Mike Thorn's Blog

September 22, 2025

Craftwork Episode 22: Tonal Registers, Byzantine Journeys, & Repurposing Research w/ Michael LaPointe

Listen to Craftwork Episode 22: Tonal Registers, Byzantine Journeys, & Repurposing Research w/ Michael LaPointe.

In this interview, we chat with Michael LaPointe about navigating the pipeline between impulse and expression, breaking the genteel picture of literature, finding liberation in failure, and so much more.

Michael LaPointe is the author of The Creep, a novel published by Random House Canada. He has written for The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and he was a columnist with The Paris Review. His work has been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories and Best Canadian Essays, and he lives in Toronto.

Books mentioned in this episode:

Affliction; Continental Drift; Rule of the Bone; The Sweet Hereafter – Russell Banks
Naked Lunch – William S. Burroughs
The Adventures of Pinocchio – Carlo Collodi
Bleak House – Charles Dickens
Play it as it Lays – Joan Didion
The Lover – Marguerite Duras
Middlemarch – George Eliot
American Psycho; Less Than Zero; The Shards – Bret Easton Ellis
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Bad Behavior; Two Girls, Fat and Thin – Mary Gaitskill
In a Lonely Place – Dorothy B. Hughes
Snow Country – Yasunari Kawabata
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination; Sula – Toni Morrison
The Sorrow of War – Bảo Ninh
Inherent Vice – Thomas Pynchon
All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
Voyage in the Dark – Jean Rhys
Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
Last Exit to Brooklyn – Hubert Selby Jr.
Alice James: A Biography – Jean Strouse
The Invisible Woman: The Story Of Nelly Ternan And Charles Dickens – Claire Tomalin
Rejection – Tony Tulathimutte
Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
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September 4, 2025

Craftwork Episode 21: Myth, Fetishism, & the Horror of Living in an Allistic World w/ Gemma Files

Listen to Craftwork Episode 21: Myth, Fetishism, & the Horror of Living in an Allistic World w/ Gemma Files.

In this interview, we chat with Gemma Files about horny monsters, Lovecraftian Airbnbs, the female gaze, and so much more.

Previously a film critic, journalist and teacher, Gemma Files has been an award-winning horror author since 1999. She’s best-known for her novel Experimental Film (Open Road Media) and her collections of short fiction, including the Bram Stoker Award-winning In That Endlessness, Our End and Blood From the Air (both from Grimscribe). Her next book, Little Horn: Stories, will be out in October from Shortwave. She is the autistic mother of an autistic son. For fun she sings, and doodles pretty monsters.

Books mentioned in this episode:

Empire of the Sun – J. G. Ballard
D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths; Norse Gods and Giants – Edgar Parin d’Aulaire and Ingri Parin d’Aulaire
Black Flame – Gretchen Felker-Martin
The Rotting Room – Viggy Parr Hampton
Barrowbeck; The Loney; Starve Acre – Andrew Michael Hurley
Bright Dead Star; Zoetrope Bizarre – Caitlín R. Kiernan
The Jungle Book; The Second Jungle Book – Rudyard Kipling
The Magician’s Nephew – C. S. Lewis
The Reddening – Adam Nevill
Metamorphoses – Ovid
Cyrano de Bergerac – Edmond Rostand
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
Dracula – Bram Stoker
A Dark Matter – Peter Straub
The Castle of Otranto – Horace Walpole
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August 13, 2025

Craftwork Episode 20: Girlhood, Defamiliarization, & Poetic Excavation w/ Emily Banks

Listen to Craftwork Episode 20: Girlhood, Defamiliarization, & Poetic Excavation w/ Emily Banks.

In this interview, we chat with Emily Banks about posthumous publications, linguistic allergies, the atomic nuts and bolts of imagery, and so much more.

Emily Banks is the author of Mother Water (Lynx House Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Plume, Copper Nickel, 32 Poems, The Rumpus, CutBank, Mid-American Review, and other journals. She publishes scholarship on American gothic literature, runs The Shirley Jackson Society, and is currently editing The Oxford Handbook of Shirley Jackson. She holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and a Ph.D. from Emory University. She lives in Indianapolis and teaches at Franklin College.

Books, poems, and stories mentioned in this episode:

“Filling Station”; “In the Waiting Room” – Elizabeth Bishop
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Turn Up the Ocean – Tony Hoagland
“Dorothy and My Grandmother and the Sailors”; Hangsaman; The Haunting of Hill House; We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson
Bliss Montage; Severance – Ling Ma
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy – Jenny Odell
Middle Distance – Stanley Plumly
Pamela – Samuel Richardson
Modern Poetry – Diane Seuss
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July 14, 2025

Craftwork Episode 19: Ghost Stories, Market Pressures, & Tapping into the Subconscious w/ Naben Ruthnum

Listen to Craftwork Episode 19: Ghost Stories, Market Pressures, & Tapping into the Subconscious w/ Naben Ruthnum.

In this interview, we chat with Naben Ruthnum about character development, avoiding TV-brained writing, making sense of first-reader notes, and so much more.

Naben Ruthnum is a Toronto-based writer of fiction, cultural criticism, film and TV. His novel A Hero of Our Time was released by Penguin Random House and was optioned for development by The Littlefield Company. His books include the YA novel The Grimmer, the World Fantasy Award-nominated horror novella Helpmeet and two thrillers penned as Nathan Ripley, both of which have been optioned for development and were published internationally. He has written for Canadian television series including Murdoch Mysteries and Cardinal. As a feature screenwriter, he’s collaborated with Kris Bertin for feature and TV projects in development at Oddfellows, BoulderLight Pictures, Automatik, Skybound, and Blink49. Kris and Naben’s script Road Test made the 2024 Black List.

Books mentioned in this episode:

A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
The Sorceress in Stained Glass & Other Ghost Stories – Richard Dalby, ed.
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
The Black Dahlia; Killer on the Road; L.A. Confidential; My Dark Places – James Ellroy
Black Flame – Gretchen Felker-Martin
The James Bond series – Ian Fleming
The Collector; The Magus – John Fowles
The Green Carnation – Robert Hichens
The Americans; The Tragic Muse; The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
Supernatural Horror in Literature – H. P. Lovecraft
The Beckoning Fair One – Oliver Onions
A Fatal Inversion; Master of the Moor – Ruth Rendell
Flicker – Theodore Roszak
The Tempest – William Shakespeare
Ghost Story; If You Could See Me Now; In the Night Room; Koko; The Throat – Peter Straub
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
A Dark-Adapted Eye; The House of Stairs – Barbara Vine
The October Film Haunt – Michael Wehunt
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July 13, 2025

Craftwork Episode 18: Ekphrasis, Sinuous Sentences, & the Logic of Sound w/ Sarah Bernstein

Listen to Craftwork Episode 18: Ekphrasis, Sinuous Sentences, & the Logic of Sound w/ Sarah Bernstein.

In this interview, we chat with Sarah Bernstein about contemplation, finding time for writing, capturing the rush of language, and so much more.

Sarah Bernstein is the author of two novels, The Coming Bad Days and Study for Obedience, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She is from Montreal and lives in the Scottish Highlands.

Books and stories mentioned in this episode:

Hysteric; Whore – Nelly Arcan
Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
The Moonstone; The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
“A Mown Lawn” – Lydia Davis
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life – Ruth Franklin
The Book of Questions – Edmond Jabès
The Haunting of Hill House; “The Lottery”; The Sundial; We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson
The Melancholy of Resistance – László Krasznahorkai
The Place of Shells – Mai Ishizawa
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being – Christina Sharpe
The House Next Door – Anne Rivers Siddons
The Door – Magda Szabó
Clean – Alia Trabucco Zerán
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June 21, 2025

“The Pasteboard Masks of Text and Screen: On Writers in Gothic Cinema” (In Review Online featured article)

“Gothic cinema inherits an ongoing obsession with writers and writing from its literary ancestors, but how does it translate such text-based fixations into its own audiovisual grammar? How does it stage ‘objective’ diegeses in concert with the innately subjective representations of writers and the act of writing? This article approaches these questions, not by offering a comprehensive history of Gothic films depicting writers (that would require a long, book-length project), but by analyzing a trio of writer-focused Gothic films notable for their dealings with literary ancestry through negotiations between subjective interiority and diegetic objectivity.”

Read the full article here.
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May 1, 2025

Launch discount for The Weird: A Companion (featuring a new Mike Thorn essay)

Order The Weird: A Companion, co-edited by Kristopher Woofter and Carl Sederholm, at a 30% discount using discount code WEIRD30 (offer ends May 30, 2025). This collection features contributions from Thomas Ligotti, Eugene Thacker, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, and many others (including a new Mike Thorn essay on Weird conventions in Darkest Hours).

Featuring a comprehensive editors’ introduction to the Weird as a mode engaging with forms of knowledge, transcendence, and resistance, this collection offers a broad-reaching discussion of Weird fiction, film, art, and thought. Its 31 essays explore theoretical and philosophical applications of the Weird, such as Black Metal Theory, and key Weird themes and tropes such as cosmic horror, radical embodiment and sensation, dark ecological speculation, and forms of alterity. Essays are highly varied in period focus and subject matter, ranging from early Weird works by William Hope Hodgson and Conan creator Robert E. Howard, to the surrealist paintings of Leonora Carrington, to more recent works by David Lynch, Octavia Butler, and Yorgos Lanthimos.
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March 13, 2025

New Mike Thorn story, “Hell is a False Abyss”, included in charity anthology Look At Our Holes: An Anthology of Voids & Orifices (available now)

Enter into a collection rife with orifice-driven horror and transgression! From literal to metaphorical interpretations, every story in here has a hole at its core—holes that bleed, holes that ridicule, holes that perturb to no end. All sales of this book will be donated to the indigenous Cucapa community of Mexicali, B.C., Mexico.

This charity anthology features Mike Thorn’s previously unpublished story, “Hell is a False Abyss”, and stories by Alissa Nutting, Elle Nash, Charlene Elsby, Brendan Vidito, Tom Over, Josh Simmons, Max Booth III, Alexandra Challoner, and others!

ORDER HERE.
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March 8, 2025

Craftwork Episode 17: Worldbuilding, Aha Moments, & Writing for the Stage w/ S. P. Miskowski

Listen to Craftwork Episode 17: Worldbuilding, Aha Moments, & Writing for the Stage w/ S. P. Miskowski.

In this interview, we chat with S. P. Miskowski about Asian horror cinema, the power of grief, the relentless desire to shape the self, and so much more.

S. P. Miskowski is a recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, for literature and for drama. Her books have been recognized with four Shirley Jackson Award nominations and two Bram Stoker Award nominations. Her stories have appeared in many anthologies including Haunted Nights, Human Monsters, Looming Low I and II, The Madness of Dr. Caligari, Uncertainties III, October Dreams 2, The Best Horror of the Year Vol. 10, and Darker Companions: 50 Years of Ramsey Campbell, and in magazines including Identity Theory, Black Static, Vastarien, Supernatural Tales, and Cosmic Horror Monthly. Her grunge noir novel I Wish I Was Like You was named This Is Horror Novel of the Year 2017 and is available via Audible. An omnibus of her books set in the weird fictional town of Skillute, WA is forthcoming from Broken Eye Books in 2025.

Books and stories mentioned in this episode:

The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales – Alfred A. Knopf, pub.
The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024 – S. A. Cosby, ed.
D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths – Ingrid & Edgar Parin d’Aulaire
Go, Dog. Go! – P. D. Eastman
Rock Paper Scissors – Alice Feeney
The Haunting of Hill House; “Maybe it Was the Car”; “The Summer People”; We Have Always Lived in the Castle; “The Witch” – Shirley Jackson
None of This is True – Lisa Jewell
Audition – Ryū Murakami
“Bluebeard”; “Cinderella” – Charles Perrault
“The Black Cat”; “The Cask of Amontillado” – Edgar Allan Poe
The Last Party – A. R. Torre
The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023 – Lisa Unger, ed.
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February 8, 2025

Craftwork Episode 16: Dream Journals, Imaginary Conversations, & Work-Life Balance w/ Fawn Parker

Listen to Craftwork Episode 16: Dream Journals, Imaginary Conversations, & Work-Life Balance w/ Fawn Parker.

In this interview, we chat with Fawn Parker about showing the reader around the room, finding the right tense, protecting your writing time, and so much more.

Fawn Parker is the author of five books including novels What We Both Know (M&S), nominated for the Giller Prize and Hi, It’s Me (M&S), nominated for the Writer’s Trust Atwood Gibson Prize, and the poetry collection Soft Inheritance, which was awarded the JM Abraham Atlantic Book Award and the Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize. Her work has been published in The Walrus, Hazlitt, Literary Review of Canada, and elsewhere. Fawn is a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick and the Poet Laureate of Fredericton.

Books and stories mentioned in this episode:

The Edible Woman – Margaret Atwood
The Mountain and the Valley – Ernest Buckler
Libra – Don DeLillo
The Guest – Emma Cline
Attack of the Copula Spiders and Other Essays on Writing – Douglas Glover
“Experience” – Tessa Hadley
Ulysses – James Joyce
Rejection – Tony Tulathimutte
This All Happened – Michael Winter
How Fiction Works – James Wood
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
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