DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

Back in September, I threw myself full tilt into a long overdue redraft of my fantasy/horror novel Trail of Shadows, after about a year and a half of occasionally pecking at it while dealing with obligations related to Clockwork Phoenix 5. This past Sunday, I

Saturday, I’ll be one of a host of intriguing writer guests reading and giving talks at an event near Atlanta called The Outer Dark Symposium of the Greater Weird. It’s an event created by Anya Martin and Scott Nicolay, the masterminds behind the Outer Dark

Laird Barron, one of my favorite horror writers of all time and a really generous guy (don’t miss his latest, Swift to Chase), started a series of posts over at his journal simply titled “Authors to Read.” Part I, from late February, highlighted great books

I’ve often broken the informal “three things make a blog post” law, but this time around I fully intended to combine three things in one post, heh. Thing One: I’m delighted that Clockwork Phoenix 5 made the 2016 Locus Recommending Reading List and thus is

Starting today at Apex Magazine, my 20,000-word horror story “The Quiltmaker” is free for all to read. This is easily my most gruesome published work to date, originally available only in my Shirley Jackson Award-nominated collection Unseaming. My thanks to Jason Sizemore and his crew

Overall, 2016 was a pretty mixed year for us. We lost our dog, Loki, a sweet soul who’d been the cheerfully goofy center of our household since 2003. I had injury-related health issues that haven’t fully gone away and Anita had an unwelcome surprise on

2016 was a strange year for me (and a stressful one, too, though in ways that have little bearing on this post). My output as a publisher was pretty spectacular by personal standards — my awards eligibility post for Mythic Delirium Books can be found

In the Sudden Plot Twist department, I’m taking another pause from preparing for the World Fantasy Convention to share that: A) My 20,000-word horror novella “The Quiltmaker,” sequel to my Nebula Award-nominated monster story “The Button Bin” and centerpiece (more or less) of my Shirley

Anita and I will be at the World Fantasy Convention this weekend, primarily to cheer on C.S.E. Cooney, whose book from our imprint, Bone Swans: Stories, is up for the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection against some very stiff competition. Our fingers are crossed

Editor Brian Sammons have graciously accepted my new story “Aftermath of an Industrial Accident” for his upcoming anthology Transmissions from Punktown a tribute anthology to the Punktown stories created by Jeffrey Thomas. My story, a sci-fi/horror/workplace satire hybrid, might be the most gruesome I’ve come