Mike Thorn’s new realist academic horror story, “The Events”, will be included in Shattered & Splintered (edited by James Sabata and Laurel Hightower) alongside fiction by Gwendolyn Kiste, Cynthia Pelayo, Stephen Graham Jones, Eric LaRocca, Hailey Piper, Gabino Iglesias, and others. All proceeds go to The Glen Haven Area Volunteer Fire Department, a critical part of the emergency response community throughout Larimer County in Colorado that provides emergency response to the Glen Haven community and the entire Estes Valley.
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
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.
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.”
“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 