Bestselling author, Grady Hendrix, joins Our First Fears for Episode 25 to talk about growing up as a cold-war kid, terrorized by constant reports in the 1980s of threats of a nuclear strike. He found strange solace in certain books and movies at that time, specifically Warday, The Steel, the Mist, and the Blazing Sun, Special Bulletin, and Threads. We chat about these titles and others, along with the primal places in pop-culture from where these stories may have burst, as well as how young people process The News, which, more and more, feels like its own horror subgenre.

Grady Hendrix is the Stoker Award winning author of Horrorstör, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, We Sold Our Souls, The Final Girl Support Group, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, How to Sell a Haunted House, and more. His non-fiction collaboration with Will Errickson, Paperbacks from Hell, is a history of the horror fiction boom of the 1970s and 80s. His latest novel, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, came out in January of 2025.

Dan Poblocki is the bestselling author of the recent novels Tales to Keep You Up at Night and More Tales to Keep You Up at Night, along with Ghost Hunter’s Daughter, Liars’ Room, The Stone Child, The Nightmarys and others. His picture book with James Rey Sanchez, My Brother’s Butt is Haunted, is arriving July 29th, 2025 from Penguin Workshop. Pre-order your copy RIGHT THIS MINUTE by visiting danpoblocki.com.

Follow the Our First Fears podcast on Instagram @ourfirstfears & @danpoblox and Bluesky @danpoblock.bsky.social. And feel free to reach out at [email protected].