The End of the End of Everything by Dale Bailey

This one…apparently the apocalypse was on my mind.Ī theme that I’ve noticed in some of the stories is the issue of gender roles and, in particular, masculinity (e.g., in “The Blue Hole,” the character’s sexuality is briefly alluded to, and in “Troop 9,” the feral scouts challenge traditional roles).

My first collection was very much about fathers and sons, but I didn’t realize that until I put the stories beside each other. I don’t think we know what we’re writing about until we step away from the word processor and take a look at it. In the case of “The End of the World as We Know It,” I was writing deliberately about - and against - the kind of disaster-porn that seems so pervasive in our culture, but otherwise I was working in the dark. We live in an apocalyptic moment, and I suppose I’m channeling those anxieties as much as any writer is. I suspect it has something to do with the social anxieties of the moment, from dirty bombs to global warming. The apocalypse is very much in the zeitgeist right now. All the stories are shot through with poetic prose and carefully crafted characters.Īpocalyptic fiction is experiencing a kind of resurgence - from Margaret Atwood to “The Walking Dead.” Do you have any thoughts as to why? And why are you drawn to writing it? Other stories feature an ode to the old Universal monster movies (“The Creature Recants”) a feral Girl Scout troop (“Troop 9”) and a decadent end-of-the-world party (“The End of the End of Everything”). The overtly science-fictional “Mating Habits of the Late Cretaceous” sets a crumbling marriage (think: Updike and Cheever) in a time-travel scenario.

“The Blue Hole” is a Bradbury-esque tale of boyhood innocence lost, while “A Rumor of Angels,” a magical realist novella about a drifter in Dust Bowl times, alludes to Steinbeck. Dale Bailey’s recent collection, The End of the End of Everything (Arche Press/Resurrection House) is comprised of nine elegiac horror and science fiction stories that recall the work of Ray Bradbury.

The End of the End of Everything by Dale Bailey