Speaker
Paul Tremblay
Appearances over time
1 episodes
Episodes
1
Podcasts
Quotes & moments
Paul Tremblay taught high school math for 30 years before finally becoming a full-time writer.
Publishers Weekly reported horror novel acquisitions were up 25% year-over-year, two years running, signalling a potential bubble.
Paul Tremblay was among the first four plaintiffs to sue OpenAI on behalf of writers, alongside Christopher Golden, Richard Cadre, and Sarah Silverman.
Paul Tremblay typically spends 12 to 15 months writing a first draft, believing the extra time lets real life improve the book.
The adaptation of A Head Full of Ghosts wrapped filming in the Dublin area, the same region where Victorian Psycho was also filmed.
Winifred, the protagonist of Victorian Psycho, kills everyone including infants, not just the upper-class villains, subverting the expected 'kills only the bad guys' trope.
Paul Tremblay saw Jaws at age 10 and suffered approximately 10 years of shark-related nightmares as a result.
Paul Tremblay's new novel Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, a satirical horror about AI and bodily autonomy, was scheduled for release on June 30.
Most horror-comedies make the horror itself the punchline, which waters everything down. Victorian Psycho and the TV show Widow's Bay pull off the rarer trick: the comedy and horror exist independently, each at full strength. Paul Tremblay says he struggles to name many films that achieve this.
Paul Tremblay spent 30 years as a high school math teacher at a Catholic boys' school before finally going full-time as a writer. The day job was his safety net — it let him write weird books without financial pressure and say no to publishers when he needed to.
Paul Tremblay was one of the first four plaintiffs to sue OpenAI on behalf of writers, alongside Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, and Richard Cadre. He calls any writer using AI a 'scab' — because AI trains on stolen books and produces work with zero human connection.
A man in a vegetative state signs his body over to a Silicon Valley tech giant, which then implants AI and nanobots to remote-control him like a video game character. His estranged daughter is hired to 'Weekend at Bernie's' him across the country. It's part satire, part nightmare.
Victorian Psycho's Winifred doesn't just kill the rich and villainous — she kills babies, innocents, and servants with equal enthusiasm. The magic trick is that her voice is so funny and inviting that readers root for her anyway. Paul Tremblay calls it one of the best reader manipulations he's read.
Halfway through Victorian Psycho, a name on a document — John Pounds — reveals that the head of the household is Winifred's biological father. It reframes her entire mission and explains why she engineered her way into that specific household. The hosts and Paul all had their jaws drop.
Paul Tremblay's father sold him Jaws as a film about the feeling of catching a fish. It destroyed him. He had a decade of shark nightmares, and still covers his eyes when Quint gets bitten — even after watching it 50 times. Horror's most enduring images never really leave.
As a governess, Winifred occupies a liminal space: she's not family, not a servant, and definitely not an equal. This gives her unprecedented access to every corner of the house and every person in it, while still being treated with contempt. Virginia Feito uses that tension to devastating effect.
The hosts run Paul Tremblay through a gauntlet of would-you-rathers: Winifred vs. villain group chat, ghost vs. book reviewer, Salem ghost vs. salty sea captain, and the ultimate question — Stephen King in the Bridgewater Triangle. Paul's answers reveal a man who deeply fears both random internet reviewers and the Puritan God.
Paul Tremblay is a lifelong scaredy-cat: he sleeps with a desk lamp on when alone, still runs up the basement stairs too fast, and admits to having a 2% belief in the supernatural that wakes him in the night — even though the other 98% of the time he's a card-carrying skeptic atheist.
Growing up in an old New England farmhouse, Ash Kelley heard something slam against a closed door from the inside — so hard she launched herself across the hallway. When her father opened the door, nothing was there. Her sister Alaina adds her own story: a Tupperware container of magazines sliding across the same room with violent force at 2am.
Paul Tremblay wasn't even a big reader until a mandatory freshman English class in his senior year of college, where Joyce Carol Oates' 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?' made him say aloud, 'I didn't know people wrote things like this.' His wife then gave him The Stand, and the rest is horror history.
Horror novel acquisitions are up 25% year-over-year, two years running, according to Publishers Weekly. Paul Tremblay credits the shift partly to Get Out forcing mainstream culture to take horror seriously, and partly to an exciting influx of own-voices horror authors — but he worries the boom could pop.
Victorian Psycho ends ambiguously: did Drusilla willingly participate in the 12-Days-of-Christmas massacre of her own family, or was she chained up the whole time and Winifred invented the partnership? The hosts and Paul parse the clues — and disagree about which version they prefer.
Victorian-era green dyes — used in clothing, wallpaper, and furniture — were made with arsenic. The poisonous green dress Mrs. Pounds gives Winifred early in the novel may be slowly driving her mad. The hosts looked it up: this was absolutely a real thing.
Analysis
What they talk about
- Arts 70%
- Education 10%
- Technology 10%
- TV & Film 10%
Connections
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