Julia takes Victoria on a deep dive of octopus stories throughout time and space in this first episode of The Vampire & the Octopus series. We tackle questions like “Are octopus stories a form of colonizer horror?” and “What’s with all the octopus books coming out recently?” and “Why did the 19th century French think the octopus was the physical embodiment of hell?”

Julia and Victoria learn what the word “flannel” means in British English and formulate their own theories about what happened to a stranded deep-sea researcher in the devastatingly beautiful novel Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield.