Fantastic Metropolis

Jack Slay, Jr.: The Fallen is being released this month. Tell us about the novel.

Dale Bailey: The Fallen is the story of a young man who returns home following his father’s suicide to the small Appalachian town he grew up in. Once there, he finds himself immersed in a variety of mysteries—not only the mystery surrounding his father’s death, and how it may or not connect to a series of other deaths in the town, but the larger mysteries of his own past, his own identity. Including, I should add, the mystery of just what he may or may not have encountered as a boy while exploring the abandoned coal mines which honeycomb the earth under the town. Structurally, it’s very much a suspense novel with strong supernatural elements—not purely horror in the sense that I’m far less interested in scaring people than in just keeping them turning the pages. I hope it works at multiple levels—that it works as plot-driven suspense and horror, while maintaining that sense of resonance that I try to achieve in my short fiction.

Jack Slay, Jr.: Do you see the novel as a culmination of the themes and ideas that have been working in the stories? I know that the novel had its origins in a story called “Giants in the Earth” (which was, in fact, the working title of the novel).

Dale Bailey: It’s not the culmination in the sense that I will never again return to those ideas, but certainly it gathers in many of the strands that appear in my short fiction. It has the Appalachian setting, the economic hardship and stoicism you find among those rural people, and of course it has the same kind of focus on family, especially on fathers and sons, that you see in the short stuff. I think the one element that sets it apart is that it grapples with issues of faith and unbelief—the essentially unknowable nature of the universe.

But I strongly suspect I’ll keep coming back to that same basic material. I think a lot of writers tend to tell the same kinds of stories over and over again, not because of a dearth of imagination but because those are the themes and locales that move them. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think that drinking from the same well enables you to enrich and explore those ideas further.

Jack Slay, Jr.: Finally, tell us what you’re working on now.

Dale Bailey: I’m working on another novel right now, a book tentatively called Dreamland. It’s a haunted house novel, so to some extent it’s rooted in my academic work on haunted house fiction—an attempt to develop and explore from a fictional angle some of the ideas I touched on as a critic.

Jack Slay, Jr.: What can we expect from Dale Bailey in the near and distant future?

Dale Bailey: In the next year or so, I have a couple new stories coming out in F&SF, plus the Golden Gryphon collection. As for new writing, the first priority is the new novel. When I finish that up, I have several short stories I want to do. There’s also a collaborative mystery novel that I need to get back to, plus several other novel ideas I’ve been mulling over. There’s plenty of things I want to do. The problem for me is finding the time to do it all.