DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

In honor of Danielle Tunstall‘s Chesley Award nomination for best paperback cover, the ebook edition of Unseaming will be on sale for 99 cents through Thursday night.   The Chesley Awards, given by the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists, will be announced Thursday

Readercon was great, but as I’m in the midst of reading Clockwork Phoenix 5 submissions and starting on a novel revision, I’m not going to be able to provide any kind of detailed report.     I did not win the Shirley Jackson Award, though

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,

So I have my final Readercon schedule and it’s pretty awesome (I am going to be one busy, busy tiger) though it doesn’t cover things like the dual-book party Anita and I will throw to celebrate the launch of Bone Swans by C.S.E. Cooney and

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