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
Everyone in the world awakens covered in blood-and no one knows
where the blood came from. A childhood doll arrives to tear its
owner's reality limb from limb. A portal to the spirit realm
stretches wide on the Appalachian Trail, and something more than
human crawls through on eight legs. Words of comfort change to
terrifying sounds as a force from outside time speaks through them.
The buttons in the bin will unseam your flesh to bare your nastiest
secrets. Opening with "The Button Bin," a finalist for the Nebula
Award for Best Short Story, and culminating with its sequel, "The
Quiltmaker," which Bram Stoker Award and Shirley Jackson Award
winner Laird Barron has hailed as Mike Allen's masterpiece, this
debut collection gathers fourteen horror tales that, in the words
of Barron's introduction, "rival anything committed to paper by the
likes of contemporary masters such as Clive Barker, Ramsey
Campbell, or Caitlin Kiernan. This is raw, visceral, and sometimes
bloody stuff. Primal stuff." More praise for UNSEAMING Throughout
UNSEAMING, reality is usually in bad shape right from the start-and
from there things proceed to go downhill. Such is the general
background and trajectory of life in Mike Allen's fictional world.
More could be said, of course, but there's one thing that I feel
especially urged to say: these stories are FUN. Not "good" fun, and
certainly not "good clean" fun. They are too unnerving for those
modifiers, too serious, like laughter in the dark-unnerving,
serious laughter that leads you through Mr. Allen's funhouse. The
reality in there is also in bad shape, deliberately so, just for
the seriously unnerving fun of it. The prose is poetic, except it's
nonsense poetry, the poetry of deteriorating realities,
intermingling realities, realities without Reality. And all the
while that unnerving, serious laughter keeps getting louder and
louder. Are we having fun yet? -Thomas Ligotti, author of TEATRO
GROTTESCO and THE SPECTRAL LINK 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
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"
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