Author | Critic
“Be warned: unlike most traditional horror, this latest collection from rising horror star Mike Thorn will make you feel less at home with yourself and your world. And the feeling may be permanent. That’s not some blurbic exaggeration or nifty hook. It’s the truth.”
“[T]hese stories are like a collection Poe might have written if he lived today, like Poe in the era of COVID.”
“Mike Thorn knows what is scary, disturbing, and emotionally scarring. He brings it all to the table in a way that is uniquely his.”
“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 