DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

So this was a surprise. I’d thought my poem “The Headless Hero” in the October issue of Dreams & Nightmares was going to be my last published poem for a while. But then a poem I had sent to Star*Line came out in the Fall

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

For reasons good and bad, I’m awfully behind in promoting my latest writing and publishing hijinx. So, belatedly but enthusiastically, more than three weeks after the fact, I’m thrilled to announce that my second short story collection, the ultra-ultraweird The Spider Tapestries: Seven Strange Stories,

I’m hugely honored that Jeffrey Thomas, author of the cult classic genre mashup Punktown, took time away from his busy writing schedule to craft a blurb for my forthcoming collection The Spider Tapestries. And I’m doubly honored by what he had to say: “We think

This past week, Publishers Weekly reviewed my new short story collection, The Spider Tapestries, and I feel like one lucky author, because whoever wrote the review seems to have understood my super-strange little book on every level. The gist of the review: “Elegant language and

Three eerie new stories of mine are available online, two of them free to read, the third acquirable via Kindle. Lackington’s first published my short surreal piece “The Spider Tapestries” in November. This month editor Ranylt Rachildis posted all the stories from Issue 8 to

The second Mythic Delirium anthology, which I co-edited with Anita, came out at the very end of 2015, while I was in a frenzy of e-book preparation and mailing. When we released the first anthology in the series, waaaay back in 2014 (heh) we were

Ha! I’m been so busy doing things I’ve fallen behind on the blogistic duty of explaining what I’ve been up to. Well, this is a good way to return to form.   My Unseaming “book tour” is over, or has at least landed in a

Sunni K. Brock of Nameless Digest has reviewed two of my 2014 books, horror story collection Unseaming and poetry collection Hungry Constellations, and she has flattering things to say about both.   About Unseaming: This book is positioned to hit the mark squarely within the

Continuing my gradual catch-up between projects (more on what those projects are in future entries):   I’ve sold a new short story, a sweetly nasty tongue-in-grotesque-cheek little short called “Tick Flick.” It’s kind of horror, kind of sci-fi, kind of within the margins of “the