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Dive: Weird Tales of Misfits & Monsters
Not yet published
Expected 17 Nov 26DRINK UP WITH THE DREAMERS, THE DESPERATE, AND THE DAMNED
Welcome to The Liz: a legendary Oakland punk bar with a fiercely loyal clientele of skull-cracked musicians, aspiring comedians, fans, hangers-on, and vampires.
Learn its sordid history; set some banks on fire; skirt a little too close to radical new film technology; volunteer for experiments that make you physically crave art—and the people who make it; and hear the joke that kills every cop who hears it (don't worry, you'll be fine, we think).
Author & comedian Allison Mick guides you through interconnected horror stories alternately gross, funny, and heartbreaking, and shows you why every story in The Liz makes a killing.
Welcome to The Liz: a legendary Oakland punk bar with a fiercely loyal clientele of skull-cracked musicians, aspiring comedians, fans, hangers-on, and vampires.
Learn its sordid history; set some banks on fire; skirt a little too close to radical new film technology; volunteer for experiments that make you physically crave art—and the people who make it; and hear the joke that kills every cop who hears it (don't worry, you'll be fine, we think).
Author & comedian Allison Mick guides you through interconnected horror stories alternately gross, funny, and heartbreaking, and shows you why every story in The Liz makes a killing.
212 pages, Kindle Edition
Expected publication November 17, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Starred review in the October 2026 issue of Library Journal
Three Words That Describe This Book: transgressive, connected stories, squirm inducing
Draft Review:
The Liz, a legendary punk bar in Oakland stands as the entry point into Mick’s collection of interconnected and immersive tales. Readers are introduced to the bar in the first story, a vignette told to a new customer by a long-time one, relaying the bar’s colorful and sordid history, before that storyteller reveals they are a hungry vampire. It only gets deliciously darker and more disorienting from there. The world building and character development are fantastic, from the elaborate history and discography of the band at the center of the story, to the recurring call for test subjects by a clearly nefarious doctor, to the maroon door (don’t open it!) readers squirm, following characters as they move in and out of stories, sometimes the star, other times on the periphery, yet never forgotten, but they will love every minute of it. However, this is more than a great collection of weird tales anchored by a place, it is also an utterly original and honest representation of the outsider art scene, its very best moments and people but also, its very worst, which Mick weaves into one cohesive and tantalizing story.
Vercit: A must read by an author on the rise from an award winning small press. Readers of transgressive horror like Cipher by Kathe Koja or anything by Eric LaRocca need to put this book on their radar.
This is a collection of transgressive, dark, immersive stories with characters who are all in one way or another connected to The Liz-- a famous punk bar in Oakland that has changed names but people just call it The New Liz. It is almost like an oral history of the bar and the people who are connected to it.
Readers are introduced to the world by a patron of the bar who is talking to someone new about the history of the bar. Sharing the solid details of how it started and where it is now-- owned by Johnny the legendary lead singer of the punk band The E.T.'s. And then it turns out that person (whose name and gender we find out later in another story) is a vampire.
This is a great entry to the entire book and the world.
Characters including the vampire (who we find out does what happens in the first story all the time) and basically everyone mentioned anywhere, come back around. If their story isn't completed (Scottie and the hair during is a great example) it will be later. Also people we don't know yet are mentioned-- but we will know them soon.
Great frame connecting the stories beyond just the bar-- Busy Bunny (a task rabbit stand in), a doctor is calling in the people who do gig work for them as test subjects. It increases the dread and adds to the weird behavior. It is very creepy and predatory as well. But said doctor is not a character, which I liked.
The maroon door also returns frequently-- don't open it.
Great world building-- the end has the "discography" and history of the E.T.'s the (fake) punk band and their members who frame the entire story. Mick doubled down on the world building here and it was worth it. Not just the bar but the story around the bar, its owner (Johnny from the band) and all for the interconnected relationships and people who are in this web.
These stories and the world
It is also a very realistic representation of the punk and outsider art scene-- especially as those in this scene age and question if it is all worth it. Honest and thoughtful. I appreciated that.
There is also a small easter egg to Mick's novel Humboldt Cut, which I loved. Very Josh Malerman and connecting the dark and horror filled towns here. I liked it.
Truly a must read by an author on the rise (I read their first book and it was also very good). And put out by an award winning small press. Keep and eye out for more from Mick. I have been and will continue to.
For fans of transgressive horror as written by Kathe Koja, specifically The Cipher and intense collections of connected stories with increased violence like Revenge by Yoko Ogawa. Josh Maleram has weird and dark collections of interconnected stories (mentioned above), but this is way more transgressive than even Malerman's darkest and weirdest stuff. I mean I like both, but as a listed comp in LJ where I have limited words, probably not.
For fans of Eric LaRocca for sure.
Three Words That Describe This Book: transgressive, connected stories, squirm inducing
Draft Review:
The Liz, a legendary punk bar in Oakland stands as the entry point into Mick’s collection of interconnected and immersive tales. Readers are introduced to the bar in the first story, a vignette told to a new customer by a long-time one, relaying the bar’s colorful and sordid history, before that storyteller reveals they are a hungry vampire. It only gets deliciously darker and more disorienting from there. The world building and character development are fantastic, from the elaborate history and discography of the band at the center of the story, to the recurring call for test subjects by a clearly nefarious doctor, to the maroon door (don’t open it!) readers squirm, following characters as they move in and out of stories, sometimes the star, other times on the periphery, yet never forgotten, but they will love every minute of it. However, this is more than a great collection of weird tales anchored by a place, it is also an utterly original and honest representation of the outsider art scene, its very best moments and people but also, its very worst, which Mick weaves into one cohesive and tantalizing story.
Vercit: A must read by an author on the rise from an award winning small press. Readers of transgressive horror like Cipher by Kathe Koja or anything by Eric LaRocca need to put this book on their radar.
This is a collection of transgressive, dark, immersive stories with characters who are all in one way or another connected to The Liz-- a famous punk bar in Oakland that has changed names but people just call it The New Liz. It is almost like an oral history of the bar and the people who are connected to it.
Readers are introduced to the world by a patron of the bar who is talking to someone new about the history of the bar. Sharing the solid details of how it started and where it is now-- owned by Johnny the legendary lead singer of the punk band The E.T.'s. And then it turns out that person (whose name and gender we find out later in another story) is a vampire.
This is a great entry to the entire book and the world.
Characters including the vampire (who we find out does what happens in the first story all the time) and basically everyone mentioned anywhere, come back around. If their story isn't completed (Scottie and the hair during is a great example) it will be later. Also people we don't know yet are mentioned-- but we will know them soon.
Great frame connecting the stories beyond just the bar-- Busy Bunny (a task rabbit stand in), a doctor is calling in the people who do gig work for them as test subjects. It increases the dread and adds to the weird behavior. It is very creepy and predatory as well. But said doctor is not a character, which I liked.
The maroon door also returns frequently-- don't open it.
Great world building-- the end has the "discography" and history of the E.T.'s the (fake) punk band and their members who frame the entire story. Mick doubled down on the world building here and it was worth it. Not just the bar but the story around the bar, its owner (Johnny from the band) and all for the interconnected relationships and people who are in this web.
These stories and the world
It is also a very realistic representation of the punk and outsider art scene-- especially as those in this scene age and question if it is all worth it. Honest and thoughtful. I appreciated that.
There is also a small easter egg to Mick's novel Humboldt Cut, which I loved. Very Josh Malerman and connecting the dark and horror filled towns here. I liked it.
Truly a must read by an author on the rise (I read their first book and it was also very good). And put out by an award winning small press. Keep and eye out for more from Mick. I have been and will continue to.
For fans of transgressive horror as written by Kathe Koja, specifically The Cipher and intense collections of connected stories with increased violence like Revenge by Yoko Ogawa. Josh Maleram has weird and dark collections of interconnected stories (mentioned above), but this is way more transgressive than even Malerman's darkest and weirdest stuff. I mean I like both, but as a listed comp in LJ where I have limited words, probably not.
For fans of Eric LaRocca for sure.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Clever and gritty, modern and trippy, this story collection is creatively interconnected with easter eggs, and related characters, and it is just so damn smart. I love when short story collections exist in the same universe, and Mick creates hers in the Bay Area punk-scene. I loved every minute reading these stories.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Once again, a very warm thank you to the gang at 10p for making the digital ARC of this book available to be read and enjoyed. All views and opinions are my own.
If you’ve ever lived in the Bay Area, even more so the East Bay, you’ll probably know what I mean when I say that it’s a place that stays with you. My time there was spent when the bay area was in a period of transition. Some might say growth, but anything can grow, an idea, a tree, a crack in a damaged windshield, a deadly fungus.
The latest phase of tech was already making waves in a very extensive way. Looking back on it, it was hard to recognize that the “large language models” that were being worked on, and discussed at backyard friend gatherings, would in a few short years, become an omnipresent blight.
Everyone was either working multiple jobs, or dedicated the majority of their time to one, while still mining side hustles and passions for funds to live by. The embryonic group called Digital Celebrities or Social Media Influencers was in the midst of a blossoming. Communities were changing, being absorbed or over taken in successive waves of gentrification, priced out or pushed down to the street. The web of communities of artists, musicians and their ilk was fracturing, struggling to adapt..evolve. If you didn’t have a podcast, you probably knew at least one person who did. All these things and more make up the seeds of experience, the grounded wires on which Allison Mick has constructed DIVE.
Dive is a multi-generational, multi dimensional saga, wherein we are given a peek at a local quadrant, a corrugated slice of the East Bay as it very well could be. A place giving lip service to the past, while struggling for dominance in polluted urban sphere, where the air is choked with smoke and the sky runs from red to gold. Stories piled on stories, like stacks of underground zines, spilling from forgotten tubs in a foreclosed house. The myriad of voices, stories and mysteries lie breaded around this particular region of Oakland the spots beyond the town that seeped into its zone of contact. Dive is a myriad tableau, a mosaic of snippets of lives woven tightly with strains of living beating nightmares.
Mick has managed to deliver something that feels like the ugliness, discomfort and ill-ease of Thomas Ligotti, merged with a intimate musings, secrets and folklore that arise in small communities, passed along in tiktoks, scrawled on flyers for shows in Jack London Square, or a hidden in zines left on park benches amid half eaten Spam Musubi take-out. A saga of a small community as it self annihilates, self immolates, regrows itself and loaths what it sees in the mirror. Fame is fleeting, but the struggle for importance, for dominance, never dies. Allison Mick does not flinch her speculative look at a time when things have continued to deteriorate, in every way, but those living through it are too wrapped up in their horrors to understand, or accept it. You used to be about the music dude, now you’re about nothing, and neither is the music. If the music is even music now.
DIVE is set to drop November 17th pre-order from Tenebrous Press here: https://tinyurl.com/MickDive
If you’ve ever lived in the Bay Area, even more so the East Bay, you’ll probably know what I mean when I say that it’s a place that stays with you. My time there was spent when the bay area was in a period of transition. Some might say growth, but anything can grow, an idea, a tree, a crack in a damaged windshield, a deadly fungus.
The latest phase of tech was already making waves in a very extensive way. Looking back on it, it was hard to recognize that the “large language models” that were being worked on, and discussed at backyard friend gatherings, would in a few short years, become an omnipresent blight.
Everyone was either working multiple jobs, or dedicated the majority of their time to one, while still mining side hustles and passions for funds to live by. The embryonic group called Digital Celebrities or Social Media Influencers was in the midst of a blossoming. Communities were changing, being absorbed or over taken in successive waves of gentrification, priced out or pushed down to the street. The web of communities of artists, musicians and their ilk was fracturing, struggling to adapt..evolve. If you didn’t have a podcast, you probably knew at least one person who did. All these things and more make up the seeds of experience, the grounded wires on which Allison Mick has constructed DIVE.
Dive is a multi-generational, multi dimensional saga, wherein we are given a peek at a local quadrant, a corrugated slice of the East Bay as it very well could be. A place giving lip service to the past, while struggling for dominance in polluted urban sphere, where the air is choked with smoke and the sky runs from red to gold. Stories piled on stories, like stacks of underground zines, spilling from forgotten tubs in a foreclosed house. The myriad of voices, stories and mysteries lie breaded around this particular region of Oakland the spots beyond the town that seeped into its zone of contact. Dive is a myriad tableau, a mosaic of snippets of lives woven tightly with strains of living beating nightmares.
Mick has managed to deliver something that feels like the ugliness, discomfort and ill-ease of Thomas Ligotti, merged with a intimate musings, secrets and folklore that arise in small communities, passed along in tiktoks, scrawled on flyers for shows in Jack London Square, or a hidden in zines left on park benches amid half eaten Spam Musubi take-out. A saga of a small community as it self annihilates, self immolates, regrows itself and loaths what it sees in the mirror. Fame is fleeting, but the struggle for importance, for dominance, never dies. Allison Mick does not flinch her speculative look at a time when things have continued to deteriorate, in every way, but those living through it are too wrapped up in their horrors to understand, or accept it. You used to be about the music dude, now you’re about nothing, and neither is the music. If the music is even music now.
DIVE is set to drop November 17th pre-order from Tenebrous Press here: https://tinyurl.com/MickDive
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews