Try our Advanced SearchShort stories by Dale Bailey
If you’ve wound up here in my little corner of the web, it’s probably because you’re interested in speculative fiction. My work includes science fiction, dark fantasy, and horror. My latest publications include the novel In the Night Wood (2018); a collection of short stories, The End of the End of Everything (2015); and a novel, The Subterranean Season (2015). Other publications include three previous novels, Sleeping Policemen (2006—with Jack Slay, Jr.), House of Bones (2003), and The Fallen (2002), and a second collection of short fiction, The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories (2003). One of the abiding disappointments of my life is that I’ve never had any of the interesting jobs that writers are supposed to have. I was never a gandy dancer or a stevedore. I never drove an ambulance on the Italian Front. I just went to school to study literature and started writing stories. I was born in West Virginia in 1968, and grew up in a town called Princeton. My stories have appeared in lots of places. A few of them have been nominated for awards and one of them, “Death and Suffrage” was adapted for Showtime anthology series Masters of Horror.
Listing 9 stories.
When a girl is found viciously murdered in the Rockdale High School gym, rumors circulate the small town that a teenage werewolf is the killer. The resulting confusion and panic drive a wedge between the students and their parents, who wish to curb their childrens' freedoms in the name of safety.
When climate change leads to oil scarcity in a dystopian future, a former racecar legend and his pit crew redirect their skills to hijacking highway tankers carrying precious oil for profit. Despite the dangers of the job, it is the love between the crew mates that ultimately leads to their downfall. In a dystopian America ravaged by climate change, an oil scarcity turns a former racecar legend and his pit crew into gasoline outlaws, rustling highway tankers for profit. But a lover's quarrel seeks to undo all of their success.
Two sisters trick audiences nationwide with fake ghosts and a blissful afterlife known as Summerland to hide the truth - they've seen the other side of death, and it's full of violent monsters waiting to escape.
When a mysterious deadly plague descends on the earth, four friends are engaged in a life-or-death struggle against an alien race attempting to fumigate the earth.
A benign alien invasion has befallen small town Ohio in the '50s. When one young girl grows tired of her angry father and abusive boyfriends, she chooses to move to the alien side of town, instead, and changes the fate of the town forever.
After his twin brother's disappearance, Doug has become haunted by childhood memories and fruitlessly determined to understand where Danny went.
In a Victorian London where the upper class eats the poor, a young married woman gains an invite to a coveted cannibalistic feast, pleasing her husband and elevating her social status. But after a falling out with the hostess and her husband, she is forced to make a sacrifice from her own family before she can be reaccepted into high society.
As the end of the world approaches a wealthy artists’ community, a long-married couple stays with their friends and attends nihilistic, indulgent suicide parties.
A man wakes up one day and realizes the world has ended, and he is the only survivor. He wanders aimlessly and crashes at another house before encountering a woman, who seems to be the only other survivor.