Unseaming

Unseaming PDF Author: Mike Allen
Publisher: Mythic Delirium Books
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
NOW WITH NEW BONUS CONTENT! 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 Allen's stories deliver solid shivering terror tinged with melancholy sorrow over the fragility of humankind. --Publishers Weekly, starred review The stories ... range from the sly to the splatteringly horrific, with every nuance of dread and menace in between. --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 Teatro Grottesco and The Spectral Link Allen can write as lyrically and as viscerally as the best of them ... an exceptional debut collection. --Locus 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 Offbeat, gruesome conceits and expert delivery. --Asimov's Science Fiction One of the most original practitioners of the body horror subgenre since Clive Barker's Books of Blood. --Rue Morgue

Hinges Book One: Clockwork City

Hinges Book One: Clockwork City PDF Author: Meredith Mcclaren
Publisher: Image Comics
ISBN: 1632153858
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
New to the city of Cobble, Orio must depend on help wherever she can find it, but her assigned familiar Bauble has other interests. And as the two explore the walls of their city, they find that they are not the only new arrivals.

The Clockwork Dagger

The Clockwork Dagger PDF Author: Beth Cato
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062313851
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Full of magic, mystery, and romance, an enchanting steampunk fantasy debut in the bestselling vein of Trudi Canavan and Gail Carriger. Orphaned as a child, Octavia Leander was doomed to grow up on the streets until Miss Percival saved her and taught her to become a medician. Gifted with incredible powers, the young healer is about to embark on her first mission, visiting suffering cities in the far reaches of the war-scarred realm. But the airship on which she is traveling is plagued by a series of strange and disturbing occurrences, including murder, and Octavia herself is threatened. Suddenly, she is caught up in a flurry of intrigue: the dashingly attractive steward may be one of the infamous Clockwork Daggers—the Queen’s spies and assassins—and her cabin-mate harbors disturbing secrets. But the danger is only beginning, for Octavia discovers that the deadly conspiracy aboard the airship may reach the crown itself.

The Clockwork Muse

The Clockwork Muse PDF Author: Eviatar Zerubavel
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674135865
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
For anyone who has blanched at the uphill prospect of finishing a thesis, dissertation, or book, this piece holds out something more practical than hope: a plan.

A Clockwork Heart

A Clockwork Heart PDF Author: Liesel Schwarz
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0091950708
Category : Fantasy fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
They gather at night. The steady click keeping them in time, unified, controlled. Their maker made them that way. As more Londoners disappear, their numbers grow. One has joined their ranks. A special one, with power more potent than any other. Old warlock magic, and something else... an enchantment wound so tight it's near impossible to unravel. And only Eleanor Chance - the girl they call the Oracle - has a hope of saving these unfortunate souls... ... souls that are burdened with the slow death from a clockwork heart.

The Clockwork War

The Clockwork War PDF Author: Adam Kline
Publisher: Insight Kids
ISBN: 9781683832362
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
To battle a menacing evil figure, a group of children team up with amazing mechanical machines built by genius clockmaker Karl Indergarten. Best friends Karlheinz Indergarten and Leopold Croak clash in an epic, imaginary battle waged in the branches of an enormous, ancient oak tree. But when lightning strikes young Leopold, he loses his imagination, and with it, his sense of right and wrong. The damaged boy grows to adulthood, treading a sinister path of industrial conquest. And Leopold’s thirst for power soon threatens the tree, the village, and worst of all, the children within. But humble Karl discovers a gift for clockwork—the magic of gears and cogs—and assembles a mechanical army to fight back. Joined by the children themselves, Karl endeavors to save the village, the ancient oak, and maybe—just maybe—something more besides.

Figures in the Fourth Dimension

Figures in the Fourth Dimension PDF Author: Ellen Rixford
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780578158655
Category : Mechanical movements
Languages : en
Pages : 511

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Book Description


Chief's Mess

Chief's Mess PDF Author: L. A. Witt
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781527207776
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Welcome to the land of the Pharaohs... Clockwork mummies, thieving deities, airship pirates, psychic queens, mechanical scarabs, unrepentant scoundrels, mysterious museums, trickster djinns, suspicious werewolves, abducted scientists, fearless spies, and vengeful gods... All this and more wait inside the pages of Clockwork Cairo. Featuring stories from: George Mann, Gail Carriger, Nisi Shawl, Tee Morris & Pip Ballantine, David Barnett, Rod Duncan, Tiffany Trent, P. Djeli Clark, Jonathan Green, E. Catherine Tobler, Chaz Brenchley, K. Tempest Bradford, Benjanun Sriduangkaew and others...

Unseaming

Unseaming PDF Author: Mike Allen
Publisher: Mythic Delirium Books
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
NOW WITH NEW BONUS CONTENT! 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 Allen's stories deliver solid shivering terror tinged with melancholy sorrow over the fragility of humankind. --Publishers Weekly, starred review The stories ... range from the sly to the splatteringly horrific, with every nuance of dread and menace in between. --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 Teatro Grottesco and The Spectral Link Allen can write as lyrically and as viscerally as the best of them ... an exceptional debut collection. --Locus 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 Offbeat, gruesome conceits and expert delivery. --Asimov's Science Fiction One of the most original practitioners of the body horror subgenre since Clive Barker's Books of Blood. --Rue Morgue

Hungry Constellations

Hungry Constellations PDF Author: Mike Allen
Publisher: Mythic Delirium Books
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
“The poems in Mike Allen’s latest book, Hungry Constellations, make a rowdy, red-tinged tapestry, representing twenty years of work from one of the major creative forces in this genre. These poems are physical, expansive, and revolutionary. They are grand and dystopic. They seethe with the conflict of opposites. Allen likes the destructive side of creation as much as the emergent side ... He writes about stars and legends and human beings contending with the monster-filled and glorious cosmos. He does it all with a relentless, energetic style, full of thought and invention.” —Star*Line The mutants of Wonderland threaten to smash through the looking glass as the river of Time overflows its banks. The King of Cats and the Queen of Wolves dance a duet across eons, alternately foes and lovers. Monstrous constellations come to life in the sky, hungry for people-filled worlds. Hungry Constellations, the newest poetry collection from Nebula Award finalist and three-time Rhysling Award winner Mike Allen, surveys two decades of mind-bending verse. Editor Dominik Parisien starts with poems drawn from Allen’s previous book-length collections, Strange Wisdoms of the Dead (2006) and The Journey to Kailash (2008), then concludes the triptych with a selection of new and previously uncollected pieces, which author, poet and editor Amal El-Mohtar calls Allen’s most ambitious work to date in her introduction. Cover artist Paula Arwen Friedlander (arwendesigns.net) adroitly illustrates the collection’s Rhysling Award-nominated title poem. Funded by a Kickstarter campaign, Hungry Constellations is Allen’s first poetry collection available in digital format. From the introduction by Amal El-Mohtar: “Let me tell you about Mike Allen’s poetry. This is a man who delights in breaking bodies: butchering, splitting, flaying, dismembering, then seeding landscapes with viscera until they too become bodies—bodies invaded, bodies stuffed, bodies contaminated. This is a man who carves words into and out of bodies, be they skin or sapphire, corpses or constellations. But somehow Allen skirts gore and clinical detachment both: there is a precision and an economy to his horror that’s reminiscent of clockwork, architecture, astronomy. Imagine a clock with bone-gears, a skin-tree growing liver-fruit, a ship knifing a face into the moon, and you’ll have something of a sense of what lies before you … Subterranean in conception and galactic in execution, this is a book of monsters.” Praise for Mike Allen's poetry: “Allen’s is poetry for goths of all ages … There is a long tradition of poetry dealing with the uncanny—think Keats’ ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ or Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’—and it’s nice to see someone putting it to such use again. Allen’s poems … do a fine job of making the human scary and the scary human.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer “Mike Allen pours everything he’s got onto his poem-canvases. Mythologies, science-fiction scenarios, private memories and desires, and untestable ideas crowd and overlay one another upon the pages as if flung from an overloaded brush. Here is a vividly vertiginous collection of poems, all fun and mind-games.” —Fred Chappell “Mike Allen is a poetic Shiva, whirling his thousand limbs to snatch gold from thin air and create these epics-in-miniature, each with its own metallic sheen.” —Catherynne M. Valente “In the great tradition of Clark Ashton Smith, Ray Bradbury and Ursula K. Le Guin, Mike Allen shows us how science fiction poetry can do what all first-rate poetry does—rouse the imagination to venture into darkness and the unknown, there to discover old truths and new delights.” —R.H.W. Dillard

Slow Burn

Slow Burn PDF Author: Mike Allen
Publisher: Mythic Delirium Books
ISBN: 1956522042
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
“Nerve-racking anticipation and dread ... An assemblage of horror tales and somber verses that frighten and fascinate.” —Kirkus Reviews “Will appeal to horror fans seeking something fresh.” —Publishers Weekly "Mythical, chilling, and visceral . . . Truly a slow burn readers will crave to simmer in." —Ai Jiang, Hugo Award-nominated author of Linghun and I Am AI "Slow Burn is a multifaceted, multifarious feast for the horror-hungry." —Matthew M. Bartlett, author of Gateways to Abomination and Where Night Cowers "By turns gorgeous, horrifying, gruesome, furious, darkly erotic, wickedly funny, and frequently all of those things at once, this extraordinary collection never shies away from pushing the reader's boundaries. Allen masterfully succeeds in being transgressive in all the best and most beautiful ways. I adore this book." —Sunny Moraine, author of Your Shadow Half Remains 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, 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. Cover art and design by Lasse Paldanius; interior illustrations by Paula Arwen Owen PRAISE FOR SLOW BURN "An astonishing range of ideas and themes that never quail from their subjects. They'll remain with you long after reading, like ash residue from a long-burning fire." —Preston Grassmann, co-editor of The Mad Butterfly's Ball "Don't let the title fool you, Slow Burn is an artistic flame that blazes like an inferno from start to finish!" —Vaughn A. Jackson, author of Touched by Shadows "Diabolically inventive and varied . . . You'll laugh, shudder, cry, and throw up a little in your mouth. Mike Allen's range can outstretch any fleshy hell-tendril, darting from experimental poetry to cheeky Clive Barker satire to whip-sharp supernatural thrillers . . . achingly human characters and heaping, writhing helpings of body horror." —Rich Larson, author of Ymir and Tomorrow Factory "Unsettling, perceptive, always surprising, always absorbing—Slow Burn is a collection of gems." —Premee Mohamed, Nebula Award-winning author of Beneath the Rising "Consuming horror that is not for the squeamish!" —Lee Murray, five-time Bram Stoker Award®-winning author of Grotesque: Monster Stories "At turns dripping with Cronenberg body horror, infused with Barker misanthropy, and crawling with the darkest fantasy, the stories and poems in Slow Burn are beautifully crafted to lure you in, but their beauty won't let you go easily. There are too many strange limbs for that." —Michael Wehunt, author of The Inconsolables "Like one of the extra-dimensional creatures lurking within Slow Burn's collected stories and novella, author Mike Allen must also have a thousand eyes, a hundred mouths, and far too many fingers. How else could he find so many strange and hidden worlds—not to mention the strangeness hidden in our own world—and translate it all so beautifully? A mind-bending delight from a horrifically unique imagination, Slow Burn will twist, turn, and transform readers." —Gordon B. White, finalist for the Shirley Jackson and Bram Stoker Awards PRAISE FOR MIKE ALLEN "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." —Thomas Ligotti "Mike Allen habitually upends Lovecraftian tropes with his own brand of cosmic horror." —Laird Barron "Mike Allen is a master of horror and dark fantasy." —Cemetery Dance