Advance review copies (ARCs) and the full press kit are available by contacting Isaac Thorne directly.
Oscar Wilde didn’t know how right he was when he wrote that life imitates art. At least as far as the main character of horror author Isaac Thorne’s new psychological thriller knows. Tab’s Terrible Third Eye, which is Thorne’s third novel, will be available at retailers on Jan. 28, 2025. It is currently available for preorder at many online retailers. Similar to the Middle Tennessee author’s previous two novels, most of the new one takes place in the fictional rural Tennessee town of Lost Hollow.
Tab Beard is a 9-year-old art prodigy, although it seems to largely work against him. His school peers pick on him. His older brother plain dislikes him. The parents are fighting. To top off all that, he’s inflicted with an angry red lump on his left temple that will not heal. After the lump appears, Tab’s drawings, which have taken a sudden turn toward the dark, seem to either predict or cause bad things to happen to people around him. Making matters worse is the oddly familiar-looking ghost that’s haunted him since the lump’s appearance. A man in blue collar garb wearing a red baseball cap sits in the bottom of his closet. Sometimes that man tells him things.
At the heart of Thorne’s story is an examination of childhood trauma and lack of agency. “When you’re a little kid, you have no power,” he explains. “And you have to fight for your agency as you grow up. There are some hurt and angry adults in the world who tend to take advantage of that by convincing the child they’re worthless or a burden. A kid who grows up with that turns into an anxious, traumatized adult. I wanted to kind of shine a light on that through the perspective of the child experiencing it.”
Although Tab’s Terrible Third Eye takes place in the same fictional town that Thorne established in his previous two novels, he says that it is not the third in a series. “Lost Hollow is my sandbox, I guess,” he says. “But the stories are not particularly related, so I consider all my novels as standalone stories. There are some crossover characters and references, though.”
An independent author, Thorne has been writing his entire life and publishing horror stories since 2012. He says he at first intended to only write and publish short stories. “Then, sometime in 2016, the urge to write my first Lost Hollow novel, The Gordon Place, hit me. I think it was two years before I finished the first draft. The second novel, Hell Spring, took less time to write, so after that one I became less focused on short stories and more obsessed with this little town.”
Tab’s Terrible Third Eye can be preordered from isaacthorne.com or any of the retailers listed on its Books2Read page at books2read.com/tabs-terrible-third-eye. Thorne’s site offers signed copies of the hardback or paperback that ship directly from him.
About Isaac Thorne
Isaac Thorne works and lives in Middle Tennessee. He is the author of three novels, including the Independent Audiobook Award (IAA)-winning 2019 novel The Gordon Place and the 2022 follow-up Hell Spring, which was a Next Generation Indie Book Awards (NGIBA) finalist in the horror category. His short screenplay adaptation of his 2016 short story “Diggum” won the “Best Violence” category at the 2017 Chemical Film Festival.
