The Faces of Pluto

Allen has distilled the speculations of Nietzsche and Freud into an impersonal meatspace whose soulless protagonist is writing its own suicide note - while time dissolves all, while the space of inscription reveals caverns measureless to man. Black Vellum is the work of an extremely subtle mind, co-opting horror to trace the integuments of a glitching futurity somehow liberated from the traditional impasses of nihilism." -David Roden, author of Snuff Memories

"The intellect was only first produced as a result of this diminishment of perception, writes Ansgar Allen in Black Vellum. This is an exquisitely written philosophical tale about human civilization as the quest for order, measurement, and automation-and perhaps, about how nihilism and despair have always fed our fantasies of humanoid machines."

   - Germ¡n Sierra, author of The Artifact

"Ansgar Allen has quickly become one of my favorite authors. He takes risks and writes well-these things alone are a rarity today. Equal parts informative, entertaining, and aesthetically appealing, Plague Theatre is an excellent introduction to his evolving oeuvre."

   - D. Harlan Wilson, author of The Psychotic Dr. Schreber

"The Wake and the Manuscript is an involving book, a textual persistence relentless in its chapter-less, paragraph-free form, start to finish. The story is a captivating oddity, a monolithic confession or lamentation, an existential interrogation inhabited with flashbacks, foibles, sickness, death, hallucination, mental aberration, religion and belief [...] exquisitely weird."

   -Eugen Bacon, AUREALIS MAGAZINE