DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

Get ’em while they’re hot.

Friday I launched a promotional giveaway of my three short stories available through Kindle. It continues through Tuesday night. Here’s what’s happened, what it may or may not mean, and what’s meaningless but definitely fun. I have six e-books uploaded to Kindle. Three of them

In honor of the wickedly dubious achievement of the three volumes of Clockwork Phoenix having sold a total of 666 copies in e-book form as of today, I am making my three strange short stories on Kindle (“She Who Runs,” “Sleepless, Burning Life,” “Stolen Souls“)

My tongue-in-cheek anti-Persephone-poem poem “Machine Guns Loaded with Pomegranate Seeds” appeared today at Strange Horizons. My thanks to Sonya Taaffe for giving this piece a home. My thanks also to Amal El-Mohtar for this delightful Twitter review: Only @mythicdelirium could make me burst out laughing

The latest Tales to Terrify podcast contains my newest “Tour of the Abattoir” column, in which I review stories from the first two issue of John Joseph Adams’ new publishing venture Nightmare Magazine, by Jonathan Maberry, Genevieve Valentine, Sarah Langan and Desirina Boskovich.  

I’m pleased to announce the poems that will be appearing in Mythic Delirium 28, scheduled to be published in Spring 2013. It’s a pretty eclectic mix, though road trips figure prominently. Día de los Muertos • F.J. Bergmann The Beast • Rachel Manija Brown Mice

My poem “The Vigil,” dedicated to Nicole Kornher-Stace — and also one of my “Claire-dare” series of poems from late 2010 — has just appeared in the newest issue of Goblin Fruit. Making this appearance extra special, the audio reading is by Claire Suzanne Elizabeth

My “Tour of the Abattoir” audio column for Larry Santoro’s Tales to Terrify horror podcast skipped the month of September so that I could finish novel edits for The Black Fire Concerto, coming very soon as an e-book from the fine madmen at Black Gate.

Congratulations to poet Sofía Rhei (and translator Lawrence Schimel) whose poem “The Magic Walnut” from Mythic Delirium 25 is a contender for the 2012 Dwarf Stars Awards. (I’ve mentioned earlier that my own poem co-written with Anita, “Unland, Unlife,” is also in the running, along

The guys behind Black Gate have announced that they’ve started publishing fiction on their website, which is great news for those who love fantasy short fiction in general, and also great news for me, as they’ll soon be publishing the standalone novelette that opens my