I loved Mike's Darkest Hours collection a while back, so when he reached out asking if I'd be interested in reviewing more work from him, I couldn't possibly say no. Mike Thorn has this incredible talent for delivering atmosphere, backstory, and chills in as few pages as possible, and these two short stories were no exception to that rule.

Dreams of Lake Drukka follows a young woman whose mother passed away years ago in a drowning accident, and something has been drawing her back to the incident ever since, never letting her rest — always convincing her that something about that terrible, fateful night was not what it seemed. In a desperate need to know more about what happened, she drags her sister along as they return to the infamous lake of their nightmares, and what they find there is downright awful. I had literal goosebumps reading the descriptions in one scene because it was so immersive and easy to lose myself in imagining how petrifying it would be to be a fly on the wall of that scene.

Exhumation takes a very different note; in it, a young man visits home to attend an estranged family member's funeral, but is stunned when another family member not only accuses him of something particularly sordid, but even manages to prey upon repressed memories that had long since been buried. This one is bizarre and I wasn't quite sure where it was going or how it connected to Drukka at first; after I finished it, though, not only were the parallels clear (unresolved family traumas and otherworldly evils, most of all), but I found myself remarkably satisfied with the direction its ending took. 

All in all, Mike's writing is concise and powerful, and his descriptions left me with a spine-chilling sense of "wrongness" that lingered for a few days after — and that's truly one of the best compliments a horror author can receive from me. I can't wait to see what he does next!

All quotes come from an advance copy and may not match the final release. Thank you so much to the author & publisher for providing me with this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

→ content warnings: violence, gore, drug abuse, murder