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Read an Excerpt from In the Night Wood |
In the Night Wood
• World Fantasy Award Finalist, Novel
• Shirley Jackson Award Finalist, Novel
• Locus Award Finalist, Horror Novel
• Manly Wade Wellman Award Finalist
• Locus Recommended Reading List
Bailey’s eerie prose centers readers firmly and successfully in his seductive and frightening night wood. – Publisher’s Weekly
Bailey’s novel is both a resonant tale of literary obsession and a story of old myths rising violently to the surface of an otherwise rational world. And it largely succeeds at both: its central characters are well-drawn, and its more uncanny aspects never overwhelm the emotional connections Bailey has established throughout the book. – Tor.com
In the Night Wood is an affecting, weighty, and haunting book about the shackles of grief. – Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World
Luminously written, literate, absorbing, transporting, and all-around excellent. I couldn’t put it down. – Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves and The Jane Austen Book Club
Featuring some of the ambiance of Robert Holdstock’s pagan fantasies, a bit of the flavor of Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time, and simpatico resonance with the similarly understated and involving fantasies of Graham Joyce, Bailey’s book proves that the shelves of libraries are truly congruent with the hidden chambers of the human heart. – Asimov’s Science Fiction
The End of the End of Everything: Stories
Shirley Jackson Award Winner, Novelette
Throughout all these fictions, however varied their subject matter or atmosphere, Bailey exhibits his compassion for and comprehension of his characters, his inerrant sense of choosing just the right words, and his determination to make all the matter of fantastika over afresh. Such a book makes one hope that our genre still has a future. – Locus
Every story . . . is a leap off the cliff. Bailey chooses his cliffs with care, reimagining standard science fiction, fantasy, and horror themes with marvelous physicality, quiet compassion for his characters, and language whose sharpness we barely feel till we look to see blood flowing from the cut. – The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
The Subterranean Season
Bailey takes on every aspect of campus life with razor-sharp glee, especially the all-too-common elevation of sports over academics, and the unforgiving hierarchy of academia. Alex’s metamorphosis, from basically decent to completely unhinged, is both terrifying and fascinating, and the utterly chilling ending is nothing less than fitting. – Publisher’s Weekly
If tension and existential dread are your thing, you’ll feel The Subterranean Season cut through you like a rusty meat cleaver. – Dead End Follies