The Resurrection Man's Legacy: And Other Stories

A breathtaking collection of wonders and horrors—including robotic surrogate parents and zombie voters—from a new acknowledged master of darkest fantasy Whether speculating on an all-too-possible future or plumbing the stygian depths of supernatural evil and human degradation, Dale Bailey’s award-winning short fiction has been justifiably compared to the work of some of the true giants in the field—Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, and Theodore Sturgeon, to name but a few. In this first collection of astonishing stories, the acclaimed author of the modern horror masterworks The Fallen and House of Bones demonstrates his remarkable range with tales that exhilarate, terrify, and touch the soul. A young boy comes of age on a secluded farm that grows a particularly grisly crop. The dead rise up to cast their ballots in a close presidential election. An assassin plots his next kill from inside the body of someone frighteningly close to the victim. An African American census taker discovers a hidden bayou town where time has stopped at a nightmarish point in history. Bailey takes readers inside the tents of a circus of shadows and explores an expectant father’s dark and terrible legacy for his unborn child. This extraordinary collection runs the gamut from fantasy to horror, from science fiction to heartbreaking reality, speaking in voices, old and young, that brilliantly capture the light and the darkness of their ingeniously imagined worlds. Includes the Nebula Award–nominated novelette, “The Resurrection Man’s Legacy.”

From Publishers Weekly

In Bailey's somber story collection, his first, tension often radiates from the uneasy relationship between parent and child, and the dead seldom rest easy. In the title tale, a 12-year-old boy copes with the unwelcome gift of a "simulated person" to fill the emotional gap left by his father's death. The moody "Death and Suffrage" begins with the blackly comic premise of the dead rising to vote in a close presidential election, but drifts to a lonely, if inconclusive, ending. Meanwhile, zombies of a different sort, bodies grown to provide organs for transplant, provide the gritty, grisly setting for "The Anencephalic Fields." 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.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Most of the 11 stories in this collection were first published in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and read like it. That is, their style is quite polished, and their quality is uniformly high. Let it be said that Bailey has been writing for at least a decade, that his content and style have been compared to those of the late Theodore Sturgeon, and that all these stories make extensive use of description and emphasize the characters' feelings as much as their actions. Then there is his versatility: "The Resurrection Man's Legacy" is an exercise in nostalgia for the sf of an older era; "Death and Suffrage" is about coming-of-age and gun control; "Exodus" is hard-science sf; and "In Green's Dominion" calls upon the ancient English mythic figure of fertility, the Green Man. In general, this is a batch of stories appealing more to the fans of "literary" sf and fantasy than readers whose tastes run to a particular flavor (military, hard science, swords and sorcery, etc.) of sf and fantasy. Frieda MurrayCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Dale Bailey is an assistant professor of English at Lenoir-Rhyne College. He is a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and has published short fiction in Amazing Stories, Pulphouse, The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, Nebula Awards 31, and The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction. He is the author of American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction and writes a bimonthly column on death and dying for The Dodge Magazine. He lives in Hickory, North Carolina.

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