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The Big Idea: Mike Allen
Oct. 10th, 2025 04:06 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
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Creepy crawlies can become less creepy when you characterize them. Such is the case for author Mike Allen, who shares with us his initial fear of spiders that has turned into more of a cautious appreciation. Follow along in the Big Idea for his newest spooky story, Trail of Shadows, and see the web he’s spun for us.
MIKE ALLEN:
My Southern Gothic-meets-surreal horror novel Trail of Shadows is a story of spirit beings and murderous monsters set in the Appalachian Mountains, where I’ve lived since the second grade. Rooted in the condition of living in a community without truly being part of it, the book draws from experiences had while traveling north and south along the mountain range.
But it’s also rooted in close encounters of the arachnid kind — and anyone who thinks that’s a digression rather than a central part of the rural Appalachian experience has not:
- Walked face-first through a spiderweb while hiking a wooded mountain trail…
- Jumped into a hay bale in a barn and found themselves face to face with the spiders that build their nests all through the walls…
- Seen the exodus of spiders and stranger things that scurry toward the house when the backyard creek overflows its banks….
The inspirations for several of the major characters in Trail of Shadows live their lives right outside my front door. I’ve seen as many as five dangling out in the dark, patiently waiting for prey to come to them, their webs strategically positioned around the porch light such that swinging the screen door open leaves them undisturbed.
Once upon a time, I would have struggled to tolerate their presence. But the years spent working on this book have actually had a positive effect on the severe arachnophobia acquired when I was a wee child on Guam Island.
(I cannot guarantee the same for readers — my novel is, after all, intended as a Halloween scare fest, part coming of age story, part fever dream, part nightmare.)
For context, a timeline: my parents met while working toward their degrees in microbiology at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. On completing his Ph.D., my father took a job teaching — at the University of Guam.
I was still a toddler when this young couple moved across the ocean. Thus, despite hailing from the Great White North, my first childhood memories formed on Guam. The constant sun; the coconut and papaya trees; cowrie shells on the beach; the coral beneath one’s feet (ouch!); the jellyfish wrapped around one’s leg (googolplex ouch!); the lizards that always left their tails behind . . . and the bright yellow spiders with leg spans as wide as my head, that paralyzed me with terror.
Really, the spiders weren’t to blame, I know, but an intense fear of eight-legged critters hung with me into adulthood. My journey from spider detestation to spider appreciation began with a private joke shared with my wife and creative partner-in-crime, Anita.
One fine night, we happened to notice that a second couple had taken up residence in our house, underneath our porch’s tin roof. The larger and rounder of the pair was clearly the lady of the manor; the other, smaller and narrower, obviously the gentleman; both with eight spindly legs.
They weren’t exactly cute to our human eyes, but we found something charming about our new tenants all the same. Anita gave them appropriately old-fashioned sounding names: Gertrude and Herman.
Those names carried over; for years, it’s been our routine to call these large orb weavers “Gertrude spiders.”
The original Gertrude and Herman live on, or so I like to imagine, in the pages of Trail of Shadows. The story concerns people possessed of the ability to phase into the world of spirits, known as the argent realms or the Underside. Someone who can do this, who can at will cross into the Underside and back again, appears in those lands as an enormous, phantasmal animal.
Early in his journey toward perilous discovery, my bewildered hero encounters an unnerving but helpful couple named Herman and Gertrude Crabbe. I’ll give you one guess what their spirit shapes turn out to be.
It’s hardly a spoiler to share that the Crabbes aren’t the only members of the spider tribe that my puma-form protagonist meets. Their alignments range from neutral but good-natured to malevolent predation. I find myself wickedly fond of even the most frightening of their number.
Living with these characters in my head has made it easier for me to peacefully cohabit with their real-life counterparts. I still can’t say that I’d invite a spider to run across me — though I have allowed a tarantula to crawl over my hand, and was startled by its soft, gentle steps.
Nowadays, though, I can lean close to admire the quarter-sized orb weavers with their legs striped like witch stockings, and watch as they spin their summer webs above our front steps.
Trail of Shadows: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
Author’s socials: Website|Facebook|Instagram|Threads|Bluesky
If you saw my post earlier this week over my friend and my’s spa experience, I’m sure you’ve been asking yourself, “but where did you guys go eat after having such an amazing, relaxing spa experience?” I’m so glad you asked, dear reader! My friend and I went to 
