2024 Locus Magazine Recommended Reading List, Best Story Collection

"Nerve-racking anticipation and dread." -Kirkus Reviews

"Will appeal to horror fans seeking something fresh." -Publishers Weekly

"Mythical, chilling, and visceral . . . a slow burn readers will crave to simmer in."

-Ai Jiang, Bram Stoker and Nebula award-winning author of Linghun

"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(R) winner Christina Sng in her introduction. "The images he paints with words are terrifying and mesmerizing, keeping you enthralled and 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.

With cover art by Lasse Paldanius and illustrations by Paula Arwen Owen

"Consuming horror that is not for the squeamish!"

-Lee Murray, five-time Bram Stoker Award(R)-winning author of Grotesque: Monster Stories

"Slow Burn is a collection of gems."

-Premee Mohamed, author of Beneath the Rising