Strange Wisdoms of the Dead: Twentieth Anniversary Edition

TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

"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." —PopMatters

"Mike Allen's voice is nothing short of mesmerizing." —Laird Barron

How many ways can the world end? In fire. In ice. In howls of laughter or tears of madness. As a flip cosmic joke or a tragedy of love destroyed. In private agony or sweeping apocalypse. In our ignorance we turn to the dead for enlightenment, but even they despair of the answer. 

A mind-bending journey into realms of death and darkness, Mike Allen's head-turning, genre-bending debut returns with a new cover, new afterword, and new availability in e-book format. Here the mysticism of tarot fuses with the magic of the Mayans, and childhood nightmares caress your face in the middle of the night. A playful kick sends Earth out of orbit, plots to steal time are thwarted, windows pulse with ghostly breath. The sacrifice of a daughter damns the world, and the dead struggle to communicate a fate beyond all understanding.

"Strange Wisdoms of the Dead is an excellent overview of the poet's past ten years of writing." — Ellen Datlow, Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 

"The literary equivalent of a Caravaggio painting, where light is bright and casts all the more shadow for its brilliance." — The Pedestal Magazine

"Features some of his more daring and experimental work . . . This is a splendid collection." —Fantasy Literature

A Philadelphia Inquirer Editor's Choice selection