DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

Rich Horton reviewed two of my short stories in the June 2012 issue of Locus, and put one of them, “Twa Sisters,” on the magazine’s monthly Recommended Reading List. That’s the first time that’s happened to me, so needless to say I’m thrilled. Here’s what

This handsome new hardcover short story collection from British puckster (prank-star?) Ian Watson…. …contains the wacky novelette that he and I co-wrote, “Dee-Dee and the Dumpy Dancers,” accurately described by The Guardian as a “bizarre vision … featuring aerial ballet and alien turkeys.”

Versification has published a poem-by-poem review of Inscrawl #3 by Amal El-Mohtar. About my contribution, “Surcease,” she writes: Mike Allen’s “Surcease” puts his characteristic horror-spin on things, and very vividly and evocatively describes a plague-ridden man in the last moments of his life. The rhythm

Karen Burnham, who runs the Locus Roundtable at Locus Online, has rounded up a series of speculative poetry-related posts, podcasts and interviews for the month of May, and I got to be first out of the gate. Here’s my guest blog post: “Let us go

My new short story at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, “The Ivy-Smothered Palisade,” has garnered a couple of reviews I’m pleased to share. First a review from Tangent Online by Chuck Rothman. He writes: “The Ivy-Smothered Palisade” takes the form of a letter from Daeliya, a woman

My dark fantasy short story “The Ivy-Smothered Palisade” just appeared in the newest issue of literary fantasy adventure zine Beneath Ceaseless Skies. It was inspired by a nightmare I had while attending the World Fantasy Convention in Columbus, OH in 2010 — though the scene

I have been through many a cringe-inducing conversation in my life wherein someone identifies themselves to me as a fellow published poet, and then reveals that they were published by the National Library of Poetry, one of the most infamous scams in recent publishing history.

I’m very pleased to be able to announce the publication of my new short story “Twa Sisters.” It’s a highly experimental science fictional lark that came together from several different point of origin. The most important threads in the weave come from two places. First,

“Kandinsky’s Galaxy,” the latest and for now last of the poems in my Disturbing Muses series, has just appeared in the new issue of Strange Horizons. You can read it here. I owe Strange Horizons Poetry Editor Sonya Taaffe for the existence of both this

As I continue to work on my Secret Second Novel, a number of cool things sort of accumulated all at once. I shall enumerate them here. I have a new poem, “Surcease,” out in Issue 3 of the recently-revived Inkscrawl, edited by Samantha Henderson, published