Unseaming by Mike Allen

Unseaming by Mike Allen

2014 Shirley Jackson Award finalist for best collection
2014 This Is Horror Award finalist for best collection
2015 Chesley Award finalist for best cover

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

Allen, Mike: - Mike Allen is Professor in the Department of Communication at UW-Milwaukee. Mike received his Ph.D. from Michigan State University, his MA from the University of Wyoming, and his BA from Lewis and Clark College. His primary research interest is in the area of social influence in which he has more than 150 published works. The International Communication Association awarded him the John E. Hunter memorial award for life time achievement in communication research using meta-analysis. He is past editor of Communication Studies and current editor of Communication Monographs.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780988912410
ISBN 10	0988912414
Title	Unseaming
Author	Mike Allen
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Antimatter Press
Year published	2014-10-07
Number of pages	224
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.