Listening to a podcast about death can seem like a counterintuitive way to unwind, but, if you’re like me, you may find yourself curiously comforted by “My Favorite Murder,” hosted by the friends turned podcasters Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. A cross between “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and “Drunk History,” “My Favorite Murder” follows the same format each week. After a lengthy opening peppered with details from their lives (a Hawaiian vacation, a husband’s trip to a baseball game), Kilgariff and Hardstark take turns regaling each other with grisly tales of murder from around the world. Their unbridled indulgence in the subject, which is what led them to become friends in the first place, feels subversive but not disrespectful. Wisely, they tend to shy away from glorifying the most heinous details or the murderers themselves. Instead, their candid chatter, which has the cadence of a boozy book-club meeting, heavy on the (justified) expletives and shouts of incredulity, gets at the humanity in each story: the tragic, the absurd, and even the serendipitous. It’s telling that the podcast’s wildly loyal fans, who have cheekily dubbed themselves “murderinos,” often credit it with helping to relieve anxiety. Kilgariff and Hardstark’s focus on mental-health awareness, and the sisterly encouragements they direct at listeners and each other, sometimes give the podcast the feel of a self-help forum, dancing on the line between horror and hope.

A jocular tone goes a long way in mitigating the content. (The hosts’ credo is “Stay sexy, and don’t get murdered!”) Still, my favorite murders have less to do with cold-blooded killings than with strange, prolonged sagas. A recent episode, “Coincidence Island,” recounts events on Floreana, a Galápagos island, in the nineteen-thirties—a tale so dense with odd characters and eerie absurdities that the actual murders, tucked neatly away toward the end, feel almost second-fiddle. There are few better ways to get both a peek at the underbelly of human nature and a good laugh in the face of death.