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Posted on September 15, 2026

Agatha Christie Reconsidered Podcast: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

From a highly anticipated exhibition at the British Museum debuting in October to a new BBC series centering Hercule Poirot to the imminent debut of a modern Miss Marple mystery novel, Agatha Christie and her characters remain firmly in the popular culture zeitgeist an astounding fifty years after her death. In some ways, this is not unexpected of an author who has sold over a billion books. And yet, the modern agility and resonance of her stories when compared against her writing contemporaries is worth thinking about – and that is exactly what we hope to do in this seven-part podcast examining the enduring legacy of Christie’s works. We will also consider how Christie’s position as “Queen of Mysteries” has potentially erased her contributions to horror and gothic storytelling by offering an assessment of both her most famous and less so storytelling devices.

In our first episode, we take up The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a story that will reach its 100th year milestone this year and whose unexpected twist continues to divide readers.

Please be mindful that this podcast series will contain spoilers.

Works Cited:

Allmendinger, Blake. “Death by Hari-Kari in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews, vol. 36, no. 3, Apr. 2023, pp. 398–99.

Bayard, Pierre. Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? The Mystery Behind the Agatha Christie Mystery. The New Press, 2001.

Berlatsky, Noah. “Getting Fooled Again: Rereading Agatha Christie’s “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” in the Age of Trump.” The Los Angeles Review of Books, 25 May 2022.

Dey, Anindita. “The Politics of Watching in the Narratives of Detection and Crime: A Study of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The Erasers.” IUP Journal of English Studies, vol. 8, no. 4, Dec. 2013, pp. 7–20.

Gutkowski, Emanuela. “An ‘Investigation in Pragmatics’: Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.” Clues: A Journal of Detection, vol. 29, no. 1, Apr. 2011, pp. 51–60.

Lanchester, John. “The Case of Agatha Christie.” London Review of Books, 20 December 2018.

Posted on September 3, 2026

Endless Night: Agatha Christie for Horror Fans

Dawn Keetley

Agatha Christie published Endless Night late in her career, in 1967. It’s a stand-alone novel, without the stabilizing center provided by either of her famous detectives, Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. It is, perhaps because of that, a good place to start for horror fans interested in how Christie’s work as mystery writer frequently veers into horror. While the novel itself contains many horror elements, I’m focusing here on the (quite faithful) 1972 film adaptation, which brilliantly amplifies those elements.

Posted on August 23, 2026

The Monsters Are Here on Oak Street: David Robert Mitchell’s Throwback Creature Feature

Dawn Keetley

David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street (2026) is a glorious throwback. While it may seem a bit of a swerve from Mitchell’s previous films, both The Myth of the American Sleepover (2010) and It Follows (2014) are actually also suffused with nostalgia: indeed, a key scene early in It Follows involves Jay (Maika Monroe) and Hugh (Jake Weary) at a classic art-house cinema preparing to watch 1963’s Charade, with Hugh talking wistfully about how he wants to be little again. The End of Oak Street evokes – in just about every way it can – a time that is past. I loved it for that, and for all its echoes of mid-twentieth-century film and television. There’s also inevitably a profound regressiveness to it all, too, though.

The End of Oak Street tracks a family (husband, wife, two children) as their neighborhood appears to travel through some kind of portal – transplanted to a prehistorical era when dinosaurs rampaged. Chaos ensues, as the family and their neighbors seek to evade, fight off, and outrun the gigantic predators with whom they now share Oak Street. There’s a sense that everyone’s in shock (not surprisingly) – not thinking clearly. There’s a lot of carnage.

Posted on July 22, 2026

Review: Marcus Kliewer’s The Caretaker

Dawn Keetley

Marcus Kliewer’s 2026 novel, The Caretaker, in true horror fashion, begins with a prologue. A man (David) is trying desperately to follow “the Rites” in order to ward off a “Visitor” who looks just like his dead son but isn’t. He fails. Then we cut to Macy Mullins, our twenty-something protagonist – and the story becomes hers. Indeed, one of the very many good things about The Caretaker is Macy Mullins, a character expertly drawn whom we can’t help but care about, despite her own conviction that nobody will.

Macy is looking after not only herself but her teenage sister, Gemma, in the wake of their father’s death in a car accident. Three years later, his daughters are struggling to come to terms with their grief – and, indeed, to get by at all. Without a job, with no money, and accumulating eviction notices, Macy answers a strange ad for a caretaker for an elderly man – only three days of work. She takes the job even after a still stranger interview where she discovers the elderly man in question is apparently dead and what she is really being asked to do is stay by herself in the house and follow a bizarre sequence of “routines.” Desperate, she agrees. (And who wouldn’t take $9000 for three days’ work?) The novel follows Macy over those three days.

Posted on July 13, 2026

Backrooms, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Dinner Scenes, and Discarded Workers

Dawn Keetley

The new power duo of Gen Z directors, Curry Barker and Kane Parsons, both seem to be influenced by an iconic horror film: Tobe Hooper’s 1974 Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Director of the record-shattering Obsession (2026), Barker is directing a reboot of the film for A24, which he plans to make “grounded, brutal, raw.” Kane Parsons, director of the similarly record-shattering Backrooms (2026), does not appear to name Texas Chain Saw Massacre as an influence (see this article in GQ for the list of the influences he’s claimed), yet he incorporated an extended homage to Hooper’s film into his own, in one of the most interesting scenes of the film.