DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

Today, for the sake of the Halloween season, The Roanoke Times (my employer!) published my new ghost story “The Helping Hand.” This was an unexpected boon! I’m honored that my colleagues in the Features Department gave me a chance to exercise my fiction-writing chops for

Locus Magazine short fiction review Rich Horton has some really cool things to say about my short story “Still Life With Skull” in his just-published review of Solaris Rising 2.   Mike Allen’s “Still Life With Skull”, set in the same very strange world as

I’m pleased to announce that my strange somewhat science fictional poem “Dearly Beloved” has just sold to Canadian anthology series Postscripts to Darkness.   I’m especially tickled because “Dearly Beloved” is part of a series — it’s set in the same far future world as

Ellen Datlow has posted her annual “long list” of honorable mentions (Part 1) (Part 2) selected from the material she read for this year’s edition of The Best Horror of the Year.   I was pleased to discover I earned four this year for stuff

I’m proud to able to announce the sale of my short story “The Lead Between the Panes” to Lakeside Circus, publisher, editor and writer Carrie Cuinn’s new online zine. (By the way, she’s still looking for submissions for the first issue.)   “The Lead Between

It all comes down to ReaderCon. Somehow I always manage to do this. However, ReaderCon has always been very good to me, so I suppose it’s in part the con’s fault for being so encouraging. Here’s everything that is supposed to happen, that I’m going

Since the beginning of May I have: Spent a weekend at the home of writer Nicole Kornher-Stace and her husband Dan at a gathering that was informally dubbed “CoalCon,” with the likes of Claire Suzanne Elizabeth Cooney, Francesca Forrest, Julia Rios, Caitlyn Paxson, Dominik Parisien,

Writer and poet Francesca Forrest, who took on the daunting tasking of proofreading the soon-to-be-finalized (VERY soon!) manuscript of my Clockwork Phoenix 4 anthology, brazenly took to the Internet to share how much she liked what she had just read. I’m pleased to point people

I couldn’t attend the book launch of Solaris Rising 2 (lacking the financial and temporal freedom to jet to the U.K. and back for a weekend) but Solaris released this interview with editor Ian Whates and several of my fellow contributors that makes for a

To help promote the new anthology Solaris Rising 2 (which contains my short story “Still Life with Skull”) I wrote a guest post for the Solaris blog in response to a request by editor Ian Whates to discuss my favorite sf short story. “When Ian