The Spider Tapestries — Mike Allen

“Mike Allen will infect your subconscious with hallucinatory and alarming delight. This book is a must-read for fans of weird fiction and dark fantasy.”
-- Helen Marshall, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Gifts for the One who Comes After

“Surrender yourself to The Spider Tapestries and let these tales rewire your mind.”
-- Scott Nicolay, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Do You Like to Look at Monsters?

“Elegant language and surrealistic themes defy genre and moral expectations in the weird and transgressive stories found in this collection . . . Allen's pairing of individualistic suffering and cosmic hugeness evokes a lyrical friction between dread and wonder.”
-- Publishers Weekly

The Spider Tapestries, Mike Allen's sophomore short story collection, takes a wrecking ball to genre boundaries, showcasing seven stories that mix transhuman noir, Lovecraftian horror, and surrealistic sorcery in an exploration of the further reaches of the Weird. Readers who savored the disorienting strangeness in Allen's debut collection Unseaming, a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and Amazon.com horror fiction bestseller, will find The Spider Tapestries begins where Unseaming left off.

As Nicole Kornher-Stace, author of Archivist Wasp, explains in her introduction, “Allen outdoes himself even further, borrowing and synthesizing across genres with gleeful abandon. . . . This results in stories like ‘Twa Sisters,' with an atmosphere and setting as if Heironymous Bosch had been brought in as a consultant on Blade Runner. Or ‘Sleepless, Burning Life,' which, with simultaneous nods to steampunk and metaphysics, explores and upends the familiar trope of Mortal Chosen by the Gods.”

“The Spider Tapestries is kaleidoscopically, gloriously imaginative.”
-- Jeffrey Thomas, author of Punktown

“The seven stories in this slim collection range from dark fantasy to sf to horror -- sometimes all within one tale . . . Allen weaves intriguing connections among his tales, applying dizzying, sensual images.”
-- Library Journal