Peculiar Book Club Podcast

Jessica McCann is an award-winning historical novelist and has worked as a professional writer and journalist for more than 35 years. One of her earliest assignments as a freelance writer was covering a new surgical radiation technique for destroying brain tumors, during which she donned scrubs and observed inside the operating room. Since then, her reporting and creative nonfiction has appeared in dozens of magazines, including Business Week, The Writer, Phoenix, Raising Arizona Kids and ASU Research.

McCann’s debut novel, All Different Kinds of Free, was awarded the Freedom in Fiction Prize. Her second, Peculiar Savage Beauty, was named Arizona Book of the Year and shortlisted for the international Rubery Book Award. Bitter Thaw, McCann’s most recent release, was named 2023 Best Indie Book by Shelf Unbound magazine and received the Gold Award for Historical Fiction from Foreword INDIES. 
In all her writing, McCann shares stories of ordinary people overcoming adversity to accomplish extraordinary things. Layered themes of nature, forgiveness, community, acceptance, and perseverance are another hallmark of her work.
Connect: 
www.JessicaMcCann.com
amazon.com/stores/author/B004V9UD58
x.com/JMcCannWriter
instagram.com/jmccannwriter
goodreads.com/jessicamccann

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You’ve seen the movies. But did you know that zombies are in fact all around us? Insect zombies, that is. In Rise of the Zombie Bugs, Mindy Weisberger explores the eerie yet fascinating phenomenon of real-life zombification. The truth is stranger than fiction: these parasites reproduce by rewriting their victims' neurochemistry, transforming them into the "walking dead": armies of cicadas, spiders, and other hosts that helplessly follow a zombifier's commands, living only to serve the parasite's needs until death's sweet release (and often beyond).

We’ll chat live with the author about the evolutionary intricacies behind zombie ants, mind-controlled beetles, and the fungi and viruses that reprogram behavior from Brazilian rainforests to European meadows. It’s weird. It’s macabre. It’s right up our peculiar little alley. Come ask the hard questions, like why is a bug's world full of zombies, why are arthropods so susceptible to this zombification, and could the creators of zombie bugs ever evolve to do the same to people? It's a must-read for anyone curious about the true terrors lurking in nature's undergrowth and the unnerving beauty of evolution's darker side.

Music for tonight's Comedy Sketch provided by:Shockwave Drift by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.comCreative Commons / Attribution 3.0 Unported License (CC BY 3.0)https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US

Episode was recorded live January 8, 2026.
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Welcome to the Peculiar Movie Club, a bonus podcast linked to our main show the Peculiar Book Club through common themes in media.  This week, in honor of the book When We Spoke to the Dead, we are reviewing the romance film Ghost.

Join Davey Berris and Darren Cross as they take a deep dive into this sexy pottery movie. We'll discuss the themes of the fragility of life, believing in spiritualism, and is Unchained Melody the most epic love song of all time.

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From Sarah Weinman, author of Scoundrel and The Real Lolita, comes an eye-opening story about the first major spousal rape trial in America and urgent questions about women’s rights that would reverberate for decades.

In December 1978, Greta Rideout bravely testified that her husband, John, whom she still lived with, had raped her. She was the first woman in United States history to do this, at a time when the idea of “marital rape” seemed ludicrous to many Americans and was a crime in only four states. After a quick and conservative trial acquitted John Rideout and a defense lawyer lambasted that rape was perhaps "the risk of being married," Greta was ridiculed and scorned from public life, while John went on to be a repeat offender. Thrust into the national spotlight, Greta and her story would become a national sensation, a symbol of a country’s unrelenting and targeted hate toward women and a court system designed to fail them at every turn.

A now little-remembered trial deserving of close, wide, and lasting attention, Sarah Weinman turns her signature intelligence and journalistic rigor to the enduring impact of this case. Oregon v. Rideout directly inspired feminist activists, who fought state by state for marital rape laws, a battle that was not won in all fifty until as recently as 1993. Mixing archival research and new reporting involving Greta, other women victimized by John in later years, as well as the activists battling the courts in parallel, Without Consentembodies vociferous debates about gender, sexuality, and power, while highlighting the damaging and inherent misogyny of American culture then and still now.

Book: https://www.sarahweinman.com/book/without-consent/
Instagram: @sarahweinman
Bluesky: @sarahweinman.com 
NYT review of Without Consent: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/11/books/review/without-consent-sarah-weinman.html
WNYC conversation about the book: https://www.wnyc.org/story/the-groundbreaking-case-that-helped-make-spousal-rape-illegal/
Salem Statesman-Journal feature on the book: https://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/news/local/2025/11/22/without-consent-highlights-history-of-1978-salem-spousal-rape-trial/87272985007/
My op-ed for the Globe & Mail about marital rape in Canada: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-spousal-rape-remains-all-too-misunderstood/

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Ghosts spoke. Women listened. Everything changed.It began with whispers in a dimly lit room. In the 1840s, the Fox Sisters―and the legions of mediums they inspired―ignited the Spiritualist movement that swept through Victorian parlors and presidential campaigns alike. Contacting the dead wasn't merely a parlor trick: It was a political statement, a declaration of self that still echoes. Séances attracted suffragists and scientists, skeptics and charlatans, giving women a voice in a society that often refused to hear them. But as Spiritualism surged, it also blurred the lines between faith, fraud, feminism, and financial opportunity, drawing figures as varied as Harry Houdini, Victoria Woodhull, and even modern self-help gurus into its ever-expanding orbit.From wartime séances to the rise of televangelists, from Victorian ghosts to goop-approved wellness rituals, When We Spoke to the Dead unearths the forgotten roots of today's obsession with manifestation, mysticism, and the power of belief. Exploring America's deep-seated hunger for the unseen―whether through politics, personal empowerment, or grief―this book traces how the supernatural, once condemned as heresy, became the ultimate commodity.Step inside the séance room. The spirits have been waiting.

Episode was recorded live December 11, 2025.
Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://brandyschillace.com/peculiar/⁠
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