Ginger Nuts of Horror is excited to bring you the cover reveal for Slow Burn by Mike Allen, as well as an interview with the cover artist Lasse Paldanius.
Slow Burn by Mike Allen, Cover Reveal, an Interview with Cover Artist Lasse Paldanius.
“Unsettling, perceptive, always surprising, always absorbing.”
Premee Mohamed, Nebula Award-winning author of Beneath the Rising
“Mythical, chilling, and visceral.”
Ai Jiang, Nebula finalist and author of Linghun“Slow Burn is a multifaceted, multifarious feast for the horror-hungry.”
Matthew M. Bartlett, author of Gateways to Abomination
Slow Burn by Mike Allen
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® winner Christina Sng in her introduction. “The images he paints with words are terrifying and mesmerizing, keeping you enthralled, 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 and design by Lasse Paldanius and interior illustrations by Paula Arwen Owen. Distributed through Ingram, promotions planned at Readercon in Boston and Necronomicon in Providence.
“The digitally painted cover art of Slow Burn introduces an metaphorical combination of elements and characters present in Mike Allen’s horror tales,” said cover artist Lasse Paldanius.“Fire and some sort of a flame shape consisting of suffering faces and hands seemed an intuitive, logical choice for the cover, as the fire element is present in the title story and others.”
“I’m so thrilled by what Lasse came up with,” Mike Allen said. “Anita and I met him almost seven years ago at WorldCon 75 in Helsinki. At the time we were publishing Mythic Delirium magazine, and Lasse ended up contributing a cover. Because our press, though mighty, is quite tiny, and only puts out a couple of books a year, it took a while for us to line up another project that I thought might fit with Lasse’s style: C. S. E. Cooney’s novel The Twice-Drowned Saint, with its beautiful, monstrous, mutating angels.
“Lasse’s piece for Claire’s book captured both the wild creativity and fun spirit, and his interior illustrations well matched the novel’s surprising turns into both humor and horror,” Mike said. “I couldn’t help but be intrigued at the thought of what he might come up with for an out-and-out horror volume. At first I wasn’t sure he’d be interested in illustrating horror, but as it turned out, he was quite enthusiastic about the chance to do so.”
“The creature on the cover is a visualization of one of the emissaries of evil appearing in Mike’s novella ‘The Comforter.’ The image embodies her slow burning anger, as well as the agony of those numerous souls she has captured inside the mythical buttons she masters,” Lasse said. “After Mike and I had this sort of brainstorming session on the topic, Maria from ‘The Comforter’ seemed an interesting character who should be featured, as the carrier of this flame of slow burning anger and agony.”
“Slow Burn contains a wide sampling of my dark poems and stories, and some of them do have ties to previous tales, a thing I’m having more and more fun doing,” Mike said. “Readers of my debut collection Unseaming might recognize Maria as one of the central characters from my novella ‘The Quiltmaker.’ When we join her in ‘The Comforter,’ well … let’s say her spiritual journey has taken her to a radically different place from where we last saw her.
“Although I don’t think you need to be familiar with Unseaming or the follow-up Aftermath of an Industrial Accident to enjoy Slow Burn, if you do know those books, you’ll get reacquainted with some old ‘friends,’ even if they are in some cases altered,” Mike said.
Lasse Paldanius website
Home page for Slow Burn
https://mythicdelirium.com/slow-burn#Burn
