Epeolatry Book Review: Slow Burn by Mike Allen
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Title: Slow Burn
Author: Mike Allen
Genre: Horror Short Stories, Erotic Horror, Occult
Publisher: Mythic Delirium Books
Date: 16th July, 2024
Synopsis: 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 and 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.
Personal confession: since childhood, I have had a phobia of buttons. Haberdasher stores and sewing work baskets trigger me in the least pleasant ways. As a result, reading Mike Allen’s horror fiction is a particular challenge – but I stick with it for the sheer quality of the work itself. So should you.
Mike Allen has been turning out one story after another that have featured in the shortlists of most major horror, weird fiction and related genre awards. A new collection from him is more than welcome. This one brings together 14 horror stories, alternating with 13 macabre poems. (Mike is a three times Rhysling Award winner for his fantastical poetry.) With his wife Anita, Mike Allen runs his own independent press, Mythic Delirium Books, publisher of this volume –Slow Burn is anything but a vanity project.
Slow Burn comes with an introduction from Christina Sng, herself a highly regarded weird poetry writer, and garlanded with plaudits – which it eminently deserves. As well as poetry, the stories are interlaced with evocative and occasionally disturbing interior illustrations by Paula Arwen Owen, redolent of hex signs or alchemical symbols from ancient grimoires.
The prose succeeds superlatively in progressing down mundane pathways before hanging a sharp right into the utterly disquieting and bizarre. From high school angst we progress abruptly into unnatural dread, as in “The Comforter,” or we take a road trip that detours into a crossover between social media anxiety and cosmic awfulness, in “Machine Learning.” The poems are more like distilled quintessence of the same themes and ambience, refined to the pure minimum of expression. There’s a suggestion here and there of a whole mythos, as in the opening story “The Feather Stitch,” or the title tale itself, but never enough to bog you down in a Lovecraftian morass of Portentous Proper Names. Mike Allen’s touch is far lighter and more allusive, although still well able to draw on genre tropes and approaches to add that little extra drama and grit to a narrative.
Indeed, to my mind, it’s the most genre-adjacent stories that are likely to stick in the memory most tenaciously. “Matres Lachrymarum” is much more post-apocalyptic cosmic horror than it is De Quincey, but many other tales are more redolent of noir crime fiction. I could even imagine “The Comforter” forming the basis of a highly original, very bizarre independent horror movie. There’s nothing explicitly folk horrorish in these stories, but there is more than a suggestion of Old Gods of Appalachia-style presences and forces moving behind the modern set dressing. (I won’t speculate about whether the author’s Virginia residency feeds into that.) Just now and again, there’s a dose of dark humour too, as in “Good to the Last Drop,” brewed with his wife Anita, which takes a dip into Hellraiser waters.
Mike Allen dubs this collection the third in “an informal trilogy,” following his preceding collections Unseaming and Aftermath of an Industrial Accident. A few of the tales pick up threads from those collections, but not in a way that is going to discommode any reader who hasn’t read those yet. (Needless to say, any reader who hasn’t is urged to.) A couple stories pick up from his widely praised past tales “The Button Bin” and “The Quiltmaker.” “Abhors” and the novella-length “The Comforter” are set in the same milieu, and the latter is essentially a conclusion. “Slow Burn” also shares characters with both. The collaborative pieces expand the range of the collection, but it’s not like Mike Allen needs any external supplement to elevate his own voice. And for those fans whose expectations have been conditioned by the likes of Unseaming, there’s plenty of squicky body horror, as befits a self-confessed disciple of Clive Barker.
According to Mike Allen’s acknowledgments, he has an upcoming novel, Trail of Shadows, linking to these earlier stories. I await this eagerly – as I will any future collection like this one. Just beware the high squick factor. At the time of writing, Slow Burn is offered by the publisher at a super-low launch discount for the ebook, although I have no idea how long this will last. In any case, buy it at whatever price if you’re seriously interested in what’s happening at the (literally) bleeding edge of weird and unsettling fiction.
/5
- About the Author
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Paul StJohn Mackintosh is a Scottish author, poet, journalist, games writer, and media professional. Born in 1961, he was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, has lived and worked in Asia and Central Europe, and currently lives in France near Geneva.
Paul’s first collection of short stories, Black Propaganda, appeared from H. Harksen Productions in 2016. His second story collection, The Echo of The Sea & other Strange War Stories, was published by Egaeus Press in 2017. His short novel The Three Books was published by Black Shuck Books in 2018. His short story “The People of the Island,” in Eldritch Horrors: Dark Tales, from H. Harksen Productions, received an Honorable Mention from Ellen Datlow in her Best Horror of the Year Volume Two list for 2009.
Paul’s acclaimed first poetry collection, The Golden Age, was published by Bellew Publishing in 1997, and reissued on Kindle in 2013. His second poetry collection, The Musical Box of Wonders, was published by H. Harksen Productions in 2011. His sonnet cycle The Great Arcana: Sonnets for the 22 Trumps of the Tarot, and his ballad cycle Black Ballads, based on traditional Scottish myths and legends, were both published in 2022.
Paul’s Lovecraftian and dark fiction, and criticism, has appeared in numerous formats and journals worldwide, including Occult Detective Magazine, Weirdbook, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Strange Horizons, the Financial Times, the UK Independent, the Times Literary Supplement, Arts of Asia, Strange Horizons, A Broad Scot, and elsewhere. His co-translations from the Japanese, done with Maki Sugiyama, include The Poems of Nakahara Chuya (1993) and Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids (1995) by the 1994 Nobel Prize-winner Kenzaburo Oe, which won a Japan Festival Award. He also co-translated Superstrings (2007) by Dinu Flamand from Romanian with Olga Dunca. Paul is a former Executive Committee member of the Translators Association of the Society of Authors of Great Britain. He was rated #1 of “The 12 Publishing Shakers You Should Be Following” by The Independent Publishing Magazine. He is also the official clan poet of Clan Mackintosh.
