DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

The past few weeks I’ve been occupied with getting Latchkey by Nicole Kornher-Stace ready for the book’s premiere at Readercon in July. (I couldn’t be prouder that Nicole’s novel received a starred review for Kirkus Reviews — the first time a Mythic Delirium Book has appeared in Kirkus, too!)

While I’ve been doing that, a few things have happened on the writing front that I wanted so share.

Sean Moreland’s Postscripts to Darkness has reprinted a horror story of mine, “Tardigrade,” that was first published in 2014 in the limited edition hardcover anthology A Darke Phantastique, edited by Jason V. Brock. It’s one of my most gruesome and most experimental horror stories, and I’m grateful PstD chose to share it more widely.

Here’s the opening hook:

Gunshots in the dark. One, two, three, four, five.

In the abyss, a flatscreen monitor lights, as if awakened by the noise.

From the computer, loud chimes play “Turkey in the Straw” as a creature dances on the monitor, a bear-like thing with chitin for skin and a circular sucking mouth in place of a face. Needles protrude and retract from the orifice in time with the music.

Shuffling in the dark. Bare feet descending stairs. One, two, three, four, more.

A ghost appears, a woman in a pale night robe, trembling all over, pistol clenched in one hand, a snub-nosed, square device. Her wide eyes are moons, her breath coming in half-sobs.

Black stains spatter the belly of her robe. She stares at the monitor. One of the stains is moving, separating from the rest, inching up a fold of cloth over her ribs. She doesn’t notice, but we do.

Click here to read the rest! There’s a new, fun, gross illustration by Ry Graham to go with it.

The reprint of “Tardigrade” is the first prong of a triple attack at PstD. Sean also published a new interview with me that’s even longer than the one that appeared in Locus in December. Sean asked me a number of questions that I’ve not had to field before, and I’m grateful for both his curiosity and generosity.

The interview covers the full range of my fiction, poetry, and editing, and goes deep into where my major stylistic quirks come from. I also expound a bit more on the recent closing of Mythic Delirium magazine. Here’s part of my response to a complex, multi-paragraph question about why all my writing contains elements of body horror regardless of genre:

My father taught biology at the University of Guam and later at Clinch Valley College in Wise, and I remember, on visiting his offices and classrooms, being fascinated by the large plastic anatomy models — you could open them and remove the internal organs, the pieces of the brain, the eyes, you could open the heart up and look inside it. Also all the strange creatures from many phyla floating in formaldehyde, and the even weirder invertebrates described in textbooks. I never did get to see the biology department’s cadaver, but I knew it was there inside its coffin-shaped tank. Somehow, though, none of these things ever scared me the way Poe or Lovecraft did.

And yet, I would have these astonishing nightmares, incredibly vivid, where streets would be lined with veins and intestines and people would suffer gory fates worthy of the grossest splatter films — which I had never watched! As a kid, when something too scary came on the television, I’d flee the room. Those dreams, I’m certain, guide my aesthetic as an adult.

You can read the rest of the new interview here.

Finally, PstD reprinted my poem “Dearly Beloved,” which first appeared in print in Postscripts to Darkness 5 in 2014, acquired by poetry editor Dominik Parisien, and was later nominated for a Rhysling Award. It’s set in the same far-future sf milieu as my short stories “Twa Sisters” and “Still Life Wife Skull,” both of which are reprinted in The Spider Tapestries.

andante maestoso
Long before the partiers arrive, the Arborists
form the ballroom, standing in a dolmen circle,
stretching their many arms until vine-fingers
meet and entwine, bloodflow causing all
their leaves to fan out in rosy canopy,
transparent teeth unsheathed in long smiles
that serve for windows.

You can read the rest of the poem here.

Last but hardly least, a new poem I’ve written in collaboration with S. Brackett Robertson, “shore skin,” has sold to John Benson at Not One of Us. This is the first poem I’ve written in at least two years, maybe longer, so it’s thrilling to have it find a home so quickly. More are coming, all in collaboration with Sally Brackett, so far.

That catches me up. Anita and I (obviously) are planning to be at Readercon next month, hope to see folks there!

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Posted in Editing, Fiction, Interviews, Mythic Delirium, Novels, Poetry, Short stories, The Spider Tapestries, Writing

My second published story in 2018, just like my first, is a form of exquisite corpse! I am nonplussed but also tickled. The joke in journalistic circles is that if something happens three times, you can call it a trend, though I’ve not been invited to participate in a third exquisite corpse, thus no trend yet, heh.

Also, like “It Began in Red Hook,” this new story, “A Game of Lost and Found,” is only available “behind a paywall,” as the kids say these days. Though it’s an old-fashioned kind of paywall, raised in support of a very worthy cause.

“A Game of Lost and Found” was orchestrated by Ranylt Richildis, editor of Lackington’s, as a bonus feature available only to subscribers or to readers who purchase the newest issue of her zine, the “Gothics” issue, released last week. My collaborators in Gothic mischief were Vajra Chandrasekera, Amal El-Mohtar, Natalia Theodoridou and JY Yang.

Amal came up with the story’s title, and it’s a perfect title. It’s also startling how smoothly this Gothic AF Frankenstein’s monster of a tale fits together, which makes the following contest pretty challenging.

Ranylt is offering a chance to win the entirety of Lackington’s back issue archive to those who can successfully guess which writer wrote which section of “A Game of Lost and Found.” To play, you have to subscribe, a mere $9.99 for four issues, or purchase the issue itself, a mere $2.99.

To further whet your appetite, here’s the full table of contents:

• “A Thousand Tongues of Silver” by Kate Heartfield
• “Satia Te Sanguine” by A.J. Hammer
• “Letters Written to the Dearest Deceased Frances Blood” by R.M. Graves
• “Nothing Must Be Wasted” by Arkady Martine
• “Swans and Roses and Snow” by Laura Friis
• “At the Hand of Every Beast” by Premee Mohamed
• “Verwelktag” by Steve Toase
• “Cavity in a Hurt” by J.M. Guzman
• “A Game of Lost and Found” by Mike Allen, Vajra Chandrasekera, Amal El-Mohtar, Natalia Theodoridou, and JY Yang
• Illustrations by Carrion House, Michelle MB, Pear Nuallak, Paula Arwen Owen, Dotti Price, Gregory St. John, Kat Weaver, Carol Wellart and P. Emerson Williams. Cover art by Richard Wagner.

I do have other stories in the pipeline that are not exquisite corpses, I swear. I’ve signed contracts for them and in some cases I’ve even been paid for them. However, the question as to whether or not any of them will appear in 2018 is going to be answered by forces completely outside my control. So if you’re tempted to hold out, by all means, just give in and buy this magazine issue instead. You won’t regret it.

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Posted in Fiction, Short stories, Signal boosts, Writing

It’s been in the back of my mind since April Fool’s Day that it might be neat to do a National Poetry Month tribute, even though the course of my writing has veered well away from poetry in recent years. I certainly wasn’t going to create anything new for it.

But this weekend I remembered, I actually launched this incarnation of my longtime homepage in 2011 with a really elaborate poetry month tribute. Operating under the theory that it’s become old enough to be new again, I present thirteen poems from my 2008 collection The Journey to Kailash, with illustrations, detailed explanatory notes and even audio of me reciting each poem (you’ll have to activate Flash plug-ins to listen to those). And below the links to the main show I’ve included a bonus, my concrete poem “Phase Shift” from which this blog gets its name. Originally published in Tales of the Unanticipated in 1997, “Phase Shift” appears in my collection Hungry Constellations, but this stunning visualization by artist Bob Freeman appears nowhere else but here.

Poems from The Journey to Kailash:

I. “Defacing the Moon” (note about)
II. “Requited” (note about)
III. “A Curtain of Stars” (note about)
IV. “Bacchanal” (note about)
V. “Midnight Rendezvous, Boston” (note about)
VI. “Manifest Density” (note about)
VII. “Petals” (note about)
VIII. “Giving Back to the Muse” (note about)
IX. “Disaster at the BrainBank™ ATM” (note about)
X. “No One” (note about)
XI. “Sisyphus Walks” (note about)
XII. “The Strip Search” (note about)
XIII. “The Thirteenth Hell” (note about)

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Tags: The Journey to Kailash sampler
Posted in Audio, Poetry, The Journey to Kailash

I wanted to acknowledge that I’ve had a new tidbit of fiction appear, and that it’s quite a bit different from anything I’ve had pop out before.

First, it’s part of an ensemble piece, written for what the publishers called a “screaming corpse.” That’s not a literal corpse, believe it or not, but a type of “exquisite corpse.” In your standard “exquisite corpse” exercise, the writer of each new section is allowed to read only the previous section, so that the final product comes out disjointed and surreal. (With this particular story, the contributors were allowed to cheat, and read all the preceding installments, though things got pretty surreal anyway.) The requirement to turn an “exquisite corpse” into a “screaming corpse”? Every writer had to incorporate the phrase “And then the murders began” into their section.

Second, you only get to read this story if you backed The Kaleidocast: Season Two Kickstarter. The story was released to backers on Jan. 19. An audio adaptation by C.S.E. Cooney is forthcoming — also available only to backers.

Those who didn’t back this Kickstarter can gnash their teeth that they don’t get to read a story co-written by (in alphabetical order) myself, Marcy Arlin, Evan Berkow, S. A. Chakraborty, Phenderson Djèlí Clark, D.T. Friedman, Carlos Hernandez, Barbara Krasnoff, Bradley Robert Parks, J. M. Plumbley, Ted Rabinowitz, Rob Cameron, Catherynne M. Valente, Lilah Wild and Fran Wilde.

The story (really, it’s a novelette) is called “It Began in Red Hook.” Lovecraftian reference? Wouldn’t you like to know…

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Posted in Short stories, Signal boosts, Strangeness, Writing

Writing-career wise, 2017 was a deceptively quiet year for me, with a lot of hard work going on behind the scenes but not a lot to show for it publicly. With 2014, 2015 and 2016 being as lively as they were, I concede that a lull was inevitable.

But I didn’t fall altogether silent. These things happened:

Me at Worldcon 75 in Helsinki after swiping Ian Watson’s Staff of Cthulhu. Photo by Anita

• My novella “The Quiltmaker” was reprinted in the January issue of Apex Magazine.
• My anthology Clockwork Phoenix 5 (published in 2016) mustered a powerful ensemble performance, first making the 2016 Locus Magazine Recommended Reading List, then landing a nomination for the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology! The latter, as you might gather, was a first for me, and I’m still pumped about it.
• I produced, on time, four more issues of my online zine, Mythic Delirium. I posted a 2017 awards eligibility post over at the Mythic Delirium site, where you can catch up on all the original poems and stories.
• And a bit of lagniappe: Short stories I picked for Mythic Delirium and Clockwork Phoenix 5 were finalists for the Nebula, Aurealis and World Fantasy Awards.


Me reading at the Outer Dark Symposium. Love that banner! Photo by Eric Schaller

• In March, I want to the first ever Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird in Atlanta, Georgia, a wonderful event where, among other things, I read excerpts from my short stories “Her Acres of Pastoral Playground” and “The Cruelest Team Will Win.” You can listen to that here.
• In August, Anita and I celebrated our 25th anniversary with a trip to Finland and Iceland that not at all coincidentally included attending Worldcon 75 in Helsinki. (I wrote about some aspects of the trip here.) The Hugo Award ceremony was particularly spectacular, and I had the honor of speaking on the “Remembering Tanith Lee” panel about Tanith’s contributions to the Clockwork Phoenix series.


The “Remembering Tanith Lee” panel at Worldcon 75, photo courtesy Ian Whates. From left to right, me, Ian, Shawna McCarthy and John-Henri Holmberg

• A new short story, “Binding,” appeared in August in Phantasm/Chimera: An Anthology of Strange and Troubling Dreams, edited by Scott Dwyer.
• A new poem, “The Headless Hero,” appeared in the September issue of Dreams & Nightmares.
• Another new short story, “Burn the Kool Kidz at the Stake,” appeared in the October issue of Not One of Us.
• A particularly fun one: my horror story “The Button Bin” was translated into Chinese (the first time it’s ever been translated anywhere!) in the October issue of Science Fiction World Translations
• And a cool surprise: my short story “Her Acres of Pastoral Playground” has been translated into Ukrainian!
• Another new poem, “Draught,” appeared in the fall 2017 issue of Star*Line.


I dig this photo of me that Beth Gwinn took for Locus.

• A neat final act, especially given how quiet things have been: Locus Magazine published a lengthy interview with me in their December issue.
• Additional fun: helping out with the successful Kickstarter for the second season of Kaleidocast resulted in this chibi drawing.


Chibi me by Jennifer Chu

Most of my writing efforts went into completing an extensive revision of my novel Trail of Shadows, an expansion of my short story “The Hiker’s Tale.” The manuscript is still out on submission. Then I wrote two drafts of “The Comforter,” a novella-length sequel to my stories “The Button Bin” and “The Quiltmaker” (that also pulls in my story “Gutter” and a couple others that haven’t been published yet). I am in fact switching back and forth between revising “The Comforter” and typing this blog entry.

Here’s hoping that playing the long game pays off in 2018. Cheers!

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Posted in Strangeness

The December issue of Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field is now in stores, and it contains something that’s, from my perspective, very unusual: a 4,600-word interview with me! New York Times-bestselling, multiple-award winning author Seanan McGuire is the headliner, as she damn well should be, and I’m like the opening act or the B-picture, take your pick. I’m super-flattered Locus editor-in-chief Liza Trombi found my oddball career worthy of that many column inches; Liza herself interviewed me via Skype.

The topics we covered include my collections Unseaming and The Spider Tapestries, moonlighting as a poet, my largely unknown novel The Black Fire Concerto, the childhood things that brought me in contact with science fiction, fantasy and horror, my problems with night terrors, the truly weird thing that happened that turned me into an editor when I’d never planned on becoming one, finding myself hailed as a writer of the Weird, the awesome time I had in March at The Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird, and more.

You can get the issue at the Locus website, and also at Weightless Books, and, I presume, participating newsstands.

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Posted in Appearances, Clockwork Phoenix, Editing, Fiction, Interviews, Mythic Delirium, Novels, Poetry, Short stories, The Black Fire Concerto, The Spider Tapestries, Unseaming, Writing

So this was a surprise. I’d thought my poem “The Headless Hero” in the October issue of Dreams & Nightmares was going to be my last published poem for a while. But then a poem I had sent to Star*Line came out in the Fall 2017 issue just a month after I received a letter from the new editor expressing interest, thus proving my pronouncement about “The Headless Hero” greatly exaggerated.

“Draught” is a nightmarish rendition of a game of checkers. I wrote it some time back, I’m not quite sure what inspired it, whether it was a literal nightmare or a random musing.

Speaking of nightmares, Scott Dwyer’s anthology Phantasm/Chimera: An Anthology of Strange and Troubling Dreams received a glowing review in the Nov./Dec. 2017 issue of Rue Morgue, especially fun for me as the cover story celebrates the 30th anniversary of the first Hellraiser film.

My story “Binding” is one of the works highlighted in Dejan Ognjanovic’s review, accurately described as “an urban legend told among students about the sinister campus library.” Also highlighted: tales by Brian Evenson, Clint Smith, Livia Llewellyn, Christopher Slatsky, Matthew M. Bartlett and Jason A. Wyckoff. Ognjanovic writes, “Don’t let this small press [anthology] fall under your radar.”

It’s a pleasure to get a mention again in the pages of Rue Morgue, which published a flattering review of my horror collection Unseaming back in 2015.

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Posted in Poetry, Reviews, Short stories

It feels like Anita and I haven’t had much time to take a breath since we got back from from Finland and Iceland in August. In my editorial for the newest issue of Mythic Delirium, I wrote a bit about how that trip went, and I’m still a bit too strapped for time to elaborate further, so I may just never get to. But some cool things have happened since we came back — so here, succinctly, are some writing career-related things that have gone down since our WorldCon adventure.
 
Translation into Chinese

My Nebula Award-nominated horror tale “The Button Bin” has been translated into another language for the first time ever — and it’s quite an auspicious foreign debut, as the story appears this month in Science Fiction World, China’s largest-circulation sf/fantasy magazine. That cover art is off the chain.
 
Two new horror stories

Phantasm/Chimera: An Anthology of Troubling Dreams, edited by Scott Dwyer, includes my horrotica tale-within-a-tale “Binding,” described in a Ginger Nuts of Horror review as “no-frills ghoulish fun.” You can get the anthology here.
 

The newest issue of John Benson’s Not One of Us features a surreal, stream-of-consciousness horror venture from me, “Burn the Kool Kidz at the Stake.” I’m tickled to be back in the pages of this long-running dark fiction zine, which you can subscribe to here.
 
One new poem

The latest issue of David C. Kopaska-Merkel’s Dreams & Nightmares contains “The Headless Hero,” the first poem I’ve had published in two years (and likely the last poem of mine to appear for a long while). Nonetheless, it’s cool to be back in the old stomping grounds.

“The Headless Hero” was inspired by a strange dream about a alternate-universe television show wherein the main protagonist has no body (thus the title is a playful inversion). The rest of the poem is playful, too: you can check out the zine here and see for yourself.

While I’m at it, I feel a need to note, tongue-in-cheek, that all my new publications this year are seriously old-school; that is, no e-versions exist. It’s like I’m back in the 1990s!
 
Translation into Ukrainian

“The Button Bin” isn’t the only story of mine slithering its way into another language. What you’re looking at is a Ukrainian translation of my Lovecraftian tale “Her Acres of Pastoral Playground” at the Warkô Movčök blog. Rather than a commercial venture, this was a labor of love done by professional translator Babasik Funkie on his own time.

Babasik tells me he’s working on the companion story, “Silent in Her Nest,” which flatters me hugely, not the least because I don’t think many people even know that “Her Acres” has a companion story! That’s some impressive “deep cut” knowledge of my oeuvre.

I’ll share that translation when it appears, too.
 
Works in progress

Earlier this year, I mentioned that I finished an intensive rewrite of Trail of Shadows, a novel that’s an expansion of my short story “The Hiker’s Tale.” The novel remains on the desk of the personage I pitched it to, so cross your fingers.

In the meantime, I’ve been working on a novella with the working title of “The Comforter,” the next story in the sequence begun with “The Button Bin” and “The Quiltmaker.” I wrote most of this one longhand — in fact, one of my fondest memories from the trip to Helsinki involves simply sitting on a bench atop a hill in the little park next to our hotel, enjoying the warm sun and a gentle breeze as I scribble away with pen on steno pad, concocting new terrors for my characters to endure. I’ve at last completed the first draft, but it’s mostly handwritten, so now comes the part where I transcribe it all into a word processor file.

That’s a lot to pack into a post — but now I’m caught up!

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Posted in Editing, Fiction, Mythic Delirium, Poetry, Short stories, The Spider Tapestries, Unseaming, Writing

I put up a long post at the Mythic Delirium Books website about the World Fantasy Award nominations for my anthology Clockwork Phoenix 5 and for Rachael K. Jones’s story in it, “The Fall Shall Further the Flight in Me.” In that entry, I wrote about what the nominations mean from the perspective of an editor and publisher.

Here, I’m just plain ol’ me, squeeing that I actually made the World Fantasy Award ballot. It really is a longtime dream of mine, or at least an idle daydream that started up about the time Clive Barker’s Books of Blood became my favorite read as a teenager.

It’s especially wonderful that this nomination dovetails with the choice of the WorldCon 75 programming staff to place me on a panel commemorating the life and art of Tanith Lee.

Thursday, August 10, 2:00 p.m.
Remembering Tanith Lee, 101d, 14:00 – 15:00
John-Henri Holmberg, Shawna McCarthy, Ian Whates, Mike Allen

Tanith Lee (1947-2015) was one of the most influential English writers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror from the 1970’s onward. Her books grappled with contradictions and intersections, especially with regards to horror and eroticism. Her protagonists were often lonely, lovely, and alienated.

Tanith Lee’s stories were the core of the Clockwork Phoenix anthologies through their first four volumes. I feel the need to refer everybody to yet another Mythic Delirium Books entry: here I wrote in detail about her significance to the Clockwork Phoenix books and how a relationship that started out wholly professional became something more for both myself and Anita.

I confess that with each of the first four volumes I had hoped against hope something like this would happen. It never did, and I am definitely sorry that this did not happen in Tanith’s lifetime, although she certainly had no shortage of honors from the World Fantasy Awards and many other awards institutions without any help from me.

Nonetheless I cannot help but feel that she deserves to be acknowledged in this posthumous nomination. And I intend to say so this coming Thursday when I’m speaking on the panel in Helsinki.

Last year I was included on a similar panel at Readercon, and something became clear to me, that I was working with Tanith in more ways then I realized, as the books produced through my ventures as an editor and publisher have been filled by writers inspired by Tanith. On some level I suppose I knew this, but up until that panel I’d not had it so dramatically underscored, listening to authors I’ve worked with and published on multiple occasions — Theodora Goss, Gemma Files, Sonya Taaffe and Lila Garrott — speak about how deeply Tanith’s work influenced them as young readers.

I also recognized during that panel that while the interactions I had with Tanith while she was alive were very dear to me, my relationship with her and her work was rather narrow in scope. So in preparation for this upcoming panel at WorldCon I reached out to other writers and asked them to share what Tanith Lee meant to them. I’m grateful to Dora Goss and Gemma and Sonya and Nicole Kornher-Stace and Silvia Garcia-Moreno and Craig Laurance Gidney, who did not hesitate to share their own very moving thoughts about Tanith. I will share as much of what they sent me as I can with the audience at the panel, and perhaps find a way to make these tributes even more widely available once we’ve returned to lil ol’ Roanoke.

I’m looking forward to seeing many old friends in this country that’s new to us, and also looking forward to making new ones. Onward we go!

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Posted in Appearances, Awards, Clockwork Phoenix, Editing

Back in September, I threw myself full tilt into a long overdue redraft of my fantasy/horror novel Trail of Shadows, after about a year and a half of occasionally pecking at it while dealing with obligations related to Clockwork Phoenix 5.

This past Sunday, I finished that rewrite. (Or, more accurately, abandoned it.) And now that this monster of a book is off to market, I’m pondering which of two to four possible large scale writing projects will be the next thing I machete my way into.

In the meantime, things have happened, none of which I’ve reported here.

“Binding,” a surreal and gruesome little #librarotica story-within-a-story, is scheduled to appear in August in Phastasm/Chimera, an anthology of “strange and troubling dreams” from Scott Dwyer’s imprint The Plutonian. The book has a terrific table of contents that includes Livia Llewellyn, Brian Evenson, Matthew M. Bartlett and more. I understand the goal is a book launch at NecronomiCon in Providence.

“Burn the Kool Kidz at the Stake,” an exercise in stream-of-consciousness reality bending that may or may not also be a ghost story, is tentatively scheduled to appear in the October issue of John Benson’s terrific zine Not One of Us.

Speaking of excellent, long-running zines, David C. Kopaska-Merkel’s Dreams & Nightmares intends to publish my poem “The Headless Hero” in September. This is the first poem I’ve sold in many a moon and is likely the last one I’ll have published for a long, loooong time, so I’m glad it’s found a good home.

On the soundfile front, the talented young Brooklynite whippersnappers behind Kaleidocast are making plans to do a new audio adaptation of my horror story “The Blessed Days,” most recently seen in Unseaming. Apparently this involves capturing my soul inside a chibi drawing.

To give a little extra context to that very first item, Trail of Shadows is about 100,000 words set in the same hypothetical world as my short story “The Cruelest Team Will Win.” As with that story, there are spiders. I’m sure that’s a surprise. The novel is an expansion of “The Hiker’s Tale” that appears in Unseaming. Where there are also spiders. If it’s any solace, cats are in there, too.

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Posted in Audio, Clockwork Phoenix, Fiction, Novels, Poetry, Short stories, Strangeness, Writing