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The Resurrection Man's Legacy and Other Stories now available

My new collection of short fiction, The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories, came out from Golden Gryphon Press November 1st, 2003.  The collection features eleven short stories--long stories, actually, since most of them run to novelette length--published over the last decade or so.  The book itself--typically, for Golden Gryphon Press--is lovely:  an archival-quality hardcover with stunning wrap-around cover art by John Picacio.

 The jacket copy reads:

“Dale Bailey’s literary fantasies have been delighting and discomfiting readers for a decade now.  The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories, his first collection, showcases his skills at doing both.  Presently under option to 20th-Century Fox for development as a motion picture, the Nebula-nominated title story is characteristic of his work.  Plunging us into a subtly alternate 1950s--a gentler past that has been spared the mushroom clouds over Japan--‘The Resurrection Man’s Legacy’ mixes baseball lore with one of science fiction’s central metaphors, the robot, producing from these disparate sources an unforgettable story of grief, loss, and the often-painful bonds of family.  These are themes to which Bailey returns again and again in the tales that follow.  ‘Death and Suffrage,’ winner of an International Horror Guild Award, depicts a nightmarish presidential contest in which a political strategist wrestles with his own haunted past and its possible connections with an onslaught of the newly arisen dead.  ‘The Anencephalic Fields’ sweeps us off to post-apocalyptic Appalachia, where a young boy on the edge of manhood is forced to choose between the mother who raised him, the father he has never known, and the corporate paymasters who seek to exploit the bizarre, almost-human crop his family has been cultivating in the rich fields outside his Kentucky farmhouse.    ‘Sheep’s Clothing’ is a near-future science fiction tale of political assassination rendered even more timely by the press of contemporary events.  And the closing novella, ‘In Green’s Dominion,’ is a gripping meditation on love, art, and the costs of a life tempered by fear.  Blending fantasy and reality in consistently lyrical prose, Bailey’s stories--whether he’s writing about a stillborn child or a lost southern town where slavery still rears its ugly head--are uniformly memorable expeditions into the tangled interior of the human heart.” 

The early reviews have been very favorable:

Publisher’s Weekly says:  “The dark-touched souls of the small-town characters of ‘Quinn's Way,’ ‘Touched’ and ‘The Census Taker’ bring to mind the deft chill of Ray Bradbury's early work. With his thoughtful, frequently elegiac prose, Bailey has a knack for crisp, compelling family drama strung on a web of fantasy.”

Booklist notes that the style of the stories “is quite polished, and their quality is uniformly high.”

If you want to buy The Resurrection Man's Legacy online, click here

House of Bones Available Now:

Signet Books has just published my new novel, House of Bones.  

If you're a fan of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House or Stephen King's The Shining, you're going to dig this book.  I first got the idea while working on my doctorate at the University of Tennessee.  My dissertation was a study of the haunted motif in American fiction, ranging from Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne in the 19th century to more recent writers such as Shirley Jackson and Stephen King.  

When I revised the dissertation for publication (it came out from Bowling Green State University Popular Press in 1999 as American Nightmares:  The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction), I included a chapter on new directions for the haunted house tale.  I still remember writing the sentence, "It's only a matter of time before someone sets a haunted house tale in the ruined inner-city housing projects of America's blighted inner cities"--and then striking it from the manuscript in the next breath.

After all, if someone was going to write it, why shouldn't it be me?

Now I have.  

I think you'll agree that Signet gave the book an absolutely spectacular cover (it captures the novel's spirit perfectly).  And if that isn't enough to get your attention, maybe the cover copy will.  It reads:

Dreamland was abandoned years ago.

Its concrete towers were built to house the indigent.  Instead it became a perverted monument to human suffering.  No one lives there anymore.  But it isn't empty.  People say that voices still echo from the abyss of its empty elevator shafts . . . and that something still breathes in its black halls.

No sane person would even dare to set foot in its shadow.  Until tonight.

Slated for demolition, Dreamland is playing host to an eccentric billionaire who's obsessed with its unspeakable past.  Four strangers have been hired to join him.  Each has a reason for daring the unknown and a secret that could break down the boundary between the living and the dead.  Now they're about to discover where evil dwells--and thrives.  And it could condemn them all to an everlasting nightmare."


If you want to buy House of Bones online, click here

“Death and Suffrage” wins International Horror Guild Award

Good news:  my novelette “Death and Suffrage,” published in the February 2002 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, has won a 2003 International Horror Guild Award.  The IHGA is a juried award that honors works of dark fantasy and horror in various categories--including novel, first novel (where my novel The Fallen was also a nominee), and short fiction at various lengths. 

“Death and Suffrage” was the intermediate length winner; it tied with Elizabeth Hand’s novelette, “Pavane for a Prince of the Air.”  This was doubly cool since I’ve admired Hand’s work for years (one of my all time favorite novels is Hand’s dark fantasy, Waking the Moon).

Click here to see the full press release from the International Horror Guild