11 - Pet Sematary with Joe Vallese

On episode 11 of Our First Fears, Pushcart Award nominee, Joe Vallese shows me the path beyond Stephen King's Pet Sematary and up into the haunted hills where the buried-dead have a tendency to rise and wreak havoc on the living. Together, we explore how certain aspects of stories that frightened our childhood-selves can end up being quite different from what gets to us as grown-ups. We talk unreliable narrators and characters, whether or not too much research might be a bad thing for writers, and how, and at what age, we humans begin to process our own mortality.

Joe’s anthology, It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror, is chock-full of interesting ideas about scary movies and queer themes, and it is available now at your local bookshops and libraries. 

Follow the Our First Fears podcast on social media sites @ourfirstfears.

And feel free to reach out at ourfirstfears@gmail.com. 

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@danpoblox on Instagram 

@danpoblocki on Twitter/X. 

(Content warning: death, mortality, illness, violence, harm to animals and children)