I love writing, and consequently, writers. I love their brazen faith as they stare at the blank page, certain that the words will come. I love their sense of play, their willingness to live in their imaginations. Most of all, I love their eloquence, their ability to explain the world with just the right words. My love of writers (and my understanding of their struggle) makes it easy to say nice things about their work. Sometimes, however, a writer comes along whose work speaks to you in a more profound way– who tells stories that remind you of your own, or the stories you want to be writing. These aren’t writers that you admire, these are the writers you want to be.  

For me, Dale Bailey is one of those writers, and The End of the End of Everything is my favorite collection published this year.

Every story in this collections works. Every story. That includes “Lightning Jack’s Last Ride,” which is about a former NASCAR driver in an oil-depleted future. There are few things in this world that I hate more than NASCAR, but I still enjoyed this story. That’s how good Bailey is.

What makes Bailey’s stories so special is how much attention he pays to his characters. Some writers let the fantasy or science fiction element in their stories take precedence over everything else, but Bailey does the opposite. In his work, the speculative elements illuminates the lives of the characters, enhancing our understanding of them. Bailey’s stories may contain dinosaurs (Mating Habits of the Late Cretaceous”) or feral girl scouts (“Troop 9,” with its heart-stopping last line) or lake monsters (“The Bluehole”), but they’re really about the important things: relationships, the nature of love, what it truly means to be human. His characters struggle to make moral choices–every one of these nine stories involves at least one character making a momentous choice–and live with the consequences of their actions. Bailey’s stories aren’t clever, or bristle with incident; that’s not what they’re about. They’re about heart, about rejecting or accepting the darkness in ourselves.

The title story in The End of the End of Everything makes good use of Bailey’s pervasive themes. Here we have an artist’s colony waiting for the world to end, as an amorphous apocalyptic event (dubbed “the ruin”) is heading their way. It has already reduced most of the world to ash, and cannot be avoided. The artists have taken to throwing nightly suicide parties, where the host of each party kills themselves at dawn. Everyone else drinks and drugs and swaps sex partners, waiting for the inevitable. Bailey follows a quartet of artists as they get caught up in these parties, then have a crisis of conscience. Bailey takes us down a dark path here–so many of these stories do–but he asks all the right questions: how are you going to act when it all falls apart? What really matters to you? What’s truly in your heart, and is it going to save you or destroy you? It’s funny that my deepest connection to Bailey’s work is on a thematic level, but I guess these are also the things I care passionately about, the things I want to write about.

Bailey isn’t as recognized in either the science fiction or horror community as he should be. I hope this collection (and his recently published novel, which I can assure you I will be reading soon) change this. Either way, I am so very glad I have found another role model (like Nathan Ballingrud and Steve Tem) for my writing career, a writer I can aspire to emulate as I take my next steps forward. Thanks, Dale.