Amid the hard-scrabble West Virginia coal mines, a terrible magical vengeance takes an equally terrible toll on a young boy's heart. Ancient gods provide metaphors for a father's love and a child's grief, and Cinderella's shattered glass slippers become a window into the horror of the Holocaust. A mythic tale of a little girl's rebellion explains all the craziness of weather, and the Wandering Jew reveals the truth about the Loch Ness Monster. Longtime Mythic Delirium editor Mike Allen returns to his fiction roots with MYTHIC, a digest of fantasy prose and verse in the tradition of Prime Books' Jabberwocky. This volume, the first of a planned anthology series, places off-beat new talents like Matthew Cheney, Theodora Goss, Richard Parks and Sonya Taaffe alongside veterans such as Joe Haldeman and Ian Watson to offer a unique literary smorgasbord of humor and horror, wonder and wisdom.
Mike Allen works as the arts and culture columnist for the daily newspaper in Roanoke, Va., where he lives with his wife Anita, a goofy dog, and two cats with varying degrees of psychosis.
In his spare time he does a ridiculous number of things, including editing the critically-acclaimed anthology series CLOCKWORK PHOENIX and the long-running poetry journal MYTHIC DELIRIUM. His own poetry has won the Rhysling Award three times, and his fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award. His short stories have popped up in places like WEIRD TALES, INTERZONE, and the anthologies SKY WHALES AND OTHER WONDERS, CTHULHU'S REIGN and STEAM-POWERED.
He's also recorded podcasts for STARSHIPSOFA and CLARKESWORLD MAGAZINE and participated in local improv theater, where he's often asked to provide the voice of an Ominous Narrator or play the part of Satan.
