The Side Quest Book Club Podcast

One of us argues the Wendigo doesn't need to be real for part two to work.

Part 2 of 4 on PET SEMATARY by Stephen King. Spoilers through part two only.

Jonathan calls this the scariest King book he's read, and not because of jump scares — it's dread, and it got worse reading it through fog on four hours of sleep. Slava counters that only one book has ever truly creeped him out, and it wasn't this one. We dig into the myth itsel...

King put this one in a drawer. He only published it to finish out a contract.

Part 1 of 4 on PET SEMATARY by Stephen King. Spoilers through part one only — two of us are reading it for the first time.

Slava has read it twice. Jonathan and Josh are going in blind, which means predictions, wrong theories, and one running joke that this is King's debut novel about neutering animals. We get into why he shelved the manuscript, the r...

She built an author platform with a public money ledger and an e-reader she says rivals Kindle.

We sit down with Jules, founder of thing.pub — the ARC and beta reader platform built for the author community.

Jules walks us through the proprietary e-reader that carries almost any book's formatting into near-print visual fidelity, and the book showcase pages that give authors a customizable marketing hub — accent colors, ge...

Dozens of agent queries, mostly form rejections. So he took his fantasy novel to Substack.

We sit down with Rob Mortell, author of the indie fantasy TALES & TREASURE, for a full author interview.

Rob explains how a quirky bard named Vatis, a bards guild, and bard tourneys became the spine of a four-year discovery-writing project. We get into soft magic versus Sanderson-style hard magic, a haunted Fangorn-style forest he invented ...

Why did The Hunger Games take off in the West when Battle Royale never did?

We close out SUNRISE ON THE REAPING by Suzanne Collins with a full look at the world of Panem — and whether this one makes a good movie.

Evan and Jules are back for the finale. We start with the four-year gap between the book and the first movie, and what we were all doing in 2008 instead of reading it. Jules argues that Kishotenketsu is why Eastern sto...

Effie Trinket gets a better character arc in ten pages than Haymitch gets in the entire book.

We break down SUNRISE ON THE REAPING by Suzanne Collins — themes, character arcs, and full spoilers. Part 2 of 3.

Slava, Jonathan, Jules, and Evan roll a die to pick a theme and land on the cost of survival — what Haymitch actually gets for staying alive. It turns into an argument about whether Collins gave him an arc at all, why...

One of us has a theory that this book was ghostwritten and badly edited.

Part 1 of 3 on SUNRISE ON THE REAPING by Suzanne Collins — the plot, top to bottom, full spoilers.

Jules walks through the prose inconsistencies that made her suspect a second hand on the manuscript. Slava reread all three Hunger Games books and watched four movies out of spite, and still landed at 3.5 out of 5. We argue about whether Snow is a Disney vill...

How to start a podcast without waiting for perfect gear — just pick a narrow niche and find your 10 episode ideas.

In this how-to episode, Slava and Jonathan walk through the actual process of launching a podcast in 2026, from defining your topic and audience to building a setup that fits your budget.

They cover the 10-episode test that separates viable ideas from broad ones that get buried, why specificity wins over production...

She built a magic system out of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

Physicist-turned-author Keon Shore on THE BAD APOTHECARY, book one of The Ninth Path, and the Jungian shadow underneath it.

Keon walked away from physics, then spent years turning integral theory, Jung's shadow, and Daoist inner alchemy into a cultivation fantasy where doing magic wrong tears holes in reality. She explains how a universe with repressed truths became the ...

He stocked shelves at Barnes & Noble and kept the A-slot open for a book he hadn't sold yet.

Crime thriller author Marc Avery on DISCIPLINE, ten years from first draft to physical book, and building an audience on Threads.

A hundred rejections in, a bookseller told Marc to try one more time. He emailed an agent who had already turned him down years earlier, and she sold the book. He talks through what Discipline actually is under...

She was offline for ten years. She came back and built an anti-piracy platform for authors.

Indie author and solo dev Jules Mourne on thing.pub — a free platform for sharing manuscripts without feeding them to AI.

Jules walks us through how thing.pub actually works: device fingerprinting, watermarks embedded so they survive being run through a model, a kill switch for anyone poking at the dev console, and a reputation system th...

Evan Kidwell was born three months premature, always the smallest kid in the room and the easiest target. From grade school through junior year of high school, bullying was constant. Books were his escape. Fantasy worlds were where he survived.

Now he's an author.

In this episode, Evan joins Side Quest Book Club to talk about Timaeus, his debut young adult fantasy novel about a hierarchy of powered individuals, a tyrannical governmen...

Join us as we sit down with Mark Benson, author, entrepreneur, and founder of Writerly — the thriving community transforming writers into family.

In this interview, Mark shares his unconventional journey from Chicago's South Side to Marquette University (where he discovered that medical school wasn't his calling) to becoming a passionate novelist and storyteller. 

We dive into:

✍️ His writing process and what inspires his e...

🚨 Announcement 🚨

We are taking a break, but we also have author interviews. Subscribe, tune in, and join us on Discord. Link in bio or the comments.

Or here:https://discord.gg/z3qYKnKC3

ABOUT THE SIDE QUEST BOOK CLUB PODCAST 
Reading is the ultimate side quest. Side Quest is a casual book club podcast full of literary adventures. Join Slava and Jonathan as they discuss the books they are reading, life, history, belief system...

We finally finished Pride & Prejudice and have thoughts. In this season finale, Shiara, Jonathan, and Slava are joined by guest Lindsay to break down Volume 3: Darcy's secret intervention, the Lydia and Wickham disaster, the Pemberley awkward run-in, and whether Elizabeth Bennet deserves her happy ending (jury's still out).

We also get into why gossip is the engine of the whole book, what makes Mr. Darcy the most underrated char...

Volume 2 of Pride and Prejudice delivers the most talked-about proposal in English literature and Darcy somehow manages to insult the woman he's proposing to while doing it. In this episode of Side Quest Book Club, Shiara, Slava, and Jonathan break down Charlotte's calculated decision to marry Mr. Collins, Jane's disappointing trip to London, Darcy's awkward courtship strategy, and the moment Elizabeth finally learns the full truth...

In this episode, Shiara, Slava, and Jonathan dig into Volume 1 of Pride and Prejudice, and things get surprisingly heated. We break down why Jane Austen was basically living her own novel, why Mrs. Bennet is actually more tragic than she is crazy, and why Mr. Darcy is either the most misunderstood man in literary history — or just a really well-dressed snob.

Also: Jonathan was not bamboozled by Wickham (for the wrong reasons),...

Debbie Show joins the SideQuest crew to talk about all of it — what really happened, what she changed, and why she hired a developmental editor for two years instead of just writing the book she could have written the day her sister was arrested. 

We get into bibliotherapy, writing as trauma processing, the Kirkus review, and why developmental editors might be better than therapists. Slava also drops one of the most hones...

We're back to wrap up Paper Roses by debut indie author Debbie Show, and she did not disappoint. In Part 2, we cover the second half of this semi-autobiographical slice-of-life novel: betrayal, financial fraud, ethical spirals, forgiveness, and one of the most satisfying endings we've seen from a first-time author.

We also explore why writing is a powerful tool for processing trauma. Slava shares an update on his autobiographical ho...