, and his favorite place to go is this patch of land about a mile away from my house. That is the square where all of the drama takes place in the book. I take Ted there once or twice a week. It’s his favorite place, and the only place I let him off the lead and throw the ball for him.

One day I was looking at this tree, and I had a morbid train of thought. I remember thinking, “When Ted dies, I'm gonna bury him under that tree.” That just spawned this entire story. Because I started thinking that, well, what would happen if somebody in those houses saw me doing that? What would they think I was up to? And the story literally just leapt unbidden from there. For a long time, I thought it was going to be a short story, and then Wild Hunt invited me to write something for the Northern Weird series, and it just seemed the obvious story to tell.

In terms of developing Riot as a character, he's just all my favorite parts of Ted. It's the the absolute joy of life that I think we should all aspire to. You know the scene where Riot gets his name, when he's running around and around the house? It's exactly the kind of thing Ted would do.

Dogs are my favorite thing about being alive. I know that sounds really, really cheesy—you get all these memes of meeting dogs and ignoring the owners. And it's all true! I go for a walk and I meet other dogs. Their owners are a pair of knees to me.

Nothing makes me sadder than the thought of an animal suffering. I can't stand the idea, and that's why I was very, very, very keen to not have any suffering in the book. There is pain; there is no suffering. I love all animals, but dogs in particular just fill me with absolute joy. I wanted to write about them, and I wanted to make them the opposition to evil, because I think they are. I think joy and bravery are far greater antidotes to evil than goodness, if that makes sense. And I think dogs are capable of great joy and great bravery.

Absolutely. Good can feel quite bland and neutral.

And quite judgmental, and quite distanced, and quite inhuman sometimes, because we're all flawed. Put it this way: Joy and bravery have achieved a damn sight more in life than goodness ever has.

I have cats now, and I really believe animals are capable of great empathy and insight. I lost my mom a couple years ago, and my tabby would just sit right next to me and let me dry my tears on her little striped tail.

I've inherited my dad's dog, Lulu, this little white cloud. She looks like AI. She looks too cute to be alive. Having her is a massive solace, because she’s the thing my dad loved most.

I also think cats are great—this is not just pro-dog. The reason I made it a dog and not a cat is, one, I'm a dog person. But also, cats would fuck up the boggart. It wouldn't be a fair fight. It would be over in like, one chapter.

Until you just mentioned it, I didn't realize that your book was so literally where you live in the north of England. How would you describe the spirit of the place?

I live 14 kilometers from the place I was born—but it feels in many ways like a world apart. I grew up in a town which I'm not going to name, because I'm not exactly kind about it, in the northwest of England. It's at the far end of the valley, the furthest from Manchester you could get. And it feels, even now, like going back in time.

In some ways, it's a sort of innocent place. It was a wonderful place to grow up, because there was so much freedom, because it was so safe. But as I've got older, just like Jim does in the story, I've realized that a place that's great to grow up in is not always a great place to live, because it's a place that's been left behind by contemporary progressive politics.

There are lots of places in the northwest like this, but this is a particular enclave of what I would call “good-natured prejudice.” By that, I mean it's full of people who are not awful people by any means. These are not MAGA hat-wearing people. They're people who have been let down by the last 30 years of capitalism and development and globalization, and they have a genuine grievance. I just think they go about that grievance in the wrong way, targeting the wrong people. Same story the world over, right? My mum still lives there—lovely person, and has lots of lovely friends. It's not a monoculture, but it's a place that's stricken by a certain kind of political, economic deprivation.

I'm being very patronizing in what I'm saying, and there's sort of no way around that, because it is the truth. There's a massive amount of the population of the town I grew up in who have never been exposed to the very things that have that lead other people to have a different point of view. So if that's patronizing, there's nothing I can really do about that. The more we get comfortable with saying these things this, the sooner we'll get somewhere, right?

Ten miles up the road, I live in this place that's the same landscape, but much more metropolitan. [There’s a] sort of café culture, but it still has that grain of working class grit. It's not become completely gentrified at all. There’s this really gritty, scarred landscape of great beauty, but also the quarrying and mining and and textile industries.

I still feel like I'm in the muck and the mire of the Victorian Industrial Revolution north, but with a slightly more enlightened point of view. So, I managed to marry all the stuff I love the place I grew up in with all the stuff that I aspire to. I'm still very fond of the town I grew up in—I just I want better for it than it has, and that's what the book is about. Why do people get stuck in these small towns, and why do these towns grind people down rather than letting them flourish? That's the real theme of the book.

Do you plan to continue writing about this place?

There's a book that's been gestating. I quit my job to try and write this book. Basically, the book is too big for me at this stage in my career—it's either too long to publish as a newbie, or I don't yet have the skill to make it concise enough to sell. I'm waiting till either I'm a better writer or someone will let me publish a 600 page book.

I haven't told anyone this before, but the town of Symester that's in Good Boy—I plan to make that my Castle Rock. I plan to write other stories in the area, and this novel I want to write is going to be set in the same valley. It's going to be all about the quarrying industry, because it's both scarred the landscape and rendered it quite beautiful. There are loads of cool old ruins on the hills, and they're all around me. I've got this idea for a big ghost story that's all about this quarry. I hope to write that one day.

I have to ask you about THE blurb: the Stephen King blurb. How did that feel?

Everything with King feels insane, right? He came on the show, and then he came back on the show, and we've maintained a correspondence. I really try not to to push it, because I don't want to be that guy, but…right, I'll say this: He sent me a story to read that wasn't published yet. And I read it, and then as Stephen King does, because he's just a nice guy, he said, “Fair's fair. Send me something of yours.”

So I sent him Good Boy, and he read it, and he wrote me a really nice email. I waited like a month, and then plucked up the courage to say, “Can I please use this as a blurb?” And he was like, “Oh yeah, of course, sure! That's what I thought [you’d do].”

It was really cool, but it's sort of impossible for me to really access my feelings on what that means. It's so surreal that I'm not really able to really feel it. Does that make sense? Everyone says they're his number one fan—and look, I'm not going to argue, but there is no one who is more a fan than I am. His stories mean more to me than most things in life. So, to have spoken to him was like a dream that I could never have imagined. To be conversant with him is beyond belief, and for him to have taken the time to read my story and to like it? I genuinely do not have the emotional articulation to really pin down, even for myself, how that feels.

It seems like he has a keen awareness of his own impact on the genre, and that he takes it to heart.

He uses his position with such generosity, and with real intention. In a non-arrogant way, he knows who he is and what he means, and he uses it. I think that's a wonderful thing for the world.

Plus, he seems to still really love the genre. That makes me feel excited to be his age someday, hopefully, if I'm lucky.

I call it “the search.” Every time I feel like I've exhausted my capacity for—wonder is too trite a word, but you know that feeling when you were like, 14 and reading a book and it being the best book you'd ever read? You'd hear a song, and it's just like, oh my god, this is breaking my heart in real time. I live in terror of that capacity dissipating.

I fucking hate the word “content.” It drives me insane, the contentization of culture. I worry that I'm going to lose that ability to really feel.

And then every time I get to point where it's like, “Oh god, I've not read a great book in six months,” or I haven't heard a song that's made me take a breath, I'll find something. I just recently read Joe Hill's King Sorrow, which is out October, and I felt like I was 17 again, reading the book of the summer. It's so good. If I don't get that for another six months, I don't care, because I sort of been re-upped, you know?

King's 78 now, and I think he still gets that, so there's hope for all of us. Because if he can't become jaded, then we should all be okay.

You have an incredibly busy—maybe even punishing—schedule. Do you have any advice for writers or creative people who are trying to carve out time for their own projects?

I'm the worst person to ask this question, because I had to quit my nine to five in order to do this. I'm in awe of people who are working jobs where they have a boss applying pressure to them, and they might have kids, and they're still finding time to write their five hundred words a day. I am in awe of those people, because I couldn't do that.

I now work much harder than I ever worked in in a job. I do more hours, I'm more effective. But it's on my own schedule, and so I'm in a weird position where now I can work really hard, but I wouldn't know how to tell someone who is exhausted by the grind how to buckle down.

With writing, you've got to be disciplined. I did two things that fostered a sense of discipline in me. In 2020 during lockdown, when I quit my job, I ran every single day for 365 days. It was a nightmare, but I did it. And I also got my dog, and I have to walk him every day, whether it rains or shines, whether I'm tired, whether I'm ill.

Those two things fostered a kind of physical discipline in me—a bodily discipline that I can summon when I want to write. And more than the writing, the running and the dog walking has made me the kind of person where you don't overthink it. You just sit down and do the damn thing, because in an hour, you'll be done and then you feel better about it. I never used to have that—I would just put things off.

So, I would say to someone who was struggling to find the discipline: Make yourself do [something] every day that perhaps engages your body rather than your mind. I think the body is easier to discipline than the mind is. Then use that as a learning tool. It might be just going for a walk. I think everyone can find something. But do it every day, and don't let yourself not do it.

I was the most undisciplined person you can imagine. Now, my entire life hinges on personal discipline. If I can do it, literally anyone can.

Up Next: Dialing the Urban Legends Hotline with American Hysteria’s Chelsey Weber-Smith

Ring-ring! It’s the Urban Legends Hotline, and the call is coming from inside the house. From razorblades in apples to the perplexing tale of Balloon Boy, Chelsey Weber-Smith is a dogged researcher tracking down the truth, sharing the real stories, and unpacking what the hell it all means their podcast, American Hysteria.

Chelsey kindly answered my questions over email, and one of their responses genuinely made me laugh out loud. If you enjoyed my post about spiritualism a few weeks ago, you’ll like this interview, too!

Scare Me! is a free weekly horror newsletter published every Thursday morning. It’s written by Michelle Delgado, featuring original illustrations by Sam Pugh. You can find the archive of past issues here. If you were sent this by a friend, subscribe to receive more spooky interviews, essays—and maybe even a ghost story or two.