Unseaming (35 page)

—
Publishers Weekly
, starred review

Mike Allen’s ability as a poet is evident throughout this fever dream of a book. Brutal, elegant, and shocking, the stories in
Unseaming
are snapshots of a beautiful Hell.

—Nathan Ballingrud, author of
North American Lake Monsters: Stories

Unseaming
is one of my highlights of 2014 … It is my belief that Mike Allen is about to grab a lot of attention with this book. The sporadic publishing of his fiction over nearly two decades has helped him fly under the fiction radar. This changes with his collection. This is where he crashes the party, strutting in like a rockstar, with the skills to back it up. I expect to hear his name a lot in the coming years.

—
Arkham Digest

Mike Allen’s
Unseaming
is wonderfully, wickedly labyrinthine in nature—which is to say, where you start with each story is nowhere close to the destination he has in mind for you. Just when you think you have a handle on the journey he’s sending you on, Allen masterfully leads you down an entirely new path, just as wondrous and terrifying as the previous twist in the road. These are beautiful, complex, unsettling tales of love, loss, and pain that will stay in your head long after you put down the pages, stitching their way through all the dark corners of your soul.

—Livia Llewellyn, author of
Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors

Mike Allen blends a poet’s attention to language with a crime reporter’s instinct for the darker precincts of human behavior. Lush, phantasmagorical, his stories match the monsters outside with the monsters inside, B-movie tropes opening into psychological and spiritual desolation. These stories glow with demonic energy, and what they illuminate are the faces of our secret selves, screaming back at us from the mirror’s depths.

—John Langan, author of
The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies

Mike Allen’s
Unseaming
confirms his status as a poet who writes in dread and awe rather than ink. His most recurrent themes are those of wrenching loss and transformative retribution, with a liberal helping of the literal fear of God(s); sowing out a hundred different apocalypses, personal and otherwise, these stories reap an unforgettable crop of nightmares, sketching a chimeric universe in which shape-changing is less a rumour or an option than a sad, simple inevitability. Not to be missed.

—Gemma Files, author of
We Will All Go Down Together

After you travel these often blistering and always fantastic poetic nightmares with Mike Allen, the darkness owns your soul …
and you rejoice in it!

Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., author of
Portraits of Ruin
and editor of
A Season in Carcosa
and
The Grimscribe’s Puppets

Mike Allen has put together a first class collection of horror and dark fantasy.
Unseaming
burns bright as hell among its peers.

—Laird Barron, author of
The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

Bad Wizard
by James Maxey

In 1892, Oscar Zoroaster Diggs turned up in Topeka with a suitcase full of high quality emerald, instantly making him the richest man in Kansas. With his winning smile and keen mind, he launches a political career that leads to his appointment as Secretary of War under Teddy Roosevelt. Diggs persuades the president that the perfect tool for spreading democracy would be a fleet of new-fangled rigid airships.

Dorothy Gale, a reporter for the Kansas Ear, is dedicated to exposing Diggs’ plans for his fleet of Zeppelins. She’s the one person who knows the truth about Diggs, since she met him ten years previously in the Emerald City, where he called himself the Wizard. But explaining that one of the most powerful men in the world is planning to use his aerial navy to invade an invisible island in the sky ruled by witches is a difficult story to tell her editor. With power of her silver slippers and some help from old friends, can Dorothy stop Diggs from once more claiming the throne of Oz?