
Mike Thorn makes a guest appearance on the Optimism Vaccine podcast to discuss Rob Zombie’s films House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil’s Rejects, and The Lords of Salem.
Author | Critic

Mike Thorn makes a guest appearance on the Optimism Vaccine podcast to discuss Rob Zombie’s films House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil’s Rejects, and The Lords of Salem.

“It’s almost Halloween and so I’ve brought in an expert on scaring the hell out of you. On this episode, horror author Mike Thorn joins me to talk his latest short story anthology, the darkly powerful Peel Back and See, out on October 29th from Journalstone Publishing. We also talk about horror on film, salvia trips, sleep paralysis, and a whole lot more.”


“Mike Thorn knows what is scary, disturbing, and emotionally scarring. He brings it all to the table in a way that is uniquely his.”

What first attracted you to horror writing?
Reflecting on my earliest childhood encounters with horror, I remember being initially attracted to the genre’s visual iconography, above all else. It seems impossible to separate my desire to write horror from my interest in reading horror. These two things are inextricably bound.

“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.”