DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

Over the Thanksgiving holiday I was delighted and pleasantly surprised to learn that the excerpt from my novel The Black Fire Concerto was October’s most read story at Black Gate Magazine.   Black Gate overlord John O’Neill told me the excerpt not only won the

My latest “Tour of the Abattoir” audio column is up at Tales to Terrify. This time I talk about horror master Laird Barron’s new short story collection, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, and also touch on a book that collects some obscure early

It’s different from writer to writer and from novel to novel. The Bull Spec blog has a series called the “The Hardest Part” in which writers confess what was most difficult about scribbling out their books. Samuel Montgomery-Blinn generously invited me to share what made

In which Shalon Hurlbert and I talk about two seriously flawed yet intriguing films in which characters travel into the woods and lose their grips on sanity, The Corridor and YellowBrickRoad. Fiction is by S.A. Partridge and Brendan Detzner. Click here to have a listen.

This notice is mainly for those associate and active SFWA members who have access to the private forums. I’ve made all of the following available there for those looking for material for Nebula consideration. #SFWApro     The Black Fire Concerto (novel, by me!) PDF,

Today, for the sake of the Halloween season, The Roanoke Times (my employer!) published my new ghost story “The Helping Hand.” This was an unexpected boon! I’m honored that my colleagues in the Features Department gave me a chance to exercise my fiction-writing chops for

The Roanoke launch party for The Black Fire Concerto took place this past Tuesday (Oct. 22) in a cozy space at the Raleigh Court Library. (Technically this is the second launch party for the book; the first one happened in July at ReaderCon.) Since I

There’s a new issue of Goblin Fruit out, which is always reason to celebrate.     I have a special reason beyond the norm to celebrate this particular issue. The Goblin Queens have honored me by publishing “Hungry Constellations,” a light-hearted (for me) meditation on

The Raleigh Court Branch Library is holding the Roanoke launch party for my first novel, The Black Fire Concerto, the story of a pair of sorceress-musicians who fight necromancers and ghouls in a post-apocalyptic future. My friend Anne Sampson will provide some beautifully eerie music

I’m pleased to report that Strange Horizons is buying my new poem “The Paper Boy,” a grim meditation on a crime’s aftermath. Thanks go to Romie Stott for accepting it and to Dominik Parisien for motivating me to write it. #SFWApro   I’m also pleased