DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

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

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

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

Since mid-April, I’ve started a new chapter.   Not so much in any particular writing project, of which I have several ongoing, but in my writing life as a whole.   This “new chapter” feeling comes not from fresh goals I’ve set for myself, but

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

Recently Best Horror of the Year editor Ellen Datlow posted her annual recommended reading list, and I was pleased to see that four of my stories from 2014 made the bloody cut.   On the honorable mention roll call: “The Quiltmaker,” my novella-length sequel to

Editor Rhonda Parrish has shared the lovely and eerie cover for her forthcoming anthology Corvidae, which contains a new weird tale from yours truly, “The Cruelest Team Will Win.” (It’s a sequel, of sorts, to “The Hiker’s Tale” in Unseaming. The corvidae family, of course,

I’ve got two promotions going on simultaneously to tell all y’all about:   Promotion one: My Shirley Jackson Award-nominated horror story collection Unseaming is the featured book today at Kindle Books and Tips. Coinciding with this, the ebook is available on Kindle, discounted from $5.99

A nice surprise at the end of an arduous if triumphant May: my Shirley Jackson Award-nominated horror story collection Unseaming earned some kind words in the latest issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction from reviewer Paul di Filippo:   “Representing sixteen years of prose output from

So I waited until all the pieces were in place before formally announcing this one, though I’ve been plugging it on Twitter for a lil’ while now. Behold The Sky-Riders, a new novelette that’s quite a departure for me, available in numerous online places in