It’s just 3 days until The Company of the Mad: The Stand Podcast premieres! As part of our countdown to the big day, we’re giving you a daily Panelist Spotlight, letting you know more about Mike, Tananarive, Anthony, and myself. Hopefully, you’ll feel like we’re all old friends by the time the episode lands on Friday!
Today, we’d like you to meet one of the panelists who will be on all 6 episodes of our limited podcast series.
Tananarive Due is an award-winning novelist, and the Executive Producer of Shudder’s groundbreaking documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror. She teaches Black Horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA, and you can take her online digital download course The Sunken Place at TananariveDue.com.
Due has played with King in the rock band, The Rock Bottom Remainders. The photo above, circa 1996, was taken backstage during a concert in which she played keyboard and King played guitar.
This is the first video I ever saw with Tananarive Due, and it made such a lasting impact and impression on me. In it, she speaks of how she came to love horror because of her mother, a civil rights activist who loved the genre.
In an article for Entertainment Weekly, Due elaborates: “I first got a copy of Stephen King’s The Shining for my 16th birthday — a paperback with a shiny silver cover I can see when I close my eyes — and I was trapped with the Torrance family at the Overlook Hotel. I still write REDRUM with backward Rs like Danny Torrance on every steamy hotel bathroom mirror. My love affair with King’s work didn’t stop there. I was sick in bed when I read The Stand, and I felt every symptom of Captain Trips. I gave my cat the side-eye the whole time I read Pet Sematary. King scared me time after time by creating characters I believed in.”
For Tananarive Due’s 1997 novel, My Soul To Keep, Stephen King wrote a blurb for the front cover: “An eerie epic… bears favorable comparison to Interview with the Vampire. I loved this novel.”
It is an absolute honor to have Tananarive joining our distinguished panel of guests each month to discuss The Stand. In the first episode, premiering this Friday, May 29, we will discuss chapters 1-24.
You can join us in #TheStandChallenge by reading along with us! Let us know your thoughts on The Stand and tweet us using the hashtag: #TheStandChallenge.
Jason Sechrest’s Twitter: @jasonsechrest
Mike Flanagan’s Twitter: @flanaganfilm
Tananarive Due’s Twitter: @tananarivedue
Anthony Breznican’s Twitter: @breznican
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