DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

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

My “Tour of the Abattoir” column in the most recent Tales to Terrify podcast discusses the career so far of horror writer Joe Hill, including a lengthy review of his latest novel, NOS4A2. Fiction is by John Dodds. Click here to have a shivery listen.

The reviewer behind the Just Book Reading blog just came out with a review of The Black Fire Concerto. Not all reviews are like surprise presents, but this one is.   I listened to the first part of this book when it was featured on

I’m honored to have been invited to take part in the latest Mindmeld post on SF Signal, a roundup of fellow writers and editors discussing favorite women horror writers and current writers to watch. Other participants are Ann VanderMeer, Joe McKinney, Lisa Morton, Rhonda Parrish,

Locus Magazine short fiction review Rich Horton has some really cool things to say about my short story “Still Life With Skull” in his just-published review of Solaris Rising 2.   Mike Allen’s “Still Life With Skull”, set in the same very strange world as