DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

First, an excerpt from the “Acknowledgements” essay I wrote for the new edition of my novel The Black Fire Concerto. The Black Fire Concerto began its life as a novelette called “The Reed Player.” This story combined two elements that did not obviously belong together:

I began 2024 with no notion that my first published novel was going to get a makeover. Lo, and behold, that day has arrived! My sidearms and sorcery secondary world zombie apocalypse novel The Black Fire Concerto spreads its black fire curse across the world

Second chances like this one don’t come around often in the publishing world. We’re less than three weeks away from the re-release of my first novel, The Black Fire Concerto. Because I’ve not had other novels published in the meantime, it’s still my first novel,

A combination of terrific and not-terrific developments prevented me from posting several overdue items here before now. I’m going to get the absolute most important thing out of the way first: My novel The Black Fire Concerto has been made available for pre-orders. Here is

This is, possibly, the wildest update I will ever post on this site. Not that many people will read it here, but rest assured, I’ll be sharing this information in other places where it will be seen. As widely as possible, in fact. For starters,

Prior to this post, you’ll notice a proliferation of double posts that were simultaneously shared on both the Mythic Delirium site and this one. That’s because my home blog here had a functional “simulpost to Twitter” feature, which doesn’t work anymore because of Elon Musk-driven

Six dark fantasy and horror titlesdiscounted to 99¢for an early Halloween start See a map of how my stories and upcoming novel connect Read the beginning of my 30th anniversary interview Read the second part of the interview Read part three Reflecting on your published

There’s two big events on my horizon this week. The first is the online release of Nicole Kornher-Stace’s novel Latchkey, which happens Tuesday. The second thing is: Readercon! As I noted over at the Mythic Delirium blog, Anita and I will be running a Mythic

The December issue of Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field is now in stores, and it contains something that’s, from my perspective, very unusual: a 4,600-word interview with me! New York Times-bestselling, multiple-award winning author Seanan McGuire is the headliner, as

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