DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

In which I discuss the novel This Book Is Full of Spiders and the movie John Dies at the End. Our main feature is a reading of “The Gaze Dogs of Nine Waterfall” by Kaaron Warren.

I’m still asking myself this. In terms of writing, editing and publishing, this was easily my biggest year since 2009 (when I was up for the Nebula for “The Button Bin” and had released the 10th anniversary issue of Mythic Delirium and the second volume

For the few and the proud who watch for it, I won’t be recording a “Tour of the Abattoir” column this month for Tales to Terrify. I had spent most of last week wrestling with the Clockwork Phoenix 4 submission pile, with plans to draft

The latest Tales to Terrify podcast contains my newest “Tour of the Abattoir” column, in which I review stories from the first two issue of John Joseph Adams’ new publishing venture Nightmare Magazine, by Jonathan Maberry, Genevieve Valentine, Sarah Langan and Desirina Boskovich.  

My poem “The Vigil,” dedicated to Nicole Kornher-Stace — and also one of my “Claire-dare” series of poems from late 2010 — has just appeared in the newest issue of Goblin Fruit. Making this appearance extra special, the audio reading is by Claire Suzanne Elizabeth

My “Tour of the Abattoir” audio column for Larry Santoro’s Tales to Terrify horror podcast skipped the month of September so that I could finish novel edits for The Black Fire Concerto, coming very soon as an e-book from the fine madmen at Black Gate.

In the latest edition of Larry Santoro’s Tales to Terrify podcast, I talk about the Weird Tales/Save the Pearls controversy and review two new novels, Ennis Drake’s 28 Teeth of Rage and Laird Barron’s The Croning.

The newest Tales to Terrify podcast contains my latest “Tour of the Abattoir” column, in which I and buddy Shalon Hurlbert tear the liver out of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus … but end up finding it somewhat tasty. There’s also a story from podcast overlord Larry

In which I discuss horror stories that have unnerved me over the years, share a very short story of my own, “Six Waking Nightmares that Poe Gave Me in Third Grade,” and review Chesya Burke’s short story collection Let’s Play White. There’s also a short

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