The Resurrection Man's Legacy: And Other Stories

Description

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 pay-masters 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. Book jacket.