Author | Critic
“When you have the wide open world of a fictional medium, you can allow yourself to explore, to be a little bit reckless and go to some really uncomfortable places. Peel Back and See probably goes further, in terms of my discomfort as a writer, than either of my previous books. We’ll see how readers feel about that, but it was liberating for me.”
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.
Bob Pastorella and Michael David Wilson sit down with Mike Thorn to discuss his three 2021 releases, Jim Thompson, Kathe Koja, writing horror within academia, and much more.
“Be warned: unlike most traditional horror, this latest collection from rising horror star Mike Thorn will make you feel less at home with yourself and your world. And the feeling may be permanent. That’s not some blurbic exaggeration or nifty hook. It’s the truth.”
“[T]hese stories are like a collection Poe might have written if he lived today, like Poe in the era of COVID.”
“Shelter for the Damned is reminiscent of Stephen King in its acute examination of the mysterious pull of place and atmosphere. The descriptions of the shelter are beautiful and evoke a sense of dread I associate with King’s depiction of the Marsten House, the eerie mansion in ‘Salem’s Lot. As King’s work often does, Thorn’s novel also echoes H.P. Lovecraft’s sense of destabilizing ‘outer’ forces (most explicitly when a decidedly Lovecraftian tentacular monster assails Mark in his bedroom). The book takes these elements of Weird fiction and angles them towards the metaphysical.”
Mike Thorn 