DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

My next collection of short stories, The Spider Tapestries: Seven Strange Stories, is available now for pre-order in both electronic and paperback formats. The book will officially launch March 1. The title story is the surreal piece that recently appeared at Lackington’s, that, as it

Three eerie new stories of mine are available online, two of them free to read, the third acquirable via Kindle. Lackington’s first published my short surreal piece “The Spider Tapestries” in November. This month editor Ranylt Rachildis posted all the stories from Issue 8 to

So I drop in a heap at the end of 2015 feeling like I’ve packed several years’ worth of creative living into one. This ain’t the first time for that, but even judged my often hyper-busy standard this has been a barnstormer of a year,

I have been deep, deep, deep in the wilderness of Kickstarter campaign/submission reading land as bits and bobs related to my own writings have popped up over the last couple of months. This is my attempt to assemble them in a more tangible form than

Recently Best Horror of the Year editor Ellen Datlow posted her annual recommended reading list, and I was pleased to see that four of my stories from 2014 made the bloody cut.   On the honorable mention roll call: “The Quiltmaker,” my novella-length sequel to

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

Last week I found out that my newest poetry collection, Hungry Constellations, is a Suzette Haden Elgin Award nominee. This is a relatively new award given by the Science Fiction Poetry Association for best poetry collection, chosen by member vote.   I considered Suzette a

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,

My kooky career path has led me to a place where two major aspects of my life have overlapped unexpectedly: speculative poetry and Rammstein fandom. Horror house Raw Dog Screaming Press has published an English translation of Rammstein frontman Till Lindemann’s second poetry collection, On