Palindrome Hannah

Michael Bailey brilliantly blends horror and drama, art and pop, wit and mystery in this series of five dark, intertwined tales. With homage to Stephen King, David Mitchell, and Edgar Allen Poe, Bailey beats his own backward path into the deep dark woods of the human psyche and turns everything upside down. Enter a cruel "palindrome" world: a strangely symmetrical place where disturbing incidents displace the rain-saturated Mayberry calm of contemporary suburban Seattle. A young father fights his suicidal urges. A failing marriage of two entirely unlikable people begins to unravel. An old man given to bouts of mental "whiteness" remembers the cruelty of the orphanage where he spent his childhood and how the "whiteness" began. A psychiatrist strives to understand a mental patient whose several uncanny abilities suggest something other-worldly. A school bully and the gang of misfits he tortures take a playground war farther and farther...

From the Publisher

This strange novel is filled with symbolism and imagery, painted in the bright flowing colors of a twisted imagination. It holds five dark tales, each dissimilar from the next. These stories will make you ponder, keep you guessing, and leave you yearning for more. Nested narratives push the limits of form in this collection of stories. Enter a cruel "palindrome" world: a symmetric place where disturbing situations displace the common; where good acts transmute to evil ones. Within, characters influence each other through macabre arrangements of involuntary happenstance, and learn the inevitabilities of coincidence. A segmented story of a mother and daughter intertwines the others. This hidden sixth story, told in reverse and assembled from the five separate narratives, uncovers the sad life of a child who carries a palindrome name, and her struggling teenage mother. With five stories heading one direction, and Hannah traveling the opposite, the story unfolds like the meaning hidden in a palindrome.

About the Author

Michael Bailey lives in California with his wife Kimberly. He is currently writing his second novel of literary horror and a collection of short stories. In his spare time he wanders into other creative realms by writing prose poetry, drawing black-and-white sketches, unloading his mind in ponderous blogs, editing a short-run literary publication, and inking an atrocious series of stick figure comics.

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