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.

Welcome back to True Crime Tuesdays on Fearsome Fiction. Today we're going deep into one of the most haunting and complicated criminal cases in recent American history—the Delphi murders.

It started on a cold February afternoon in 2017 in the small town of Delphi, Indiana. Two best friends, thirteen-year-old Abby Williams and fourteen-year-old Libby German, went for a walk on a popular hiking trail near an old railroad trestle. They never came home. What followed was five years of anguish, dead ends, a viral piece of evidence the whole country watched, and then—finally—an arrest. But the story doesn't end there. Not by a long shot.

This one has everything: a small-town mystery, a killer hiding in plain sight, jailhouse confessions, Norse paganism, and an appeal that's heading into court next year. Let's get into it.

Welcome to Fearsome Fiction. Today we're stepping into a New England boarding house where one room has a way of making its occupants very, very uncomfortable. "The Southwest Chamber" was written by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and published in 1903—and it is exactly the kind of quiet, creeping horror that gets under your skin before you realize what's happening. A dead woman's room. A succession of boarders who each try, and fail, to spend the night. And something in that room that won't stay buried. Stay with us.