Visit the Department of English (UNB Fredericton) for more information.
Registration is open for ENGL 3984: Horror Literature (Dr. Mike Thorn, University of New Brunswick, Summer 2026)
New essay, “Plumbing the Depths: Haunted Writers and Haunted Writings,” in Nightmare Magazine
“I propose that horror literature, by definition, hinges on this vexed dialectic, between the affective destruction of thought and the creative process of thought (specifically, of cognizing the incognizable: the supernatural, the numinous, the unseen, the illegible). Within this dialectic, the horror writer oscillates between helpless prey to horror and the creative agent of horror.”
Craftwork Episode 27: Indie Publishing, Intentional Ambiguity, & the Tyranny of Structure w/ Daniel Braum
In this interview, we chat with Daniel Braum about exploring the ecology of the supernatural, finding inspiration in liminal spaces, cultivating a sense of awe, and so much more.
Daniel Braum writes short stories that explore the tension between the psychological and the supernatural. He intentionally adopts the term “strange tales” for his “Twilight Zone-like stories in homage to author Robert Aickman and the intentional ambiguities of his work. His latest collection is Phantom Constellations: Strange Tales and Ghost Stories from Cemetery Dance Publications (2025). His stories appear in places ranging from The Best Horror of the Year Volume 12, edited by Ellen Datlow, and Shivers 8, edited by Richard Chizmar.
Books and stories mentioned in this episode:
- Cold Hand in Mine — Robert Aickman
- The Artist’s Way — Julia Cameron
- Ancient Images; The Hungry Moon — Ramsey Campbell
- “Plunged in the Years” — Jeffrey Ford
- “Children of the Corn” — Stephen King
- The Ceremonies — T. E. D. Klein
- Beginnings, Middles & Ends — Nancy Kress
- Dreams of Dark and Light — Tanith Lee
- Rosemary’s Baby; The Stepford Wives — Ira Levin
- Story — Robert McKee
- Conjunctions 83: The Ghost Issue — Joyce Carol Oates and Bradford Morrow, eds.
- The Jaguar Hunter — Lucius Shepard
- Shadowland — Peter Straub
- Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists — Peter Straub, ed.
- Harvest Home — Thomas Tryon
- The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers — Chris Vogler
Craftwork Episode 26: Sculpture, Anaphora, & Writing by Hourglass w/ Hajer Mirwali
Listen to Craftwork Episode 26: Sculpture, Anaphora, & Writing by Hourglass w/ Hajer Mirwali.
In this interview, we chat with Hajer Mirwali about cross-disciplinary work, embodied writing, poetic mad libs, and so much more.
Hajer Mirwali is a Palestinian and Iraqi writer living in Toronto. Her first book, Revolutions (Talonbooks, 2025), is a collection of poetry on shame, pleasure, and Arab Muslim girlhood. Two poems from the collection also appear in an anthology of Palestinian poetry called Heaven Looks Like Us (Haymarket Books, 2025). Hajer’s work has been published in The Ex-Puritan, Brick Magazine, Room Magazine, and Joyland. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph, and a BA in Creative Writing from York University.
Books mentioned in this episode:
- Trust Exercise — Susan Choi
- The Butterfly’s Burden — Mahmoud Darwish
- Junie B. Jones series — Barbara Park
- Who by Fire; Who by Water — Greg Rhyno
- Harry Potter series — J. K. Rowling
25 Favorite First-Time Viewings of 2025
One per director. Chronologically organized.
Merrily We Go to Hell (Dorothy Arzner, 1932)
Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946)
Forever Amber (Otto Preminger, 1947)
Secret Beyond the Door (Fritz Lang, 1947)
Raw Deal (Anthony Mann, 1948)
The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950)
Don’t Bother to Knock (Roy Ward Baker, 1952)
Magnificent Obsession (Douglas Sirk, 1954)
Pushover (Richard Quine, 1954)
Senso (Luchino Visconti, 1954)
Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963)
Valley of the Dolls (Mark Robson, 1967)
Looking for Mr. Goodbar (Richard Brooks, 1977)
Looker (Michael Crichton, 1981)
The Appointment (Lindsey C. Vickers, 1982)
Mike’s Murder (James Bridges, 1984)
Cold Heaven (Nicolas Roeg, 1991)
Single White Female (Barbet Schroeder, 1992)
Color of Night (Richard Rush, 1994)
Torment (Claude Chabrol, 1994)
Double Team (Tsui Hark, 1997)
Unfaithful (Adrian Lyne, 2002)
How Do You Know (James L. Brooks, 2010)
The Eternal Daughter (Joanna Hogg, 2022)
Cloud (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024)
25 Favorite First-Time Reads of 2025
One per author, chronologically organized.
Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen (1817)
The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins (1868)
The Island of Dr. Moreau, by H. G. Wells (1896)
What Maisie Knew, by Henry James (1897; 1908 New York Edition)
The House of Souls, by Arthur Machen (1906)
Widdershins, by Oliver Onions (1911)
Summer, by Edith Wharton (1917)
Tales of the Jazz Age, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1922)
The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett (1930)
Strangers on a Train, by Patricia Highsmith (1950)
The Nothing Man, by Jim Thompson (1954)
A Severed Head, by Iris Murdoch (1961)
Aura, by Carlos Fuentes (1962)
Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion (1968)
Sula, by Toni Morrison (1973)
The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1980)
Bad Behavior, by Mary Gaitskill (1988)
Ancient Images, by Ramsey Campbell (1989)
Blonde, by Joyce Carol Oates (2000)
Border Crossing, by Pat Barker (2001)
These Truths: A History of the United States, by Jill Lepore (2018)
The Best of Both Worlds, by S. P. Miskowski (2020)
Hi, It’s Me, by Fawn Parker (2024)
Dark Matter, by Kathe Koja (2025)
Wreckage / What Happens in Hello Jack, by Peter Straub (2025)
MONSTRUM 8.2: Vegan and Animal Liberation Horror, guest edited by Mike Thorn (read now!)
Monstrum vol. 8, issue 2 is now available!
Guest-edited by horror scholar and fiction writer Mike Thorn, this robust issue presents six feature essays, two works of original fiction, a dossier of retrospective reviews, and two essays in our student forum. Feature essays cover both literature and the moving image from a broad range of perspectives. From reorienting human and more-than-human animal perspectives in the essays by Poulomi Choudhury, Dru Jeffries, and Britt MacKenzie-Dale, to epistemological and ontological shifts in the way we think of human and more than-human ecologies in the essays by Zoë Anne Laks, Jenni Makahnouk, and William Taylor, and the Introduction by Mike Thorn, the contributions to this special issue explore the challenge of thinking beyond harmful anthropocentric and hegemonic capitalist world systems.
For the first time, this issue of Monstrum includes original fiction. In “The Playground,” celebrated horror author Kathe Koja (The Cipher, Under the Poppy, Straydog) traces a shift in ecological sensibility to what might be called a necessary violence. And with “Cogno,” Mike Thorn (Darkest Hours, Peel Back and See) brings us into the terrifying world of tech-bro longevity at the expense of … maybe everything.
A selection of retrospective reviews considers literary and cinematic texts that strive to reorient human and nonhuman animal perspectives, including a critical reassessment of the (anti-)anthropocentrism in Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2018), the vegan aesthetic of Rob Zombie’s films via House of 1000 Corpses (2003), and the brutal struggle against becoming-animal in Stuart Gordon’s grim King of the Ants (2003).
The student forum includes two essays by emerging scholars that continue the issue’s investigations of radical otherness. A product of the SSHRC-funded “Horror Ecologies” workshop by CORERISC held in summer 2024 at Dawson College, Emerson Reault’s essay reads Ginger Snaps as a trans allegory, reconsidering the film’s metaphorical “curse” as less one of becoming a woman, than that of an understanding of one’s embodiment. In their essay, Luka Romney looks at radical empathy for the “animal” Other via Julia Kristeva’s concept of herethics in two of Larry Cohen’s most provocative 1970s films, It’s Alive! (1976) and It Lives Again (1978).
Augur 8.3 includes “Chlorophilia”, a new short story by Mike Thorn and Miriam Richer
What do you desire from the natural world? For millions of years, we’ve been shaped and reshaped by the environment around us. If technology has the power to mimic lush lands and blue waters, how do we bond if we can’t tell what is real or not—or worse, does it even matter? In this issue, we journey through galaxies where love knows no bounds, nature that heals, wild hearts to be untamed, plants that lust.
Read Augur 8.3.
Reading Like a Writer (online course through UNB Art Centre) [instructor: Mike Thorn]
Description:
Reading is arguably the most crucial practice for any serious writer. In this course, you will “reverse engineer” acclaimed short stories to determine how and why they work. You will use these stories as lenses into key aspects of effective fiction (dialogue, plotting, voice, character, etc.) The course will help you to identify the key features of various distinctive prose styles, and you will participate in guided writing exercises inspired by those styles.
Winter term:
Wednesdays, Feb. 11 to March 25 (6 weeks, no class March 4)
6:30 – 8 p.m.
$135 (+ HST)
Craftwork Episode 25: Braided Essays, Collective Solitude, & the Objective Correlative w/ Kasia Van Schaik
In this interview, we chat with Kasia Van Schaik about reverse outlining, asking “what if”, sublimating emotion through landscape, and so much more.
Kasia Van Schaik is the author of the Giller Prize-nominated story collection We Have Never Lived on Earth and the forthcoming book of memoir and cultural criticism, Women Among Monuments. With Myra Bloom, she is the co-editor of the essay collection, Shelter in Text: Essays on Dwelling and Refuge. Kasia’s writing has appeared in Electric Literature, the LA Review of Books, Room, The Rumpus, the Best Canadian Poetry, and the CBC. Kasia holds a PhD in literature from McGill University and is assistant professor of English and co-director of Creative Writing at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, Wolastoqiyik territory.
Books mentioned in this episode:
- Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë
- The Secret Garden — Frances Hodgson Burnett
- Autobiography of Red — Anne Carson
- Boyhood; Youth; Summertime — J. M. Coetzee
- Outline; Transit; Kudos — Rachel Cusk
- The Days of Abandonment; the Neapolitan Quartet — Elena Ferrante
- “The Robber Bridegroom” — Brothers Grimm
- Sweet Days of Discipline — Fleur Jaeggy
- Lucy — Jamaica Kincaid
- Her Body and Other Parties — Carmen Maria Machado
- Housekeeping — Marilynne Robinson
- Rings of Saturn — W. G. Sebald
- Flights — Olga Tokarczuk
Mike Thorn 