DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

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

Even before the release of Unseaming last October, folks were expressing to me their enthusiasm for (or terror of, or repulsion by, or some combination thereof) horror photographer Danielle Tunstall’s arresting cover image. The buzz only grew once the book came out.   (Fact is,

Erzebet YellowBoy Carr of Papaveria Press has taken my most relentless horror story and shaped it into something beautiful. The Quiltmaker is available now in a very limited edition, a hand-bound hardcover with stunning cover art from Paula Arwen Owen.     I’ve long admired

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 this was always the plan—   Well, the idea that my short story collection Unseaming would be one of the rewards in a Kickstarter campaign for Clockwork Phoenix 5, that has been my plan for quite some time. Most every publishing project I tackled

So, at the end of 2010, I thought my days of writing poetry were behind me. I had gone from someone excited about speculative poetry, who advocated for it anywhere the opportunity arose, to someone so burned out and dejected by the state of the

So I’ve written a new Lovecraftian tale, my first explicit stab at the Mythos since “Her Acres of Pastoral Playground” appeared in Cthulhu’s Reign in 2010.   My new story is called “The Sun Saw,” and I’m proud to share that it will be appearing

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

Ticks are never easy to spot. An intelligent species of them would be especially evasive, n’est-ce pas?   Folks familiar with my work might find my short story “Tick Flick” an unusually sweet and sentimental depiction of friendship, except that the friends so depicted happen

Fans of weird fiction have been very good to my debut collection, Unseaming — it’s easily the fastest-selling title I’ve ever produced in my 20 years of doing this kind of thing. (And though out-selling my previous titles leaps a pretty low bar, had you