DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

Google shows me this blog review of my short story “An Invitation via Email,” which appeared in the July/Aug. 2008 issue of Weird Tales (#350), edited by Ann VanderMeer. I think the review is longer than the story!

Again, I include it for grins.

… while the idea of the story isn’t much more original than the title it is very well written and depending on your mood and personality either quite funny or quite disturbing.

To which I say, why not both? *g*

Posted in Reviews, Short stories

I’m pleased to be able to share that a poem I wrote just a week ago (and shared at last week’s No Shame Theatre) has sold to Rose Lemberg and Shweta Narayan at Stone Telling. It’s called “Surviving Wonderland” and it’s slated to appear in the “International and Mythpunk” issue.

ETA: Credit where credit is due: the poem was inspired by prompts provided to me by (of course!) Claire Cooney and Patty Templeton. Thanks, miladies!

Posted in Poetry, Writing

Within the past couple days I found this review of an issue of the 2006 issue of H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror (!!!) that contains a short story I co-wrote with Charlie Saplak, “Strange Wisdoms of the Dead.” I share it here merely for the grin it gave me.

“Strange Wisdoms of the Dead” – by Mike Allen and Charles M. Saplak – Loved this story! Waking dead, lost loves, philosophical realizations … definitely recommend it.

I note, despite the magazine’s name, there was nothing at all Lovecraftian about the tale.

Posted in Fiction, Reviews

Last night Anita and I sorted out the official table of contents for Mythic Delirium 25. And here it is:

Myths and Delusions • Editorial • 2
Elegy for Robert Sheckley • Florence Major • 3
Joseph Carey Merrick • Florence Major • 5
Babel Before Babel • Howard V. Hendrix • 6
The Description of a Wish • Sonya Taaffe • 7
The Melancholy of Mechagirl • Catherynne M. Valente • 8
The Magic Walnut • Sofía Rhei • Translation by Lawrence Schimel • 12
Little Girls, Atom Bombs • Jeannine Hall Gailey • 13
The tenured faculty meets to discuss the Moon’s campus visit • Rose Lemberg • 14
Alien Graffiti • Darrell Schweitzer • 17
Space Dogs • Ann K. Schwader • 18
Claiming Tyche; Nemesis Rising • Michael Fosburg • 19
Nobody’s Song • Jessica Paige Wick • 23
An Unkindness of Ravens • Rachel Manija Brown • 25
Yurei • Susan Slaviero • 26
Silence • Mari Ness • 27
Cloth Demon • Alexandra Seidel • 28
Moon Girl, Earth Guy • Mary A. Turzillo • 29
Trans-Neptunian Shores • Wade German • 30
Venus Crossing the Sun • Melissa Frederick • 31
Raven Singing • Mari Ness • 32

Interior art by Daniel Trout, 4;
Paula Friedlander, 7, 15, 22, 32;
Don Eaves and Terrence Mollendor, 16, 22, 30

Cover art and design by Tim Mullins

Posted in Mythic Delirium, Poetry

Monday brings me two new precious things. First, my new poem “La Donna del Lago,” dedicated to Claire (C.S.E.) Cooney, has appeared at Strange Horizons. Fitting, as it’s the last of the “Claire-dare” poems that she inspired (though not the last to appear in print.)

This marks my return to the SH poetry feed after an absence of almost two years. It’s good to be back!

Also, writer Tori Truslow has reviewed the latest issue of Mythic Delirium, No. 24, over at the Sabotage website.

“Its 24th issue contains some damn fine – finely crafted, finely balanced, finely nuanced – poetry; it also, in good speculative tradition, feels like an adventure from the get-go.”

She highlights works by Ann K. Schwader, Nima Kian, Sonya Taaffe, Theodora Goss, Serena Fusek, Ian Watson, Joshua Gage, Marcie Lynn Tentchoff, Elissa Malcohn and Shira Lipkin. Congratulations, all!

Posted in Mythic Delirium, Poetry, Reviews, Signal boosts, Writing

A new website, Versification, chartered by Erzebet YellowBoy Carr, posts reviews of speculative poetry. The site debuted this week, and three of its reviews, all reprints, concern me: there’s Amal El-Mohtar’s review of my last collection, The Journey to Kailash; Deborah J. Brannon’s review of the 10th anniversary issue of Mythic Delirium, which featured an original poem by Neil Gaiman (and of which I still have a double handful of copies left); and Alexandra Seidel’s review of the latest Mythic Delirium, issue 24.

Other items reviewed include Catherynne M. Valente’s collection A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects, two issues of Goblin Fruit, and quite a bit more. Please read; please support this new venture; and please consider contributing!

Posted in Poetry, Reviews, Signal boosts

Some folks have already gotten the word.

Guidelines here.

Posted in Mythic Delirium

Bull Spec poetry editor Dan Campbell offers a review of the poems in the upcoming Fantastique Unfettered 3, and makes mention of the interview with me that’s appearing there.

…do read it for a hint of how Allen performs his poems and an insight into the darkness present in his writing.

Indeed!

I might add that an additional question appeared on the Fantastique Unfettered blog, asking me, quite reasonably, about my parting of the ways with the Science Fiction Poetry Association.

Posted in Poetry, Signal boosts

Progress on the rewrite of my novel (revised and expanded from my short story “The Hiker’s Tale”) continues apace; ordinarily I would post something like this on my LiveJournal but that forum continues not to function, so, I share here. Today I actually reached the point I had hoped to reach this past Sunday night had much adult world travails not gotten in the way during last week’s vacation. And this is where that puts me word count-wise:

91547 / 110000
(83.22%)

This is a pretty intense part of the book. Here’s a segment I’ll share for a taste:

These are the things I saw, lying on the cold stone floor. A single long room lit by electric lights strung from the ceiling, all the wires visible. A low table of what looked like stone, the first of several in a row, on which someone lay chained, though it seemed like overkill, because his legs were missing from below the knees and his arms were missing past the elbows. The sobs I heard were coming from the figure on the table. “I’m sorry,” I heard again.

I saw that every tile in the floor, every block in the wall, had an inscription on it. A name, and a date of birth, and a date of death. Some of them had epitaphs. Every single one was a gravestone. The letters in the stone beside my head — “Her father’s joy and the comfort of his last years” — were spattered by and filling with my blood.

A bad day, yes.

Posted in Fiction, Novels, Writing

Twitter revealed to me David Hebblethwaite’s review of Apex Magazine 23, which contains a passage about my “Button Bin”:

The first of the issue’s two reprints, Mike Allen’s “The Button Bin” (reproduced from a 2007 issue of Helix), is disquieting in both its style and content. Searching for his missing niece, Allen’s unnamed protagonist tracks down Lenahan, the owner of a craft store, who (Billy Willett tells him) took Denise. Willett was Denise’s boyfriend, who lost his eyes and legs after what the authorities believe to have been a hit-and-run, the same incident in which Denise disappeared. But Willett tells Denise’s uncle something different—about how Lenahan “put us both deep under but he only kept what he wanted from me. Denise, he kept all of her.”  The narrator confronts Lenahan at his shop, and discovers the man’s strange container of buttons, which are far more than they seem. Allen’s second-person narration brings us uncomfortably close to his protagonist, which works to great effect with the imagery of what happens in the story’s closing stages, and also in the shocking way the piece turns on its narrator to reveal that he’s not the man we had been led to believe.

Posted in Reviews, Short stories