DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

I’m thrilled to at last be able to publicly reveal the amazing cover for my first novel, The Black Fire Concerto, which makes use of a spectacular digital painting by Lauren K. Cannon. Plans were made to be foiled, but at present the plan is

To help promote the new anthology Solaris Rising 2 (which contains my short story “Still Life with Skull”) I wrote a guest post for the Solaris blog in response to a request by editor Ian Whates to discuss my favorite sf short story. “When Ian

Because I never have enough to do (heh, heh) I have proposed a discussion, a workshop and three group readings for the upcoming ReaderCon convention in July. As of last week, all have been approved. I share their descriptions below.   GROUP READING: CLOCKWORK PHOENIX

This post is a little late, but then that tricksy Larry Santoro ran my column a little early! Regardless, there’s a new “Tour of the Abattoir” up at Tales to Terrify, in which Shalon Hurlbert and I talk about Let the Right One In in

Monday, I mentioned selling my new short story “Still Life With Skull” to Solaris Rising 2: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction. What I didn’t mention was the minor miracle involved in finishing it and the people I need to thank. See, as it

Tonight I’ll be performing my poem “The Strip Search” at The Best of  the Best of No Shame Theatre, 8 p.m. at Mill Mountain Theatre’s Waldron Stage on Church Avenue in downtown Roanoke. The show is close to sold out already, but I believe there

† This coming Wednesday at The Lyric Theatre in Blacksburg, I’ll be giving a presentation, “How to Run a Successful Kickstarter,” as part of PechaKucha Night Volume 3. The music starts at 6 p.m., the show at 7 p.m., space and tickets are limited. (The

Man, have I got a lot of stuff going on. Anita and I will be there starting Thursday, July 12. Friday July 13 11:00 AM NH    Group Reading: Mythic Poetry. Mary Agner, Mike Allen, Erik Amundsen, Leah Bobet, C.S.E. Cooney, Gemma Files, Gwynne Garfinkle, April

Karen Burnham, who runs the Locus Roundtable at Locus Online, has rounded up a series of speculative poetry-related posts, podcasts and interviews for the month of May, and I got to be first out of the gate. Here’s my guest blog post: “Let us go

Tales to Terrify is the new sister podcast to StarShipSofa, focused exclusively on horror. Madman Tony C. Smith invited me to contribute a monthly column to Tales to Terrify. I just finished recording the first installment. I’m calling it “Tour of the Abattoir.” Said abattoir