Dissolved Boundaries: Kathe Koja and Mike Thorn in Cinematic Dialogue
To celebrate the release of Dark Factory, Mike Thorn and Kathe Koja sat down to discuss cinema, literature, the creative process and more.
Vincent Potter Reviews Shelter for the Damned in Freefall Magazine
“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.”
Mike Thorn’s Favorite First Reads of 2021
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)
Ink Heist Guest Post: Mike Thorn’s 100 Favorite Books of All Time
“A list of favorite books is always more a snapshot of a moment in time than it is some unmoving, monumental thing: if you asked me to assemble this list ten years ago, it would look a lot different, and undoubtedly it will continue shifting as I continue aging and reading and aging and reading.”
Peel Back and See Now Available
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.
Anne Golden Reviews Shelter for the Damned in Monstrum #4
“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 