The Resurrection Man's Legacy: And Other Stories [Hardcover]

In Bailey's somber story collection, his first, tension often radiates from the uneasy relationship between parent and child, and the dead seldom rest easy. In the title tale, a 12-year-old boy copes with the unwelcome gift of a "simulated person" to fill the emotional gap left by his father's death. The moody "Death and Suffrage" begins with the blackly comic premise of the dead rising to vote in a close presidential election, but drifts to a lonely, if inconclusive, ending. Meanwhile, zombies of a different sort, bodies grown to provide organs for transplant, provide the gritty, grisly setting for "The Anencephalic Fields." The dark-touched souls of the small-town characters of "Quinn's Way," "Touched" and "The Census Taker" bring to mind the deft chill of Ray Bradbury's early work. With his thoughtful, frequently elegiac prose, Bailey has a knack for crisp, compelling family drama strung on a web of fantasy.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Most of the 11 stories in this collection were first published in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and read like it. That is, their style is quite polished, and their quality is uniformly high. Let it be said that Bailey has been writing for at least a decade, that his content and style have been compared to those of the late Theodore Sturgeon, and that all these stories make extensive use of description and emphasize the characters' feelings as much as their actions. Then there is his versatility: "The Resurrection Man's Legacy" is an exercise in nostalgia for the sf of an older era; "Death and Suffrage" is about coming-of-age and gun control; "Exodus" is hard-science sf; and "In Green's Dominion" calls upon the ancient English mythic figure of fertility, the Green Man. In general, this is a batch of stories appealing more to the fans of "literary" sf and fantasy than readers whose tastes run to a particular flavor (military, hard science, swords and sorcery, etc.) of sf and fantasy. Frieda Murray
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Dale Bailey's literary fantasies have delighted readers for the past decade, and this collection brings together the best of his work. The title story, 'The Resurrection Man's Legacy', has been optioned for a movie. In it, a young orphan must live with an elderly aunt who proves unable to supply all that the boy requires and purchases a robotic, surrogate father for him. In 'The Anencephalic Fields', another coming-of-age story, a boy is isolated with his mother on a farm where humanlike plants are grown. 'Sheep's Clothing' is a near-future science fiction tale of an assassin planning to kill a politician by assuming control of his daughter's body and using it to commit the murder. The ending novella, 'In Green's Dominion', is the story of a spinster professor reflecting on her life as it nears its conclusion, settling her affairs and remembering the magic moments in her life. Other stories blend fantasy with reality, with the dead arising to vote, the painful burial of a firstborn child, a lost southern town where slavery still rears its ugly head, and other horrific, thought-provoking, terrible, and wonderful tales of life.