Mike Thorn is offering a Horror-Writing Workshop for Wordspring 2025 (Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick).
WordSpring 2025: Horror-Writing Workshop with Mike Thorn
New Mike Thorn story, “Hell is a False Abyss”, included in charity anthology Look At Our Holes: An Anthology of Voids & Orifices (available now)
Enter into a collection rife with orifice-driven horror and transgression! From literal to metaphorical interpretations, every story in here has a hole at its core—holes that bleed, holes that ridicule, holes that perturb to no end. All sales of this book will be donated to the indigenous Cucapa community of Mexicali, B.C., Mexico.
This charity anthology features Mike Thorn’s previously unpublished story, “Hell is a False Abyss”, and stories by Alissa Nutting, Elle Nash, Charlene Elsby, Brendan Vidito, Tom Over, Josh Simmons, Max Booth III, Alexandra Challoner, and others!
Craftwork Episode 17: Worldbuilding, Aha Moments, & Writing for the Stage w/ S. P. Miskowski
In this interview, we chat with S. P. Miskowski about Asian horror cinema, the power of grief, the relentless desire to shape the self, and so much more.
S. P. Miskowski is a recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, for literature and for drama. Her books have been recognized with four Shirley Jackson Award nominations and two Bram Stoker Award nominations. Her stories have appeared in many anthologies including Haunted Nights, Human Monsters, Looming Low I and II, The Madness of Dr. Caligari, Uncertainties III, October Dreams 2, The Best Horror of the Year Vol. 10, and Darker Companions: 50 Years of Ramsey Campbell, and in magazines including Identity Theory, Black Static, Vastarien, Supernatural Tales, and Cosmic Horror Monthly. Her grunge noir novel I Wish I Was Like You was named This Is Horror Novel of the Year 2017 and is available via Audible. An omnibus of her books set in the weird fictional town of Skillute, WA is forthcoming from Broken Eye Books in 2025.
Books and stories mentioned in this episode:
- The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales – Alfred A. Knopf, pub.
- The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024 – S. A. Cosby, ed.
- D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths – Ingrid & Edgar Parin d’Aulaire
- Go, Dog. Go! – P. D. Eastman
- Rock Paper Scissors – Alice Feeney
- The Haunting of Hill House; “Maybe it Was the Car”; “The Summer People”; We Have Always Lived in the Castle; “The Witch” – Shirley Jackson
- None of This is True – Lisa Jewell
- Audition – Ryū Murakami
- “Bluebeard”; “Cinderella” – Charles Perrault
- “The Black Cat”; “The Cask of Amontillado” – Edgar Allan Poe
- The Last Party – A. R. Torre
- The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023 – Lisa Unger, ed.
Shelter for the Damned featured in “Nightmares Exist Outside Logic” (Lawrence Library blog)
“Themes of adolescence, rage, toxic masculinity and addiction are portrayed in a terrifying but comprehensible way, and the book manages to succeed in pulling at empathetic heartstrings while simultaneously delivering a very dark, surreal story that will occupy minds for ages.”
Best first viewings, 2024
Pre-2024 releases only.
TOP 10 VIEWINGS (one per director)
Die Nibelungen, Part II: Kriemhild’s Revenge (Fritz Lang, 1924)
Cleopatra (Cecil B. DeMille, 1934)
Three Comrades (Frank Borzage, 1938)
Mogambo (John Ford, 1953)
Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954)
The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (Richard Fleischer, 1955)
Peyton Place (Mark Robson, 1957)
The Big Country (William Wyler, 1958)
The Hound of the Baskervilles (Terence Fisher, 1959)
Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959)
ADDITIONAL STANDOUT VIEWINGS
City Girl (F. W. Murnau, 1930)
Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936)
The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940)
The House of the Seven Gables (Joe May, 1940)
Carnival of Sinners (Maurice Tourneur, 1943)
The Spiral Staircase (Robert Siodmak, 1946)
The Passionate Friends (David Lean, 1949)
Wagon Master (John Ford, 1950)
The Tall Target (Anthony Mann, 1951)
Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang, 1952)
Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller, 1953)
The Long Gray Line (John Ford, 1955)
The Quatermass XPeriment (Val Guest, 1955)
Summertime (David Lean, 1955)
Quatermass 2 (Val Guest, 1957)
The Last Hurrah (John Ford, 1958)
The Reluctant Debutante (Vincente Minnelli, 1958)
A Summer Place (Delmer Daves, 1959)
Tender is the Night (Henry King, 1962)
Jason and the Argonauts (Don Chaffey, 1963)
Danza Macabra (Antonio Margheriti, 1964)
War-Gods of the Deep (Jacques Tourneur, 1965)
Island of Terror (Terence Fisher, 1966)
Quatermass and the Pit (Roy Ward Baker, 1967)
Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (Freddie Francis, 1968)
The Unfaithful Wife (Claude Chabrol, 1969)
The Age of the Medici (Roberto Rossellini, 1972)
The Stone Tape (Peter Sasdy, 1972)
Messiah of Evil (Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz, 1974)
The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974)
Burnt Offerings (Dan Curtis, 1976)
The Nixon Interviews with David Frost (Jørn Winther, 1977)
Losing Ground (Kathleen Collins, 1982)
The 4th Man (Paul Verhoeven, 1983)
Angel Dust (Gakuryū Ishii, 1994)
Devil in a Blue Dress (Carl Franklin, 1995)
Perfect Blue (Satoshi Kon, 1997)
Serpent’s Path (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1998)
Ju-On: The Curse 2 (Takashi Shimizu, 2000)
Nightcap (Claude Chabrol, 2000)
Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann, 2001)
Shallow Hal (Bobby Farrelly & Peter Farrelly, 2001)
Ju-On: The Grudge 2 (Takashi Shimizu, 2003)
Swimming Pool (François Ozon, 2003)
The Bridesmaid (Claude Chabrol, 2004)
Speak (Jessica Sharzer, 2004)
The Staircase (Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, 2004/2018)
Reincarnation (Takashi Shimizu, 2005)
A Girl Cut in Two (Claude Chabrol, 2007)
Australia (Baz Luhrmann, 2008)
Missing (Tsui Hark, 2008)
Bluebeard (Catherine Breillat, 2009)
Occult (Koji Shiraishi, 2009)
Watchmen [director’s cut] (Zack Snyder, 2009)
Untold History of the United States (Oliver Stone, 2012)
A Cure for Wellness (Gore Verbinski, 2016)
The Putin Interviews (Oliver Stone, 2017)
Sharp Objects (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2018)
The Staircase (Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, 2018)
I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter (Erin Lee Carr, 2019)
Hemingway (Ken Burns & Lynn Novick, 2021)
The Deep End (Jon Kasbe, 2022)
Eureka (Lisandro Alonso, 2023)
Immersion (Takashi Shimizu, 2023)
Last Summer (Catherine Breillat, 2023)
Tell Them You Love Me (Nick August-Perna, 2023)
The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023)
Best first reads, 2024
Pre-2024 releases only.
TOP 10 (one per author)
Daisy Miller, by Henry James (1879)
A Room with a View, by E. M. Forster (1908)
Pan’s Garden: A Volume of Nature Stories, by Algernon Blackwood (1912)
The Custom of the Country, by Edith Wharton (1913)
Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
Cassandra at the Wedding, by Dorothy Baker (1962)
Another World, by Pat Barker (1998)
Heartbreaker, by Maryse Meijer (2016)
Babysitter, by Joyce Carol Oates (2022)
The Guest, by Emma Cline (2023)
ADDITIONAL STANDOUT READS
We Are Here to Hurt Each Other, by Paula D. Ashe (2022)
This Mortal Coil, by Cynthia Asquith (1947)
The Space of Literature, by Maurice Blanchot (1955)
The Writing of the Disaster, by Maurice Blanchot (1980)
Dandelion Wine, by Ray Bradbury (1957)
Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale, by Charles Brockden Brown (1798)
Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker, by Charles Brockden Brown (1799)
The Sublime and the Beautiful, by Edmund Burke (1757)
The Daughters of Block Island, by Christa Carmen (2023)
Gothic Metaphysics: From Alchemy to the Anthropocene, by Jodey Castricano (2021)
The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers (1895)
Don’t Look Now, by Daphne du Maurier (1971)
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, by Ruth Franklin (2016)
Sea, Swallow Me and Other Stories, by Craig Laurance Gidney (2008)
Twice-Told Tales, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1837)
The Marble Faun, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1860)
The Talented Mr. Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith (1955)
The Woman in Black, by Susan Hill (1983)
The Witchcraft of Salem Village, by Shirley Jackson (1956)
Let Me Tell You, by Shirley Jackson [edited by Laurence Hyman & Sarah Hyman DeWitt] (2015)
Burn Man: Selected Stories, by Mark Anthony Jarman (2023)
Man and His Symbols, edited by C. G. Jung & M.-L von Franz (1964)
Uzumaki, by Junji Ito (2013)
The Red Tree, by Caitlín R. Kiernan (2009)
The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, by Thomas King (2003)
Something Like an Autobiography, by Akira Kurosawa (1981)
What Are You, by Lindsay Lerman (2022)
Existence and Existents, by Emmanuel Levinas (1947)
Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious (1956)
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, by Lorrie Moore (1994)
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, by Toni Morrison (1992)
Devil in a Blue Dress, by Walter Mosley (1990)
Black Water, by Joyce Carol Oates (1992)
New England’s Gothic Literature, by Faye Ringel (1995)
The Gothic Literature and History of New England, by Faye Ringel (2022)
The Devil’s Candy: The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco, by Julie Salamon (1991)
The Last Man, by Mary Shelley (1826)
The Craft of Writing, by William Sloane (1979)
Lost Boy Lost Girl, by Peter Straub (2003)
The Door, by Magda Szabó (1987)
The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, by Tzvetan Todorov (1970)
A Fatal Inversion, by Barbara Vine (1987)
The Color Purple, by Alice Walker (1982)
Star-Begotten, by H. G. Wells (1937)
Ghosts, by Edith Wharton (1937)
The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe (1987)
Strange Seed, by T. M. Wright (1978)
Mike Thorn reviews Chime (In Review Online: Best Films of 2024)
“Chime traffics in the ‘eerie’ titular concept of Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie: a kind of placid, almost subliminal detachment that Fisher argues ‘can give us access to the forces which govern reality but which are ordinarily obscured, just as it can give us access to spaces beyond mundane reality altogether.’ The chime, then, is an auditory metonym for the eerie, an experience that exceeds the visceral shock of horror to inhabit the more transcendent power of terror — 18th-century gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe defines these terms as two distinct phenomena: ‘Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.’ In Chime, the high degree of life is the very thing that contracts, freezes, and annihilates.”
Craftwork Episode 14: Debauchery, Plotless Fiction, & the Paranoiac-Critical Method w/ Nour Abi-Nakhoul
In this interview, we chat with Nour Abi-Nakhoul about copy editing, creative nonfiction, feverish creations, and so much more.
Nour Abi-Nakhoul is a writer and editor based in Montreal. She is the editor-in-chief of the award-winning quarterly Maisonneuve Magazine. Her short fiction has appeared in Hazlitt and The Walrus. Her debut novel, Supplication, was released by Penguin Random House in 2024.
Books mentioned in this episode:
- Kilworthy Tanner – Jean Marc Ah-Sen
- We Are Here to Hurt Each Other – Paula D. Ashe
- Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
- The Guest – Emma Cline
- The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Autobiography of X; Pew – Catherine Lacey
- The Apple in the Dark – Clarice Lispector
- Fever Dream – Samanta Schweblin
- The Adventures of Ratman – Ellen Weiss
Mike Thorn discusses Bram Stoker’s “Gibbet Hill” on CBC Eyeopener
Loren McGinnis interviewed Mike Thorn about the recently uncovered Bram Stoker story “Gibbet Hill.”
Mike Thorn 