Mike Thorn's Blog, page 10

Jason’s Weird Reads: “Best Books I’ve Read Because of Booktube” (featuring Darkest Hours)

Watch the video.

Dissolved Boundaries: Kathe Koja and Mike Thorn in Cinematic Dialogue

To celebrate the release of Dark Factory, Mike Thorn and Kathe Koja sat down to discuss cinema, literature, the creative process and more.

Read the discussion on In Review Online.

The Fiddlehead: Mike Thorn Reviews David Folster’s Discovering the Movies in New Brunswick

“David Folster’s posthumously published Discovering the Movies in New Brunswick offers a journalistic and intentionally wandering study of its title province’s cinematic history. Spanning the late nineteenth to early twenty-first centuries, the book comprises a dense collection of esoterica, six-degrees-of-separation links, margin notes, and coincidences, all centered in a locale not customarily associated with film history (the province of New Brunswick).”

Read the full review.

Night Worms Guest Post: A Photoshoot Inspired by Fiction | Mike Thorn & Danielle Nicol

Check out the photoshoot on Night Worms.

Mike Thorn on Shepherd: “The best books about descents into existential darkness”

Check out the list.

Today in X-RAY Literary Magazine: Mike Thorn on film with Rebecca Gransden

What film, or films, made the first deep impression on you?

This question is always difficult to answer, because I honestly can’t remember a time before I was totally obsessed with film. Like many suburban Canadian families in the nineties, mine owned a collection of Disney movies on VHS. I think Fantasia (1940) was the first one that really resonated with me in a major way—it was just this overload of pure sound and image, scary and funny and beautiful and intense.

Read the full interview

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.

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.

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.

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.