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Cargando... Unseaming (2014)por Mike Allen
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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 Caitl n 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 No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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I'd never heard of Mike Allen before, but I read a comment on Goodreads comparing him to other authors I like so I took a chance, and I'm glad I did.
This collection demonstrates a really strong, unique voice. Allen's stories hover somewhere near the border between Lovecraft and Cronenburg, where horror is rooted within our own bodies, our dreams, and the possibility that we ourselves could be the gateways to something vastly more dangerous. However, he takes what could be familiar tropes and twists them to fit his own ends.
The real standout stories to me are THE BLESSED DAYS, BUTTON BIN, and THE QUILTMAKER.
The first is the most explicitly Lovecraftian story, dealing with dreams as a gateway between worlds, but with a truly grotesque conceit: everyone, all over the world, stops dreaming and instead, wakes up covered in blood.
The other two, BUTTON BIN, and THE QUILTMAKER, are linked stories about secrets, family, and the skin we live in. They are some of the most original stories I've read in years.
The collection is overall well-written, in a direct, clear style. It isn't excessively gory or violent.
I'll be looking for more from Mr. Allen for sure! ( )