Author | Critic
“One of the best things about running a blog dedicated to horror fiction – and hell, just being a reader in general – is discovering new writers. One of the best and most rewarding feelings as a horror fan is reading a new author’s work and being blown away by their talent and the awe of discovering something cool. That is the exact feeling I got when I first sat down to crack open Mike Thorn’s debut story collection, Darkest Hours.”
Today’s post on The Horror Bookshelf comes from Mike Thorn, who released his debut collection Darkest Hours towards the end of 2017 through Unnerving. Thorn’s Darkest Hours is a collection of 16 stories that run the gamut of the various horror sub-genres from bizarro to splatterpunk and everything in between. Just a few of the things you will find in Darkest Hours is alternate dimensions, deadly cults, ghosts, manipulations of reality, human monsters and so much more. I will be posting my review of Darkest Hours tomorrow, so please stop by and check that out as well. Today, Mike stopped by to share his favorite Stephen King books from each decade of his career. What are your favorite King books? Does your list look like Mike’s or a little different?
“With monsters that hunger for flesh, ghosts that lie in wait, and brutality at the hands of humanity – this collection certainly has it all. Delving into the satirical, chilling and downright disgusting, this is a must read for those that like a bit of horror in their lives.”
Horror author S.J. Budd just posted a generous new review of Darkest Hours!
“… you know each one of these tortured souls is going to have something terrible happen to them and half the fun of reading this collection is trying to determine which angle Mike Thorn is coming from.”
Curtis Freeman of Cedar Hollow Horror Reviews had me on to talk about Darkest Hours, horror movies and lots of other stuff.
Author Wrath James White’s reputation precedes him. More often than not, when I see mentions of his work, they’re within close proximity to some variation of the same signifiers: “extreme,” “hardcore,” “transgressive” and “disturbing.” His new poetry collection If You Died Tomorrow I Would Eat Your Corpse earns every single one of those terms. If the killer in William Lustig’s Maniac (1980) sat in on afternoon Byron seminars before going out for his twisted nighttime excursions, the verses looping through his mind might read something like this book’s contents. For literary comparisons, imagine the protagonist of Hubert Selby Jr.’s The Room (1971) waxing poetic in the midst of sadistic fantasies, or Poppy Z. Brite’s Exquisite Corpse (1996) written in disciplined metre.
Yes, this book is very much of a specific sensibility, and it’s very much for specific tastes. The first half is especially demanding and confrontational, almost monomaniacal in its emphasis on masculine power, domination and sexual violence. The language is often viciously blunt, and always uncomfortably intimate. I would be lying if I called this thing an easy read.
However, to my mind, the book’s sincere core of intimacy elevates it, preventing it from simply existing as an object of transgression for transgression’s sake. Wrath James White’s use of language is always controlled and efficient, and at times shockingly beautiful, even painful in its precision. To my surprise, I think Corpse is soaring highest when it’s at its least embodied—I’m less moved by its explicit detailing of sexual encounters (although they’re well-written), and more by its stretches of existential angst and vivid abstract imagery. The book’s second half seems to find Wrath James White pulling away a bit from the snarling carnal frenzy that comprises the first half, and that’s when his Romantic heartbeat sounds loudest. Many excerpts from this section achieve their impact by defiling and resisting religious iconography (this book is absolutely boiling with Christian symbolism—mentions of Christ, altars, heaven, hell, angels and demons abound).
The most honest and direct thing I can say about If You Died Tomorrow I Would Eat Your Corpse is that it affected me in a rare way, and that I’ve never read anything quite like it. Proceed with caution.
I wrote a guest post on Where the Reader Grows about my favorite book, film and album released the year I was born (1990). Read the full post here!
Marge Simon and Mary Turzillo’s new poetry collection Satan’s Sweethearts recently received a Bram Stoker Award nomination for Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection, and the recognition is well-deserved. Spanning centuries, continents and perspectives, the book sees two skilled poets collaborating on a central idea: what Simon describes in her introduction as “Evil Women in history.” It’s an amazingly ambitious collection.
Focused largely around female serial killers but also including criminals of other variations, Satan’s Sweethearts showcases an extraordinary amount of research. The vast majority of the poems’ focal women exist or have existed in reality, with a couple exceptions (most notably two of William Shakespeare’s most notorious villainesses—Lady Macbeth and King Lear’s Regan). Simon and Turzillo’s poetry is sometimes evocative and eerily lyrical, sometimes intent on confrontational language and blunt-force imagery. They play creatively within the free-form range, frequently employing verse structures but also veering into prose poetry and even, on a couple occasions, grisly variations on cooking recipes.
The poems alternate between sketches of entire lives to descriptions of intense, isolated moments in time. Simon and Turzillo bend and adapt their voices with stunning adeptness, using both first- and third-person points of view to relay the perspectives of oppressors, victims and omniscient narrators. The two poets’ styles mesh together smoothly and instinctively, lending the book a sense of real cohesion even in the midst of its scope and breadth.
For me, the cumulative effect of Satan’s Sweethearts is one of morbid curiosity. The book’s brief snapshots and vignettes often led me to conduct my own research. I often found myself asking, What was the context here?, or What led to such extreme actions? As is so often the case with real-world atrocities, many of the answers remain unclear, but Satan’s Sweethearts effectively provides a number of entry points for analysis and discussion. If you’re after a recent release in poetry, the horror genre, or both, I can’t think of a better choice than this.
Dracula 3D (2012) is certainly an anomaly in Dario Argento’s cinematic DNA, and I can understand the popular impulse to write it off as “incoherent,” but I am not personally willing to leave it there. If the director’s pre-Suspiria (1977) output can be read as a series of formal trial runs (in a non-pejorative sense), and his five-film run from Suspiria to Opera (1987) comprises a kind of fully realized auteurist vision, then where does that leave his late career? I really do not think I have figured out his 1990-2009 modus operandi (although I really admire its results). It seems that the late 20th and early 21st century mostly sees Argento probing, revisiting and teasing out past obsessions rather than advancing a concise new “agenda.” With that in mind, Dracula 3D appears to stand entirely on its own.
Curtis Freeman interviewed me for Cedar Hollow Horror Reviews. I discuss Darkest Hours, beer, writing rituals and many other things. Read the full interview here.
Mike Thorn 