Dale Bailey Books in Order

This study examines haunted houses in American fiction, tracing their development from Gothic traditions through Poe, Hawthorne, and Stephen King. Bailey explores how these disturbing domestic spaces expose anxieties about society, prosperity, and the American dream.

Henry Sleep returns to his West Virginia hometown after his preacher father's suicide. His investigation draws him into old hostilities and buried memories of his mother's death, alongside something sinister he and a childhood friend once discovered in the hills.

Five strangers accept a billionaire's invitation to investigate an abandoned Chicago housing tower. As its violent history comes alive, the group finds itself trapped inside a building whose accumulated evil threatens to turn their own nightmares into reality.

After a fatal accident, three college students hide the body and steal the victim's cash and a locker key. Their attempted cover-up leads to a recording of a missing girl's murder and entangles them with violent criminals and corrupt police.

Graduate student Alex Kern discovers a seemingly bottomless pit beneath his university's football stadium. What starts as an experiment becomes an increasingly sinister way to dispose of academic obstacles, in a dark campus satire about ambition and moral collapse.

After their daughter's death, Charles and Erin Hayden move into a house inherited from Victorian writer Caedmon Hollow. Charles's work on Hollow's biography draws him toward a disturbing fairy-tale world in the surrounding English woods, where grief and supernatural danger converge.

After his screenwriter brother dies of an overdose, an academic travels to Hollywood to understand what happened. Their shared obsession with movies draws him into an unsettling encounter with the past, while grief forces him to examine his own failures.

Nine stories explore people confronting apocalyptic futures, strange creatures, and worlds sliding toward darkness. From a café worker’s concern for her child to a boy pursuing rumors of angels, the collection finds stubborn hope amid danger, melancholy, and human cruelty.

An orphan receives a robotic substitute father, humanlike plants grow on an isolated farm, and the dead return with unfinished business. These speculative stories blend ordinary grief and longing with disturbing possibilities, exploring the fragile boundaries between humanity and horror.