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Slow Burn
Stories and poems by Mike Allen
Introduction by Christina Sng
Read the interview with cover artist Lasse Paldanius
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“Nerve-racking anticipation and dread . . . An assemblage of horror tales and somber verses that frighten and fascinate.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Nebula, Shirley Jackson, and World Fantasy Award finalist Allen (Aftermath of an Industrial Accident) presents a titillating collection of 14 horror stories and [13] poems. Throughout, Allen takes the idea of nothing being as it seems to supernatural extremes . . . these slippery, surprising stories will appeal to horror fans seeking something fresh.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Unsettling, perceptive, always surprising, always absorbing—Slow Burn is a collection of gems.”
—Premee Mohamed, Nebula Award-winning author of Beneath the Rising
“Slow Burn is a wonderful blend of story, poetry, and co-authored collaboration. It is a collection that transports readers into the shadows through the mythical, chilling, and visceral. Within, you will find tales of messy lives stitched together, twisted obsessions, violence, dark magic, and body horror from multiple perspectives. Truly a slow burn readers will crave to simmer in.”
—Ai Jiang, Bram Stoker Award winner and Hugo Award-nominated author of Linghun and I Am AI
Cover art by Lasse Paldanius
“Mike Allen in these short tales and poems cooks up beauty and brutality in a smorgasbord of horrors cosmic, technological, biological, and downright unclassifiable. Slow Burn is a multifaceted, multifarious feast for the horror-hungry.”
—Matthew M. Bartlett, author of Gateways to Abomination and Where Night Cowers
The search for a missing grandson unearths a pit of unholy hunger. A war between flesh-stealing supernatural entities will subject an entire city to devastating mayhem. In a harrowing future world, a slave is charged by his terrifying master with building a creature in its likeness. The voyage of a plague ship won’t end at mere death. Parasites are partners and lovers, and the immortal soul is but a single stage in the complex life cycle of a symbiote.
Slow Burn gathers fourteen stories of horror and thirteen macabre poems by two-time World Fantasy Award finalist Mike Allen, author of the Shirley Jackson Award-nominated collections Unseaming and Aftermath of an Industrial Accident. Allen’s works are “exquisite and vivid, his worlds rich with brilliant detail,” says three-time Bram Stoker Award® winner Christina Sng in her introduction. “The images he paints with words are terrifying and mesmerizing, keeping you enthralled, unable to look away.”
These tales and verses, set in worlds of fantasy and sorcery, in twisted, surreal futures, and in hard-boiled modern milieus . . . all find ways to explore the abyssal darkness of the human heart.
With cover art and design by Lasse Paldanius and interior illustrations by Paula Arwen Owen.
More praise for Slow Burn
“With vivid and powerful prose, Mike Allen once again stretches the boundaries of horror. From the harsh realities of existence to the grander scale of the cosmos, there’s an astonishing range of ideas and themes that never quail from their subjects. They’ll remain with you long after reading, like ash residue from a long-burning fire.”
—Preston Grassmann, co-editor of The Mad Butterfly’s Ball
“Don’t let the title fool you, Slow Burn is an artistic flame that blazes like an inferno from start to finish!”
—Vaughn A. Jackson, author of Touched by Shadows
“Diabolically inventive and varied . . . You’ll laugh, shudder, cry, and throw up a little in your mouth. Mike Allen’s range can outstretch any fleshy hell-tendril, darting from experimental poetry to cheeky Clive Barker satire to whip-sharp supernatural thrillers . . . achingly human characters and heaping, writhing helpings of body horror.”
—Rich Larson, author of Ymir and Tomorrow Factory
“By turns gorgeous, horrifying, gruesome, furious, darkly erotic, wickedly funny, and frequently all of those things at once, this extraordinary collection never shies away from pushing the reader’s boundaries. Allen masterfully succeeds in being transgressive in all the best and most beautiful ways. I adore this book.”
—Sunny Moraine, author of Your Shadow Half Remains
“Mike Allen (and friends) make and remake the monstrous in Slow Burn, a surreal collection of interconnected stories and poems which snake their way into your consciousness. Here the villains are mothers and aunties and sometimes ordinary folk with names like Maddy, Aaron, and Josey. It’s an ambitious endeavour, an out-of-the-box study of culpability and complicity that succeeds on every level. Consuming horror that is not for the squeamish!”
—Lee Murray, five-time Bram Stoker Award®-winning author of Grotesque: Monster Stories
“You can’t just assume you know where you are in a Mike Allen story, or where you’re going, or where the path ends, and the magic of this new collection lies in that feverish uncertainty. At turns dripping with Cronenberg body horror, infused with Barker misanthropy, and crawling with the darkest fantasy, the stories and poems in Slow Burn are beautifully crafted to lure you in, but their beauty won’t let you go easily. There are too many strange limbs for that. Don’t miss these new webs in the spidery legacy of Mike Allen.”
—Michael Wehunt, author of The Inconsolables
“Like one of the extra-dimensional creatures lurking within Slow Burn’s collected stories and novella, author Mike Allen must also have a thousand eyes, a hundred mouths, and far too many fingers. How else could he find so many strange and hidden worlds—not to mention the strangeness hidden in our own world—and translate it all so beautifully? A mind-bending delight from a horrifically unique imagination, Slow Burn will twist, turn, and transform readers.”
—Gordon B. White, finalist for the Shirley Jackson and Bram Stoker Awards
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Worlds of Myth and Horror: Introduction by Christina Sng
The Windows Breathe
The Feather Stitch
They Say That Time Assuages (with Ian Watson)
The Green Silence
Edifice
Strange Wisdoms of the Dead (with Charles M. Saplak)
Vacant
Falling Is What It Loves
The Shadow Train
Abhors
The Dream Eaters
Slow Burn
Thanomorphosis (with W. Gregory Stewart)
The Butcher, the Baker
Dispelling the Arcana
Good to the Last Drop (with Anita Allen)
Godbody (with Christina Sng)
Matres Lachrymarum
Supernumerary (with S. Brackett Robertson)
The Comforter
The Fifth Horseman
Gherem (with Charles M. Saplak)
The Sacrifices
Machine Learning
The Strip Search
This Rider of Fugitive Dawns
Astynome, After
