For reasons good and bad, I’m awfully behind in promoting my latest writing and publishing hijinx. So, belatedly but enthusiastically, more than three weeks after the fact, I’m thrilled to announce that my second short story collection, the ultra-ultraweird The Spider Tapestries: Seven Strange Stories, is loose in the world!
 
I had been planning on Book Day to share the full text of the wonderful blurb that World Fantasy Award winner Scott Nicolay wrote for The Spider Tapestries—except I never managed to make a Book Day announcement. So here it is now, still unbowed:
 

“There was a time before the marketplace sliced our wild fantastic literature into bite sized chunks, a time when visions could be astounding, amazing, and weird all at once, a time when Clark Ashton Smith could mainline a Thousand and One Nights into million-colored suns. Now comes Mike Allen, shredding raw that scar-woven shroud between then, now, and infinity, releasing hallucinatory torrents of jewel-encrusted erotic transhumanism with the intensity of a quasar and stripping bare the secret wheels and cogs of the universe beside those lovers who would destroy them. Here are stories accelerating divine sibling rivalries into ultimate cosmic horror and offering unthinkable sacrifices to mark mere step stones on journeys redefining time, space, and identity . . . dangerous short stories, not padded doorstops, epic explosions out of almost microscopic doses. More than a simple collection, these seven tales overlap and interplay in a crystalline cubist web that might as easily be the nightmares of deities or the dead dreams of a painted cranium, pirated memories or the visions gifted in an azure star spider’s bite. Surrender yourself to The Spider Tapestries and let these tales rewire your mind past genre for a while­—a while woven out of an eternity.”

 
One good thing about taking so long to write this post: I can include the complimentary review of the book that appeared in Library Journal last week!
 

“The seven stories in this slim collection range from dark fantasy to sf to horror—sometimes all within one tale. There are enough spiders here to make an arachnophobe go into hysterics, but they are not the only ones spinning webs. Goddesses, aliens, and genetic splicers all pull on strings. Gems include ‘Sleepless, Burning Life,’ about a woman in love with a goddess, and ‘Twa Sisters’ with a man hiding secrets in his brain. Especially vivid in its blending of imagery and narrative is ‘Stolen Souls,’ in which a former cop tries to reconnect the stolen pieces of his lover’s consciousness.
 
“VERDICT: As he did with his previous collection Unseaming, poet Allen weaves intriguing connections among his tales, applying dizzying, sensual images. Poets often make excellent writers of the short form owing to their ability to use few words to evoke an emotion or paint a picture; this volume displays that skill.”

 
Intrigued by all these wriggly insinuations? Here is a list of links to many (but not all) of the places where you can find The Spider Tapestries.
 

This post first appeared on Descent into Light.