{Feature} Mike Thorn presents a cinematic mood board that shows the influences for his latest novel ‘Peel Back And See’

Peel Back And See: Mike Thorn

Cinematic Mood Board

Introduction

As a whole, Peel Back and See is probably my bleakest book to date, with only a few diversions into more playful genre territory (e.g. “Mr. Mucata’s Final Requests”, “The Furnace Room Mutant”, and “Virus”). For the most part, these stories are awash in the personal affective experiences of chronic depression, anxiety, psychological ruptures, post-postmodern despair, addiction, loss, grief, nihilism, pessimism, and suicidal ideation. I set these subjective states against the macro backdrop of cosmic contingencies, ecological catastrophe, systemic manifestations of human cruelty, and studies of the Schopenhauerian will. Fundamentally, then, I draw on two tentpoles of dark literature: the intensely internal fiction of Edgar Allan Poe and the vast and abstractly external writings of H.P. Lovecraft.

KR: You can read Steve Stred’s Kendall Review of Peel Back And See HERE

Undoubtedly, my work also always takes substantial inspiration from the world of cinema: in fact, I originally wrote one of this book’s stories (“Offer to the Adversary”) for Beyond the Book of Eibon, an anthology devoted to Italian horror auteur Lucio Fulci. This list includes films that implicitly and explicitly informed the contents of Peel Back and See, but also some films with aesthetic/thematic connections to the book that I viewed after I finished writing it.

Peel Back And See: Cinematic Mood Board

Peel Back And See

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.

You can buy Peel Back And See from Amazon UK & Amazon US

Author Biography – Mike Thorn

Mike Thorn is the author of Shelter for the Damned, Darkest Hours, and Peel Back and See. The Spanish translation of Shelter for the Damned will be released by Dilatando Mentes in 2022. His fiction has appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies, and podcasts, including Vastarien, Dark Moon Digest, and The NoSleep Podcast. His essays and articles have been published in American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper (University of Texas Press), Beyond Empowertainment: Exploring Feminist Horror (Seventh Row), MUBI Notebook, The Film Stage, and elsewhere. He is currently pursuing his PhD in Creative Writing at the University of New Brunswick.