Author | Critic
“If The Way of Water is a crucial work of tech Romanticism, then another of its richest central dissonances is that between past and future: it imagines a world that stands a chance against modernity’s most brutal and oppressive machinations, thus situating itself in the past, but it also uses its genre modality to speculate a future that exceeds postmodernity’s politically flattening failures.”
“The story, in its last third, plunges into dark depths, with touches of cosmic horror and weird , finishing off its construction of adolescent obsessions, parent-child relationships and youth psychology.”
“Mike Thorn updates the psychological horror novel, taking it to cosmic horror and the most stark realism, using a scathing and sometimes excessive style, not suitable for everyone, really raw at times, he has written a brilliant exposition on the truth for urban youth. Like life itself.”
“While his first collection was great fun, this one shows his growth as a writer, and I feel like a lot of these stories are going to stick with me for a long time. If you haven’t read Thorn’s work this is the perfect place to jump on. I can’t wait to read what he writes next.”
Read the full review on Final Women: Horror from a Woman’s Perspective.
“David Folster’s posthumously published Discovering the Movies in New Brunswick offers a journalistic and intentionally wandering study of its title province’s cinematic history. Spanning the late nineteenth to early twenty-first centuries, the book comprises a dense collection of esoterica, six-degrees-of-separation links, margin notes, and coincidences, all centered in a locale not customarily associated with film history (the province of New Brunswick).”
“Bound up in taboo fetishism and constantly oscillating commitments between the base and the transcendent, and between comedy and horror (much like Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return), Too Old to Die Young uses its genre-codified landscape of moral corruption as an allegorical mirror for America’s crumbling civilization, and as a space for a far-reaching aesthetic study of eroticism and violence in art. Putting itself in conversation with the cinematic genre signifiers most loudly established by Alfred Hitchcock’s oneiric, perverse California masterpiece Vertigo (1958), Too Old to Die Young constantly scrutinizes the wavering spaces where the tawdry mingles with the sublime, where sexual (re)productivity entangles with morbidity and destruction.”
“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 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.”
Mike Thorn 