Mike Thorn's Blog, page 10
April 7, 2022
Pre-order SHATTERED & SPLINTERED (featuring new Mike Thorn story “The Events”)
Mike Thorn’s new realist academic horror story, “The Events”, will be included in Shattered & Splintered (edited by James Sabata and Laurel Hightower) alongside fiction by Gwendolyn Kiste, Cynthia Pelayo, Stephen Graham Jones, Eric LaRocca, Hailey Piper, Gabino Iglesias, and others. All proceeds go to The Glen Haven Area Volunteer Fire Department, a critical part of the emergency response community throughout Larimer County in Colorado that provides emergency response to the Glen Haven community and the entire Estes Valley.
Pre-order.
Pre-order.
March 23, 2022
Mike Thorn Reviews Too Old to Die Young for Vague Visages
“Bound up in taboo fetishism and constantly oscillating commitments between the base and the transcendent, and between comedy and horror (much like Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return), Too Old to Die Young uses its genre-codified landscape of moral corruption as an allegorical mirror for America’s crumbling civilization, and as a space for a far-reaching aesthetic study of eroticism and violence in art. Putting itself in conversation with the cinematic genre signifiers most loudly established by Alfred Hitchcock’s oneiric, perverse California masterpiece Vertigo (1958), Too Old to Die Young constantly scrutinizes the wavering spaces where the tawdry mingles with the sublime, where sexual (re)productivity entangles with morbidity and destruction.”
Read the full essay in Vague Visages.
Read the full essay in Vague Visages.
March 8, 2022
Calm and Chaos: An Interview with Rebeccah Love by Mike Thorn (In Review Online)
Preceded by Ripe, Parlour Palm, and A Woman’s Block, Eve’s Parade is filmmaker Rebeccah Love’s final entry in a quartet of films depicting women who struggle against societal expectations, fall into madness, and recover with the help of neighbours. The first three films in this quartet have played through TIFF, VIFF, FNC, and CBC; been featured in the Montreal Gazette, the Psychiatric Eye (the Royal College of Psychiatry’s quarterly publication, UK); and premiered alongside talks by CAMH’s Chief Psychiatrists. In May, Love has been invited to deliver talks in London and Cambridge, UK through the NHS and residents’ associations about her creative depictions of psychosis and her vision for community crisis care.
Eve Parade will premiere on April 16 at the Paradise Theatre in Toronto. Author and film critic Mike Thorn sat down with Love to discuss her political and artistic visions, aesthetics, and form in Eve’s Parade, and her quartet’s various thematic concerns.
Read Thorn’s interview with Love.
Eve Parade will premiere on April 16 at the Paradise Theatre in Toronto. Author and film critic Mike Thorn sat down with Love to discuss her political and artistic visions, aesthetics, and form in Eve’s Parade, and her quartet’s various thematic concerns.
Read Thorn’s interview with Love.
February 16, 2022
Book Signing (February 20, 2-4 pm at Westminster Books, Fredericton, NB)
PhD student Mike Thorn has an upcoming book signing at Westminster Books (February 20, from 2 to 4 pm).
About Peel Back and See
“Mike Thorn’s Peel Back and See is a stunning show-stopper of a fiction collection. Eclectic and truly unnerving, I’ll be thinking of these tales for years to come.”
– Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke
“Thorn is the real deal. A powerful and exciting new voice in horror literature. His work has teeth and can bite you.”
– Jamie Blanks, director of Urban Legend and Valentine
In spaces both familiar and strange, unknowable horrors lurk.
From the recesses of the Internet, where cosmic terror shows its face on an endless live feed, to a museum celebrating the sordid legacy of an occultist painter, this chilling collection of sixteen short stories will plunge you into the eerie, pessimistic imagination of Mike Thorn.
Peel Back and See urges its readers to look closer, to push past surface-level appearances and face the things that stir below.
About Mike Thorn
Mike Thorn is the author of Shelter for the Damned, Darkest Hours, and Peel Back and See. His fiction has appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies, and podcasts, including Vastarien, Dark Moon Digest, and The NoSleep Podcast. His books have earned praise from Jamie Blanks (director of Urban Legend and Valentine), Jeffrey Reddick (creator of Final Destination), and Daniel Goldhaber (director of Netflix’s Cam). His essays and articles have been published in American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper (University of Texas Press), Beyond Empowertainment: Exploring Feminist Horror (Seventh Row), The Film Stage, and elsewhere. He is currently pursuing his PhD in Creative Writing at the University of New Brunswick.
About Peel Back and See
“Mike Thorn’s Peel Back and See is a stunning show-stopper of a fiction collection. Eclectic and truly unnerving, I’ll be thinking of these tales for years to come.”
– Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke
“Thorn is the real deal. A powerful and exciting new voice in horror literature. His work has teeth and can bite you.”
– Jamie Blanks, director of Urban Legend and Valentine
In spaces both familiar and strange, unknowable horrors lurk.
From the recesses of the Internet, where cosmic terror shows its face on an endless live feed, to a museum celebrating the sordid legacy of an occultist painter, this chilling collection of sixteen short stories will plunge you into the eerie, pessimistic imagination of Mike Thorn.
Peel Back and See urges its readers to look closer, to push past surface-level appearances and face the things that stir below.
About Mike Thorn
Mike Thorn is the author of Shelter for the Damned, Darkest Hours, and Peel Back and See. His fiction has appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies, and podcasts, including Vastarien, Dark Moon Digest, and The NoSleep Podcast. His books have earned praise from Jamie Blanks (director of Urban Legend and Valentine), Jeffrey Reddick (creator of Final Destination), and Daniel Goldhaber (director of Netflix’s Cam). His essays and articles have been published in American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper (University of Texas Press), Beyond Empowertainment: Exploring Feminist Horror (Seventh Row), The Film Stage, and elsewhere. He is currently pursuing his PhD in Creative Writing at the University of New Brunswick.
February 8, 2022
Audio Collaboration: Mike Thorn + Yosh Des
Former apartment neighbors Mike Thorn and Yosh Des bonded over their shared commitment to creative expression and a mutual interest in industrial and electronic music. For their first collaboration, Mike recorded a reading of his short story "Entropy Major" (included in his latest collection, Peel Back and See), and Yosh composed immersive soundscape accompaniment.
Listen to "Entropy Major" on YouTube.
Or BANDCAMP.
Listen to "Entropy Major" on YouTube.
Or BANDCAMP.
January 24, 2022
Shelter for the Damned Included on Rich Duncan’s “Favorite Reads of 2021” List
“Shelter for the Damned is loaded with nightmarish scenes and if the idea of a dark coming-of-age story meeting Kathe Koja’s The Cipher intrigues you, this is definitely the book for you.”
Read the post and see the list.
Read the post and see the list.
January 7, 2022
Peel Back and See Reviewed on Howling Libraries
“Mike has a way of paying homage to his influences while creating something incredibly fresh and new, and combining very modern struggles with elements of fear that have plagued humanity for ages.”
Read the full review.
Read the full review.
December 31, 2021
December 30, 2021
Film International, “The Houses That Hooper Built – American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper”
“This juxtaposition between some admittedly cheesy films and their serious thematic undercurrents can be jarring, and nowhere is this effect more evident than in Mike Thorn’s ‘Lizard Brain Ouroboros: Human Antiexceptionalism in Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive and Crocodile.’ These films are not the director’s best by a longshot (although the former, his 1976 follow-up to Texas Chain Saw, has enjoyed a cult following), but Thorn skillfully dissects how they illustrate ‘the [triune brain] theory…that human cognition’s roots can be traced to the nonhuman animal world’ (106). The boundary separating these worlds dissolves, and viewers may find themselves rooting more for the so-called ‘monsters’ than the oblivious humans exploiting them.”
Read the full review.
Read the full review.
