BOOK REVIEW - AFTERMATH OF AN INDUSTRIAL ACCIDENT, BY MIKE ALLEN, MYTHIC DELIRIUM BOOKS, 2020

This is absolutely not a collection that quietly tucks away its felicities of style and diction, where they won’t upset the kind of genre audiences who prefer to have their suspensions of disbelief untroubled by reminders that they’re immersed in works of art, not pixellated simulspaces. It parades sheer good writing. Not every story hits the same quality bar, IMHO, but the ones that do are finely finished tours de force of the storyteller’s art – and representative examples of the state of the modern weird/dark/speculative art.

 
Some books are single, perfect jewels. Some are arrangements of perfectly matched stones. Others are compositions of widely divergent materials - gold, lapis lazuli, porphyry, wood - that somehow come together to make a dazzling whole. Mike Allen’s latest collection, his third, is like that. The 23 stories and poems in it are very diverse. They range across a whole gamut of styles and sub-genres. Some of them form continuities with stories in other collections, or even other writers’ work, rather than with pieces in the same volume. And yet it all hangs together, and delights.
 
Mike Allen’s 2014 collection Unseaming was a finalist in the Best Collection category for both the Shirley Jackson Award and the This Is Horror Award, so expectations are understandably pitched high for this selection of his tales. And it doesn’t disappoint. There’s grand guignol body horror (“Puppet Show”). There’s folk occult noir (“Follow the Wounded One” and “The Cruelest Team Will Win”). There’s more or less Lovecraftian cosmic horror (“Binding,” “Drift from the Windrows”). And there’s tongue-in-cheek, weirdly sinister science fiction (“Blue Evolution” and the cover story.) Many of the stories continue the same created worlds that he’s already debuted in other stories, and some of the sub-niches are so good that you hope for still more to expand and develop the same setting. I certainly welcome Allen’s promise in the book’s Afterword of more stories set in “the centuries-old, unchanging city of Calcharra,” and a collection of his more noirish tales would be a vantablack delight.
 
The poems and prose-poems that appear among the more conventional stories, many of them co-created with verse luminaries like Christina Sng, exemplify a quality of prose and literary craftsmanship that extends through the whole book. This is absolutely not a collection that quietly tucks away its felicities of style and diction, where they won’t upset the kind of genre audiences who prefer to have their suspensions of disbelief untroubled by reminders that they’re immersed in works of art, not pixellated simulspaces. It parades sheer good writing. Not every story hits the same quality bar, IMHO, but the ones that do are finely finished tours de force of the storyteller’s art – and representative examples of the state of the modern weird/dark/speculative art.
 
Aftermath of an Industrial Accident also contains a generous selection of stories and excerpts from Mike’s other work, but those are just the cherries and icing on top of a rich and juicy layer cake. This has got to be a shortlist candidate for many Best Collection awards for 2020. It has a great cover that is every bit as jolting and unsettling as some of the contents. And it has one of the year’s killer titles. What are you waiting for?

A Korean War veteran must rely on wits, improvised weapons, and words from the dread Necronomicon to escape the lair of a deranged cult. A ghost cannot communicate how she died, no matter how desperately she tries, while an unconventional ghost hunter incurs the venomous wrath of the Queen of Night. Murderous conspiracies reveal themselves in online video clips, a saint blasphemes as a serial killer prays for mercy, and corrupt families in ancient kingdoms trade blood and souls for leverage over foes. Enduring nightmares for a living can lead to a fate worse than burnout. A gruesome invasion from outside space and time tests courage—and corporate loyalty—past all rational limits.

In these twenty-three stories and poems, two-time World Fantasy Award nominee Mike Allen spins twisted narratives, some wound through the fabric of our world, some set in imagined pasts or futures, all plumbing the depths of human darkness. “The consistency, here, is simply excellence,” writes Bram Stoker Award finalist and Punktown creator Jeffrey Thomas in his introduction. “You are holding in your hands an overflowing cornucopia of monstrous goodness.”

"Each tale in Aftermath of an Industrial Accident packs a punch that will keep you willingly pinned to the wall."
—Christina Sng, author of A Collection of Nightmares

"Mike Allen habitually upends Lovecraftian tropes with his own brand of cosmic horror."
—Laird Barron, author of Swift to Chase

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Paul StJohn Mackintosh
Paul StJohn Mackintosh is a Scottish poet, writer of weird and dark fiction, translator and journalist. Born in 1961, he was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, has lived and worked in Asia and Central Europe, and currently divides his time between Hungary and other locations. When not writing novels and stories, he’s usually writing and playing RPGs.




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