Author | Critic
I’m selling signed copies of all my books (limited; while supplies last)! I can take payment through PayPal or e-transfer. Email mikethorn@live.com if interested. Prices (including shipping):
PEEL BACK AND SEE
Canada: $25 CAD/$20 USD
US: $30 CAD/$25 USD
Int: $35 CAD/$30 USD
SHELTER FOR THE DAMNED
Canada: $26 CAD/$21 USD
US: $31 CAD/$26 USD
Int: $36 CAD/$31 USD
DARKEST HOURS: EXPANDED EDITION
Canada: $27 CAD/$22 USD
US: $32 CAD/$27 USD
Int: $37 CAD/$32 USD
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.
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.
“Mike Thorn’s Shelter for the Damned reads like a slice-of-life centered on a budding heroin user—a coming-of-age story with a downward slope.”
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 Josh composed immersive soundscape accompaniment.
“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.”
“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.”
Bleedthrough and Other Small Horrors, by Scarlett R. Algee (2020)
The Flowers of Evil, by Charles Baudelaire [edited by Marthiel and Jackson Mathews, multiple editors] (1857)
The Unnamable, by Samuel Beckett (1953)
Selling the Splat Pack: The DVD Revolution and the American Horror Film, by Mark Bernard (2014)
The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, by John Cheever (1964)
On the Heights of Despair, by E. M. Cioran [translated by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston] (1933)
The Trouble with Being Born, by E. M. Cioran [translated by Richard Howard] (1973)
Porno Valley, by Philip Elliott (2021)
Less Than Zero, by Bret Easton Ellis (1985)
The Rules of Attraction, by Bret Easton Ellis (1987)
American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis (1991)
The Informers, by Bret Easton Ellis (1994)
Glamorama, by Bret Easton Ellis (1998)
Lunar Park, by Bret Easton Ellis (2005)
Imperial Bedrooms, by Bret Easton Ellis (2010)
The Shards, by Bret Easton Ellis (2021)
Carmilla, by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1872)
The Queer Art of Failure, by J. Jack Halberstam (2011)
In the Presence of Schopenhauer, by Michel Houellebecq [translated by Andrew Brown] (2017)
Humanimus, by David Huebert (2020)
The Damned, by J. K. Huysmans [translated by Terry Hale] (1891)
The Europeans, by Henry James (1878)
Washington Square, by Henry James (1880)
The Bostonians, by Henry James (1886)
Ghost Stories, by Henry James (1898)
Billy Summers, by Stephen King (2021)
The Wingspan of Severed Hands, by Joe Koch (2020)
Straydog, by Kathe Koja (2002)
The Blue Mirror, by Kathe Koja (2004)
Dark Factory, by Kathe Koja (2022; forthcoming)
I’m from Nowhere, by Lindsay Lerman (2019)
Shock!, by Richard Matheson (1961)
The Birds and Other Stories, by Daphne du Maurier (1952)
The Running Trees, by Amber McMillan (2021)
The Seventh Mansion, by Maryse Meijer (2020)
Circles, by Josiah Morgan (2020)
The Barrens, by Joyce Carol Oates (2001)
1984, by George Orwell (1949)
White is for Witching, by Helen Oyeyemi (2009)
The World as Will and Representation, Volume I, by Arthur Schopenhauer [translated by Judith
Norman and Alistair Welchman] (1818)
Wes Craven: Interviews, edited by Shannon Blake Skelton (2019)
Of One Pure Will, by Farah Rose Smith (2019)
The Secret History, by Donna Tartt (1992)
A History of Touch, by Erin Emily Ann Vance (2022; forthcoming)
Miss Lonelyhearts, by Nathanael West (1933)
The Ax, by Donald E. Westlake (1997)
“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.”
Mike Thorn 