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Mike Allen

Unseaming Kindle Edition

by Mike Allen (Author), Laird Barron (Introduction) Format: Kindle Edition

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2014 Shirley Jackson Award finalist for best collection
2014 This Is Horror Award finalist for best collection

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

Allen’s stories deliver solid shivering terror tinged with melancholy sorrow over the fragility of humankind. —Publishers Weekly, starred review

Allen leaves readers with nerves jangling. —Library Journal, starred review

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 Caitlín 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 The Spectral Link

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

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…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

Print length

224 pages
Language

English
Sticky notes

On Kindle Scribe
Publication date

Oct. 7 2014
File size

1178 KB
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Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00O0H7NKO
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mythic Delirium Books (Oct. 7 2014)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1178 KB
Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 224 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #272,614 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #5,020 in Short Stories (Kindle Store)
- #5,712 in Horror Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #6,793 in Short Stories (Books)

Customer Reviews:
118 ratings

About the author

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Mike Allen

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Nebula, Shirley Jackson and two-time World Fantasy award finalist Mike Allen wears many hats. As editor and publisher of the Mythic Delirium Books imprint, he helmed MYTHIC DELIRIUM magazine and the five volumes in the CLOCKWORK PHOENIX anthology series. His own short stories have been gathered in three collections: UNSEAMING, THE SPIDER TAPESTRIES and AFTERMATH OF AN INDUSTRIAL ACCIDENT. He’s won the Rhysling Award for poetry three times, and his most recent collection of verse, HUNGRY CONSTELLATIONS, was a Suzette Haden Elgin Award nominee. A dark fantasy novel, THE BLACK FIRE CONCERTO, appeared in 2013.

More of Mike's stories have popped up in places like BENEATH CEASELESS SKIES, LACKINGTON'S, SPECTRAL REALMS and the anthologies BEST HORROR OF THE YEAR ONE, CTHULHU'S REIGN, SOLARIS RISING 2, TOMORROW'S CTHULHU, PLUTO IN FURS, PHANTASM/CHIMERA, NOWHEREVILLE, TRANSMISSIONS FROM PUNKTOWN and A SINISTER QUARTET.

For more than a decade he’s worked as the arts and culture columnist for the daily newspaper in Roanoke, Va., where he and his wife Anita live with a cat so full of trouble she’s named Pandora. You can follow Mike’s exploits as a writer at descentintolight.com, as an editor at mythicdelirium.com, and all at once on Twitter at @mythicdelirium. You can contact Mike at mythicdelirium[at]gmail[dot]com.

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Customer reviews

4 out of 5

118 global ratings

5 star		48%
4 star		23%
3 star		14%
2 star		9%
1 star		6%

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Top reviews from Canada

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Karl Redekopp

Disturbing

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on April 28, 2016

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I found each of the stories to be quite unique; especially in the style of writing the author chooses to use. Each tale starts off rather innocently and slowly builds to a sense of utter bewilderment and unsettling horror as the reader realizes what's happening . Very well done; highly recommend especially for fans of Lovecraft-type tales of extra dimensional nightmares.

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Paul Roberts

it's one of the finest collections I've ever read

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on January 4, 2015

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Mike Allen's "Unseaming" was THE collection of 2014. Hell, it's one of the finest collections I've ever read. Extraordinary stories of loss, sin and the greater cosmos."Her Acres of Pastoral Playground" is a truly frightening tale. Many of these pieces are indeed short, and what Allen is able to do with just a few pages is a revelation. "The Button Bin", "The Blessed Days" and "Let There Be Darkness" should gain momentum until they are considered modern classics. "The Quiltmaker" is a tour-de-force of multiple perspective retribution.

"Unseaming" is a collection I will cherish and return to more often than a sane man should. Notice has been served - this is 'top-of-the-food-chain' amazing.

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Top reviews from other countries

Toby King

Utterly twisted. Utterly brilliant.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 6, 2015

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Great collection of dark fantasy and body horror short stories, some of which tie together. Be aware that the stories can be a bit surreal, making them harder to follow / understand than traditional tales.

The first few stories are absolutely excellent, five star ratings without a doubt. However these are let down slightly by some of the middle content which, even to me, was occasionally too much to follow. This is pulled back by the penultimate story which, with its Cronenberg style body horror (think Videodrome or Yuzna's Society), conjured such vivid images it left me wishing I had the artistic talent to draw the grotesque churning monster of flesh the story made me picture!

A highly recommended collection for horror fans. I will be looking for more of Allen's work!

6 people found this helpful

Hughie Jones

Different, well written.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 26, 2020

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I thought the few stories I read were written okay, but the subject matter didn't suit me. Don't let me put you off as I think they are more for a younger generation. I was brought up on MR James and his compatriots.

Garff

some brilliantly chilling stories

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 17, 2015

Verified Purchase

Never heard of this author but really impressed, some brilliantly chilling stories. Definitely recommend!

One person found this helpful

Mike N

Weird? Yes. Worth it? Absolutely!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 5, 2015

Verified Purchase

As one reviewer noted, this is "a bit weird".

Yes, yes it is. That's kind of the point I think. And it's weird in a very good way. I believe one of the stories in this - "The Button Bin" - is an award winner of some kind. I can believe it. It's distinctly unsettling.

I don't want to go into details for any of the stories - I think it's best if you experience them for yourselves without any spoilers. It will help maintain the "bit weird" feeling if you don't know what to expect. I do think there were a couple of weaker pieces in the middle though that could probably have been cut to give a stronger overall collection that may have rated 5 stars, but on the whole a very satisfying read.

7 people found this helpful

Steve bailey

These stories are beautifully written and really disturbing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 3, 2015

Verified Purchase

These stories are beautifully written and really disturbing; several of them have stayed with me long after reading them. Very highly recommended.

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Follow the Author

Unseaming Kindle Edition

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About the author

Mike Allen

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