We simply adore Lore with GennaRose Nethercott

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Adam Sockel:

You are listening to Passions & Prologues, a literary podcast where each week, I'll interview an author about a thing they love, and how it inspires their work.

I'm your host, Adam Sockel, and if this is your first time joining in, thanks so much for being here. If you've been here since the beginning, thanks so much for coming back.

Today's author is someone that I have been talking about for the past several months now. It is GennaRose Nethercott, the author of Thistlefoot, my favorite book in a long, long, long time. Again, if you've been listening for the past couple of months, you know that I have recommended this book several times once to Grady Hendrix, once just in passing.

And when I finished this book a few months back, I loved it so much that I flat out just reached out to GennaRose and said, “Hi, you probably don't know who I am, but I really would like to interview you.” And she said yes, and here we are.

In addition to writing Thistlefoot, which is this weird macabre, creepy book that is centered around a house on chicken legs, it is steeps in deep Jewish folklore about Baba Yaga and all this great stuff. We talk about all of it in this discussion, but I just love the book so, so much.

But in addition to being the author of Thistlefoot, GennaRose Nethercott just has a life and past that is truly fascinating. She does historical and supernatural research for the massively popular podcast, Lore. We talk about that in this discussion.

She is part of a traveling poetry emporium. She grew up with parents, one of whom was a clown — we get into all of it. It's such a wonderful conversation. You're really going to love it. This very much might be my favorite episode of the podcast so far.

I just think you're really going to love it. We became fast friends, and I think that shines through in the discussion.

Before we get to that, I want to give you an additional book recommendation, and then just some other housekeeping. I am currently listening to the audiobook of Ghost Eaters by Clay McLeod Chapman. If you are a horror novel fan, you likely have heard or at least seen the cover of Ghost Eaters. It is a very creepy cover.

It's a person with like a sheet over their face and what looks like complete voids where their eyes and mouth should be. It's a very, very scary book. It's kind of gothic punk. It is all about this drug called “ghost” that once you take it, you basically can see all of the dead people that are surrounding you.

This isn't really a spoiler alert, but basically, the main characters lose a friend very early on and in a quest to track him down and bring him back, they take this drug and it just sends their entire world into a upheaval.

Very creepy, trigger warnings for some body horror if that is something that you like to avoid. But if you're a horror novel fan, Ghost Eaters by Clay McLeod Chapman, really, really good stuff.

If you ever want to get ahold of me and you would like some customized book recommendations, you can always email me at [email protected].

Feel free to send me any of your passions, I love reading those. And I give away a gift card every single month to bookshop.org to a random person who has sent me their passions. So, thank you in advance for those.

And then also, if you want to leave me a review anywhere you listen to podcasts: Apple, Spotify, wherever it is — I know every podcast tells you that it really helps them, and that's because honestly, it really, really does.

So, if you could take 30 seconds to just do that and then send me a screenshot of that and send it to me at [email protected], I'll give you some customized book recommendations. Really, really do appreciate it. It helps other bookish people find the podcast more easily.

Okay. That's all the housekeeping. You can always find me on Twitter — I'm sorry, you can find me on Twitter too, but on Instagram and TikTok at Passions & Prologues. But no more delaying, we are going to get to the main event. I am so excited to say I hope you enjoy this discussion with GennaRose Nethercott, author of Thistlefoot Passions & Prologues.

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Okay. GennaRose, what is the thing that you're super passionate about that we're going to be diving into today?

GennaRose Nethercott:

I am absolutely obsessed with supernatural folklore and like spooky monster history, the cursed stuff.

Adam Sockel:

The cursed stuff, exactly. And GennaRose isn't just saying this — she does research for the podcast Lore, like one of the most popular podcasts in the world. So, we're going to get into that in a little bit.

But first off, like how did you come to discover this interest of yours. Was it something that you were curious about as a kid? Did it come along later in life? Like how did you discover this passion?

GennaRose Nethercott:

Yeah, so I guess from probably a bunch of different outlets, but I've always been obsessed with monster stories. When I was a kid, I was a very scared little kid. Like everything scared me to the point where I had to develop this like acute system of protective talismans around myself to just like chill the hell out.

I played the clarinet when I was a little kid. And I don't know if I've ever mentioned this to anyone before, but I played the clarinet as a kid and I convinced myself that if I had my clarinet on me, no monsters could kill me because of the beautiful power of music. And so, I would carry my clarinet around to protect myself from ghosts and monsters.

So, I really started with quite an antagonistic relationship to these topics. But then well, for one, my dad is a very whimsical gentleman, and I grew up listening to a lot of his sort of fairy stories. And also, when I was 11, I started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which in my humble opinion is the greatest story ever told in human history. And that really converted me in a big way.

And then, I mean, I was always interested in history and in stories in the stories that people tell and what it says about them. And it wasn't until I got to college, and I was studying a year abroad at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and I started taking a class in their school of Scottish studies department that was called The Supernatural World.

And it was specifically about folklore ethology, so the social and the psychological functions of folklore. So, like literally why are people telling the stories that they're telling, and very specifically, what does it say about them? What does it say about a culture? What does it say about an individual psychology to feel the need to tell a certain kind of story or invent a certain kind of creature.

And I realized like, oh, that's it. That's been the thing. That's been the common thread between all the stories that I end up really drawn to, is they all have this metaphorical root where something that we are too uncomfortable looking at directly is transformed into this kind of bloated, metaphorical, hyperbolistic creature or phenomenon that's easier somehow to look at than the actual human thing.

Adam Sockel:

So, first off, I love that, and everything you say I want to ask you 15 questions about, but I will try to say on task. You were talking about like having this kind of fascination with it, but being afraid of these stories when you were younger, and you talked about Buffy.

I feel like I was the same, but for Are You Afraid of The Dark. And like the same thing, like I would be terrified of it, but I couldn't stop watching it, and I wanted to know about these stories. And then I remember watching Edwards Scissorhands with my parents, and my mom listens to this, so she's probably going to laugh.

Like I remember watching it and then being so creeped out that like I couldn't walk by windows at night for like a week. Like I would crawl under them. But the same thing, like even now, I don't love watching horror movies, but I love like reading about horror stories and I love, love, love horror novels.

And it is for me, I think you're right, it gets like the psychology of it and like understanding the reasoning behind the monsters and things like that.

GennaRose Nethercott:

Yeah, I hate the feeling of being scared, because for me, I think as a writer, I have a pretty overactive imagination. And so, that feeling of fear does not end when like the movie ends. It like stays with me for many days and it sucks. I don't like that feeling.

But I love the features and the tropes within horror. So, yeah, it's interesting because, yeah, I love monsters, I love spooky stories. I love all of the archetypes that go into making horror, but I don't actually like the feeling of being scared.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. No, 100%. I feel the exact same. One, I hate found footage films because I feel like the whole gimmick of found footage films is to have something jump out at you on the screen and like I feel like jump scares are cheap and like I was always terrified of clowns as a kid, and now I have a weird fascination with them and-

GennaRose Nethercott:

Well, I have some news for you, my friend.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah, we're going to get to some of those stories a little bit. I don’t know if you've read them yet, but there is a young adult horror novelist named Adam Cesare, and he wrote this book called Clown in a Cornfield that came out a couple years ago. And then he had a second one that came out, Clown in a Cornfield 2 Frendo Returns. The name of the clown is literally Frendo.

And it's like, I don't know, there's something about it. I don't know why it is about a book if like I can control the visuals in my mind, but like I know there's no jump scare. Like you can write the creepiest atmospheric book, but I can like put it down or I can pause the audiobook and I can take it into my own time.

But, yeah, I don't know. Are you like the same way, like you said, you don't like that feeling of being scared, but I assume given like that Thistlefoot — well, not like a straight horror novel does have some very creepy aspects to it. Like are those the types of books you enjoy reading too?

GennaRose Nethercott:

Yeah, I mean, I like spooky, but not necessarily scary. I don't like sort of graphic gratuitous like … I'm not a Gore person. I don't really like body horror.

But it's so interesting to me that you bring up like jump scares versus literature because this is literally a debate that I've been having just the past month and become like very obsessed with, which is the idea of is it possible to create a jump scare in a book?

And so, I became really fascinated by this because I just finished watching The Haunting of Hillhouse, the Hillhouse series by Mike Flanagan. And it was so good, it's so good. And I don't know if you remember, but there's this iconic jump scare in that.

And I became fascinated by this particular jump scare because for those who haven't seen it, there's this jump scare moment where — okay, backtracking, you know with a typical jump scare, the kind of contract of a jump scare is that you know one is going to happen. There are clues that something is going to jump out.

And so, a lot of the tension and the fear comes from knowing it's going to happen, but not knowing when. So, your whole-body tenses up. And then when it finally happens, it's actually kind of a release, it's a catharsis and essentially, the fulfilling of a contract. You were promised that something would scare you and it did.

This particular jump scare, which for those who have seen it, the one that happens in the car, you know what I'm talking about. So, this jump scare completely subverts that contract where a rather than warning you there's going to be something that jumps out, your body feeling that tension and then having a release, it is in a moment where there is no horror tension. There's two characters arguing, but there's no horror attention.

You have no indication that there is going to be a jump scare, and then the jump scare comes out of nowhere. And it's terrifying because instead of fulfilling a contract with a jump scare, it's betraying the contract that you're safe. And I was like, “Oh my God, it's the same action, but it has a completely different psychological effect because it's actually breaking the contract instead of fulfilling one.” And then, yeah, got me to thinking about can you do that in a book.

Adam Sockel:

I can take that one step further, that particular scene because again, like once I watched something creepy, then I am like, okay, I need to read and find out about that creepy thing.

The actors involved didn't know when the jump scare was going to happen. They just knew their dialogue. So, that’s why like if you know what we're talking about, it feels so authentic is because they also did not know when something was going to happen.

But so, what have you come to decide? Do you think you can do a jump scare in a book or what has been kind of the conclusion for you so far?

GennaRose Nethercott:

So, going back to sort of what you were saying a moment ago about like the reason you enjoy reading horror as opposed to washing it is because you have this control of the pacing, where I think it's really, really hard, if not maybe impossible to do a jump scare in literature because for one, a jump scare relies on entirely on pacing.

It relies on something coming towards you that you have no ability to slow down or back away from. Where in reading, for one, you can control the pacing. Two, you can kind of glance ahead a little bit, and sometimes you can't really help it, your eyes can flick ahead and catch what's coming.

And three, which I think is the most important element of a jump scare is I think a jump scare, it's something literally jumping at you in the screen. So, it's not a psychological fear, it's a body fear. It's your brain registering that something real is jumping at you.

And I don't know if that can happen in the written word because your brain couldn't misinterpret a piece of information that it's reading as a real threat jumping at you.

That said, I've been polling all my friends about this topic to see if they've ever read a jump scare in a novel. And I've gotten two compelling responses.

One is two separate friends both said that there's a moment in The Only Good Indians that could constitute a jump scare. I haven't read it, but the fact that two separate people said it, makes me wonder.

Adam Sockel:

So, we're recording this in early February and the episode that came out last week was with Grady Hendrix. And he and I talked about The Only Good Indians. And I've been thinking a lot about it this week again.

That's fair. I do know the part you're talking about, and it is definitely a part that would constitute it. So, I would agree with those. So, what was the second one?

GennaRose Nethercott:

The second one is a sleeper one. This is interesting, where the second one … now, I wish I could remember which novel, but there's a Virginia Woolf novel where a protagonist is killed in a parenthetical.

Adam Sockel:

Oh-

GennaRose Nethercott:

And that, I think is a really interesting approach how to translate jump scare into writing. The idea of something happening in a parenthetical as if it could be removed from the story and it wouldn't matter is very jarring.

And so, I do wonder … actually, I'm just thinking of this now, but like a jump scare on the screen is about something becoming momentarily very loud and arresting. What if the equivalent of a jump scare in literature is the reverse. It's something major being very quiet and dismissed that shouldn't be.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. I like that lot. That's a really good theory. The other one that I would think of that came out last year, it is a book called The Honeys by Ryan LaSala who was on the show a while back and a buddy of mine.

But like it's a horror novel and it's about like these summer camp where there's just weird things going on with these kind of like mean girl type people. And there is a scene in a cave — I will not give anything away because like he's done like TikToks and stuff where he’s like, “Has anyone gotten to chapter 29 yet?”

And it's one of those moments where it's like I was reading it and I can't think of many other books, like as I'm reading it, the thing that happens is so completely out of left field from the 28 chapters you've read through that.

Like I audibly was like, “Oh my God … oh my God … oh my God!” So, I think you're right. Like I think the loud thing happening quiet and like being able to be removed and also like something that is just so … it's almost like a magic trick to what he did. Because it's like it's so completely out of left field, but it still fits within the realm of the story. And I feel like we could talk about this for six hours, but-

GennaRose Nethercott:

I know, it's so great.

Adam Sockel:

So interesting. So, getting back to like your interest in the macabre and everything like I said — when I say that you take this seriously, like you do supernatural and historical research for Lore. So, like how did your interest in Buffy and your fascination with this really interesting class that you like, studied abroad, how did that transform into like you are going to do this historical research-

GennaRose Nethercott:

Professionally, yeah.

Adam Sockel:

And then also how does it work?

GennaRose Nethercott:

Great questions all. So, basically after I took that class and I made that discovery, I sort of shifted my studies and ultimately, emerged with a degree in a combination of writing theater and supernatural folklore ethology.

So, I have a degree in folklore essentially, and all of my writing is rooted in folklore, which you've read Thistlefoot, you know that firsthand. But Thistlefoot is far from the only thing I have written that is rooted in folklore and folkloric studies.

I feel like I can safely say everything that I write is influenced by, and inspired by my folklore studies and my time as a folklorist. So, you would think that that would kind of be the natural way that I ended up with a job for Lore, which is a supernatural folklore history podcast.

I was a longtime listener of Lore. I'd listened since the beginning, have always loved it. I used to joke that Aaron Mahnke was my unofficial sponsor of my first book tour where I was driving around the country. I converted my Honda fit into a tiny camper. I was on the road for eight months straight with a puppet show in the trunk of the car performing a puppet show that animated this book of poetry called The Lumberjack’s Dove that I had written.

And anyway, I was listening to so much Lore that when I got home, the first thing I did was I bought a Casper mattress, which is like one of the Lore sponsors. So, anyway and I'd always kinda dreamt of like, man, it would be amazing to work … this is like, my dream job would be to just like do spooky curse research for this show.

So, you would think that like my qualifications would've gotten me a job, but I have to admit I kind of got it through a Tinder date. I went on a Tinder date with this guy. We ended up actually becoming really close friends, and one of his best friends was one of the head producers on Lore.

And when we met and she realized my background, she connected me to Aaron, and one thing led to another. So, I mean, yes, it was my credentials, but I like to say it was Tinder.

Adam Sockel:

It's a way better story too. Yeah.

GennaRose Nethercott:

Yeah. And in terms of how it works, basically, I do a combination of research and also writing the episodes for them. That's my newest duty, is I've just become the first person ever other than Aaron himself to write Lore, which I'm really excited about.

Adam Sockel:

That's amazing.

GennaRose Nethercott:

And the way it works is once a year, our team of like nine people do what's called a writer's room where we all bring four or five topics, episode ideas to the table. We just actually had it last week for this coming year, and we pitch ideas, and then we slot in a whole year's worth of episode ideas.

And then myself and whoever else is researching that year, gets to pick from that pile, which are the ones we want to dive into. And each week, we get a new outline, and I basically am given just a little skeleton information.

So, act one is about the history of the general region of Lake Lanier. Act two is about a history of all the drownings in Lake Lanier. Act three is one specific ghost story from Lake Lanier, and then the epilogue is another lake somewhere else that also has ghosts associated with it.

So, that's kind of the skeleton format we work with. And my job is each week, I take that little skeleton and I flesh it out into a 15-page research outline with complete bibliography. So yeah, spooky sleuthing, I'm digging through newspapers.com archives, reading JSTOR articles, scrolling throughout the web.

I have a whole shelf next to me, which you can see Adam, your listeners can't. But it's all my folklore ethnology books. And so, yeah, it's a blast. I know just the worst things mankind can ever know. And I'm really unbearable at parties now, I have to tell you.

Adam Sockel:

I was just going to say, I won't ask because obviously you said you're planning for upcoming season, that would be truly a horrible question.

But what are some of your favorite stories you've researched in the past that have already come out on episodes you can actually talk about? Like what are some of the stories that-

GennaRose Nethercott:

Yeah, which ones have come out?

Adam Sockel:

Stopped in your tracks and you're like, “Oh my God, I can't believe that is a thing?”

GennaRose Nethercott:

I'll be honest, I can't quite remember which has come out and which haven't. But I can say that I've become very, very obsessed with hot air balloon disasters. I'm not sure if that one's … there's a couple of those. I'm not sure if they've come out, but yeah, there's some really top notch hot air balloon disasters in French ballooning history.

I’m very obsessed with the way that people were so into hot air balloons in the height of what was called balloon mania. So, yeah, I know a lot about balloons plummeting out of the sky on fire. Folks used to do these shows in the early days of like balloon hype — balloonists would go up and they would set up a ton of fireworks around their hydrogen balloons.

Adam Sockel:

Sure. Why not?

GennaRose Nethercott:

Suffice to say, it didn't work out so well. But I'm trying to be vague about that because I don't know if that episode's come out. But here's one that I think has come out, I'm pretty sure. If not, I'm sorry, Aaron, I spoiled it. So, there is this phenomenon called star jelly, and have you ever heard of this star jelly?

Adam Sockel:

I want to say maybe, but when you describe it, it might be something I'm thinking is totally different. So, go ahead.

GennaRose Nethercott:

I definitely had not heard of it until I researched it for this episode, but star jelly is basically, since the 13 hundreds, there have been reported incidents largely in England, but all around the world of people seeing a shooting star, a comet or meteor — seeing the meteor land somewhere in a field or looks like it landed, and then the next morning going out to investigate.

And instead of finding a meteor or a crater or anything, they just find a big pile of jelly. So, this is real, and it's called star jelly. And there were different names for it throughout time. My favorite detail of this whack concept is that when it first came about in the 13 hundreds, like there was a doctor who was convinced it had medicinal purposes and that you should like smear star jelly all over your body.

And he was kind of viewed as a hack, but he was really into this idea. Except back then, it wasn't called star jelly. It was written in this sort of old English, and it was called Slyme of the Sterres.

Adam Sockel:

Oh my God. That's incredible. Yeah, that is not what I-

GennaRose Nethercott:

And so, basically, obviously, meteors do not turn into jelly. This is another great detail about it. In parts of Mexico, there's also a name for it. It is kaka de la lun or “shit of the moon” which is so good.

Adam Sockel:

This is so incredible. So, obviously, normally I ask authors when they come on like how/if does your passion connect to your writing. Yours is very kind of straight through line.

GennaRose Nethercott:

It's obvious.

Adam Sockel:

It's a little obvious, but I guess like how did Thistlefoot come to be? And this will kind of be also our way of talking about it. I've put off fawning over your book for long enough and I want to do that now. So, how did Thistlefoot come to be — obviously, again, rooted in folklore, but how did this book come to kind of take over your brain for a while?

GennaRose Nethercott:

So, I was on that aforementioned eight-month long puppet jot around America, and living in the trunk of my car and sleeping on couches and just driving around. I was in a new city every two days, did over a hundred shows.

So, suffice to say by about five months into that, I was feeling absolutely deranged, and the idea of Baba Yaga's house on chicken legs, this walking house that you never have to leave because it is coming with you sounded very, very nice to me at that particular moment.

And I'd always been really drawn to this figure. This hut on chicken legs is from Slavic Eastern European Russian folklore in which Baba Yaga, who is a grown witch figure from Russian folklore, lives in this sentient house that walks through the forest on chicken legs. And yeah, I'd always really loved that folk tale.

I honestly can't tell you where I first heard it. I didn't grow up on it, but it entered my consciousness at some point. And the house in particular, always really, really connected with me. I've always been an itinerant person. I grew up with my family's touring clown act. I was a professional child clown who spent a lot of my youth on the road.

And then in my twenties, I was a traveling busker who was hitchhiking around the country and around Europe and writing poems to order on the street on an antique typewriter. And I wouldn't be in the same place for more than usually a couple weeks at the most, a few months at a time. It’s how I spent my entire twenties.

And so yeah, just this intense restlessness and itinerant that made me really relate to this figure, because at the same time, I've always been a real homebody. And like I love nesting and like I love being in my bed, I do all my work in bed.

So, yeah, this house on chicken legs kind of felt like me in a way of combining these two seemingly incongruous parts of my life. And so, yeah, I was on the road with this tour and I wanted to start coming up with the idea for a novel, because my agent said that's what people pay for instead of poetry.

So, I was like, “Fine, sir, I'll write a novel.” And the first idea that came into my mind was I had this image of the hut on chicken legs standing in a Walgreens parking lot and like scratching at a candy bar wrapper. And I just thought that was hilarious.

Like I love when these folkloric images that we think of as kind of antiquated and yeah, just sort of whimsy, antiquated, folky are placed into these contemporary settings and the chaffing that ensues. And so, I just thought that was a really fun image and a really fun concept.

And then I started thinking, okay, well, like if you were to take this figure of this walking house and actually place it in the world I live in, in contemporary United States, what would that look like? And that naturally led to the thought of, okay, well, it would be this immigrant figure from this eastern European setting — oh, my family were immigrants from this Eastern European setting.

And immediately, then that led me to connecting it into the story of my own family's immigration. So, throughout the book of Thistlefoot, it weaves together this Baba Yaga folklore with contemporary American road trip stories. And most notably, the story of a pogrom that took place in the year 1919 in a Jewish shtetl in what is now, Ukraine, what was at the time, Russia.

And yeah, and that's the actual story of the shtetl that my family came from. So, it was a combination of kind of my life now, my ancestors' lives, and the stories that I loved.

Adam Sockel:

Oh my God. Okay. So, I obviously adore the book. I did not know it was so like deeply rooted in your own family history, which is phenomenal and heartbreaking and-

GennaRose Nethercott:

And kind of fucked up, yeah.

Adam Sockel:

A little bit, just a little bit. Yeah, but I want to ask you like from a latter part of the story, because there's this really, really fascinating puppet show that takes place throughout the story and it is woven in, in such a way, like I love how you kind of put little aspects of the public show throughout the book itself.

But I want to know about like what was like the traveling show your family was putting on when you were a kid? Like what was that? I need to know more about this.

GennaRose Nethercott:

Yeah. So, okay, this is real. I've mentioned this in interviews before, but I think it explains me well. So, it bears repeating. My father is a clown, and my mother is a therapist, and here I am.

Adam Sockel:

Sorry, that shouldn't be my first reaction to laugh, but that's just a perfect-

GennaRose Nethercott:

No, it should. No, it's totally deranged. So, I guess this is what you get when you combine those two entities. And so, yeah, my dad who was a writer and a clown. He doesn't clown anymore, he still writes.

But he and my brother and I, every summer would put together like a family clown show. And we weren't affiliated with anything. We weren't Circus Clowns, we weren't Party Clowns, we were just like, I don't know, loose clowns, Free Range Clowns.

Adam Sockel:

Free Range Clowns, yeah.

GennaRose Nethercott:

Yeah, Free Range Clown. Basically, what we would do is every year in Vermont, all of the libraries would do their summer reading programs like most libraries do. There's some sort of summer reading program for kids.

And each year, the summer reading program in Vermont had a different theme. So, every library in the state would be following that same sort of playful theme. And so, each summer, my dad, my brother and I, would write a clown show based on that theme, and then we would tour it to all the libraries in the state.

And that was my summer job growing up, was touring around to these libraries, doing this like bit comedy show with my eight-year-old brother. I was like 12 at the time. And my dad, my clown name, which I named myself at age four, was Chicken Bump, which I honestly think sounds like a venereal disease, but also is sort of on brand thematically, and I'm sticking with it.

So, yeah, and my dad's clown name was Jack Alun, and my brother's clown name was Red de Led, the music clown, which is ironic because my brother is like the most tone-deaf person I've met in my entire life. And Red de Led was referring to the fact that his costume was just red sweatpants and a red sweatshirt, and then he'd paint his whole body red.

Adam Sockel:

God, this is the most-

GennaRose Nethercott:

So, we were really given free range to create our clown characters.

Adam Sockel:

This is the most wholesome shit I've ever heard in my entire life. I love this so, so much. This is good. What did your mother think of the clowning going on?

GennaRose Nethercott:

She was supportive but maybe didn't fully understand what she'd gotten herself into. She was definitely not participating as a clown.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. So, I want to ask, and you can tell me if you can't talk about it, and I only ask because I think I saw a tweet about it.

But you mentioned like everything you've ever written is somewhat based folklore. Is the next thing you're working on, like are you allowed to talk about whatever you're working on next at the moment? I would love to hear about it if you can.

GennaRose Nethercott:

I would be glad to talk about it.

Adam Sockel:

That would be great. So, what's the next thing coming from the GennaRose Nethercott-

GennaRose Nethercott:

The dark recesses of my mind? Yeah. So, Thistlefoot was sold as part of a two-book deal, with a novel being Thistlefoot and a short story collection, which I actually wrote before I wrote Thistlefoot. And so, right now, I am polishing up this collection of kind of magical realism, slip streamy, spooky short stories.

And that is called 50 Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories. The titular story, 50 Beasts to Break Your Heart is sort of a mythical beast story inspired by the Latin Beast stories of all creatures I made up. But all of the stories in the collection are these kind of weird fiction, and a lot of them are tied into like themes of longing and loneliness, but also spooky, which is really my brand. It's like sad and spooky.

Adam Sockel:

So, does it have like a release date-ish yet? Or you're not sure?

GennaRose Nethercott:

We don't have a release date yet, but it's going to be sometime like in the spring probably, either late winter, early spring of 2024. That's the plan.

And I'm excited about that. So, right now, I'm editing that and then I'm also starting to get ready a novel pitch to send … to try and sell my next novel on spec before I dive into that. And that is also definitely … that one's sort of a New England Gothic and based in my hometown and definitely folklore-inspired, but very much a mythologizing of the place that I come from.

Adam Sockel:

That's amazing. Okay, last question for you, you have been very generous with your time. You just came back from a book tour, you agreed to do this when I cold emailed you. So, last question for you — I always have every author give some sort of recommendation.

It can be a book, it can be a show, it could be … I've had people say their recommendation is like, “Go for a walk or make a bowl of soup.” Like it could be just a recommendation that you want more people to do or know about. Anything will suffice.

GennaRose Nethercott:

Oh, that's so good. There's so many good things. Okay, I'll do a book one and then I'll do a random one.

Adam Sockel:

Love it.

GennaRose Nethercott:

So, the book recommendation I always give is anything by Kelly Link. I am obsessed with Kelly Link. I think that she is just truly one of the greatest short story writers that has ever lived in history. That's Kelly Link.

My favorite of hers I think is Magic for Beginners, but everything is great. And she has a new short story collection coming out in March that I'm very excited about. So, yeah, that's my book recommendation.

And my thing recommendation, this is my new life-changing gadget. I feel like every winter I get a new stupid gadget that just like changes the game for me. One year — I guess, I'll give two.

One year, it was like this little plastic cup essentially that suction cups over the overflow drain in your bathtub that allows you to fill your bathtub beyond the overflow drain. And that was a game changer.

Adam Sockel:

As a bath lover, this is huge news. I love that.

GennaRose Nethercott:

Yeah, it's amazing. It’s really incredible. But this year's one is, I got a little plug-in coffee mug warmer. So, I'm a tea drinker. Every single morning of my life, I make a cup of tea, get so excited about it, put it on my bedside table, and immediately forget that it's there.

And then four hours later, remember, and then have an ice cold cup of tea. But not anymore my friend, not anymore. Because now, I make my cup of tea, put it on my electric mug warmer next to my bed, forget about it, and then it's still warm when I remember.

Adam Sockel:

You absolute monster. I make my coffee or tea, then I like drink it in the next five minutes. So, I make fun of anyone who does this, but that is such a good recommendation.

GennaRose, no one will see the video of this, but you can attest I have had a she did good on my face for the last half hour. Like I have never met someone who's so instantly like everything you talked about, I got more and more obsessed of — thank you so much for joining me today.

GennaRose Nethercott:

Thank you so much for having me, this was really fun.

[Music Playing]

Adam Sockel:

Passions & Prologues is proud to be an Evergreen podcast, and was created by Adam Sockel, and is produced by Adam Sockel and Sean Rule-Hoffman. And if you are interested in this podcast and any other Evergreen podcast, you can go to evergreenpodcasts.com to discover all the different stories we have to tell.