“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 