House of Bones

Dale Bailey has crafted a novel that is as multileveled in its subtext as is Dreamland, the high-rise urban Hell known as THE HOUSE OF BONES. Bailey creates characters that are frightening in their similarities to those around us; they think bad thoughts, are selfish, and are fraught with self-doubt. They move through the novel as we do in real life, toward a nasty end that is one-sided and ugly in its eventuality. Reading HOUSE OF BONES, one knows that life will not end well for its characters as Bailey instills an ever-growing dread and suspense within each page. It's like watching a movie like SE7EN--you know somebody's going to get it, you don't know when, and worse, you never know HOW. It is a page-turner. This novel is an improvement over the excellent FALLEN and his style sings. His is a fresh and literate voice amongst a plethora of writers who would recycle the same novel repeatedly changing only the character's names and little else. It is refreshing to find a writer unafraid to go in a divergent direction and craft work that is not only different in style and voice but in subject matter. Moreover, this book contains important social connotation and could very easily be a mainstream literary novel in the vein of BELOVED. I will not give away plot points of this book as to do so would rob the reader of its majesty and suspense. Don't look at the blurb on the back of the book either if you truly want to be enthralled with and taken over by Dreamland, THE HOUSE OF BONES.

Novels about ghosts and hauntings are hard to pull off mainly for the reason that the ghost tale itself has been around for so long that every possible variation on the theme has been done. Dale Bailey's "The House of Bones" balances traditional techniques with the twist of modern social commentary. As in all classic haunted habitat novels and movies (Richard Matheson's "Hell House," Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House," the film "The House on Haunted Hill," for example), the device of an eccentric bringing together a disparate group of strangers, each with a secret, is used. The setting, however, is not the traditional manor, but an abandoned housing project, a place haunted by overwhelming despair that has lived on beyond the physical tenants. The writing is quite exceptional, the characters all well-rounded and the allegorical use of poverty and racism works very well. First and foremost, however, the novel is also often very terrifying and that is, after all, the true test of a great ghost story. I think the publisher made a mistake not putting this out in hardcover. It would be a shame if the ephemeral nature of paperback originals causes this one to be overlooked and forgotten. I truly believe it's one of the best ghost stories of recent times, up there with the aforementioned "Hell House" and "The Haunting of Hill House."

Dale Bailey writes very well, but don't hold that against him. Because he knows how to tell a story. Here, he uses some of the classic haunted house elements (a small, eclectic group in a claustrophobic environment) to build a suspenseful and chilling yarn. As a horror writer myself, I don't get scared easily, but this one did it to me a few times. This novel is a little more evolved than his debut, The Fallen, and reflective of a complex philosophy (though the tale never bogs down).If you like this novel, you might like The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, The Shining by Stephen King, or my forthcoming haunted house novel The Manor.

Dale Bailey is THE author to watch in today's genre fiction. Not only is his prose beautiful and very imaginative, his plotting is also tight and intricate. His books are usually about characters placed in dawry situations, and not about situations affecting characters. This is psychological horror at its very best. Bailey is no stranger to the ghost story. He began his career with a non-fiction examination of the haunted house in literature, so it is only fitting that his latest effort touches the very same thing he's been examining for so long. In House of Bones, Bailey throws five strangers into an eery setting that might or might not be haunted. Dreamland was once part of an apartment complex. It is now the only remaining tower, standing alone, forgotten and decrepit. Dreamland has a very strange and violent history, one that was never fully put to rest, one that should never be brought to the surface. When our five strangers enter the building to try and investigate the strange happenings, they will soon realize that the house itself seems to be very much alive. Paranoia, claustrophobia and fear will start coursing in their veins as the house will slowly close up on them. Their arrival awakens the house and brings back its thirst. Nothing is as it seems to be. One by one, the five of them will be faced with the horrors and monsters of their past. They will soon discover that the past is always waiting to come back to them. All of them have horrible secrets to hide, and all of them have horrible dreams about the things they've done wrong. When the house awakens, so will their past, and their fear will become a very, very real thing. Everything spirals, leading us to the great climax that will make you keep on turning the pages until the early hours of the morning. In House of Bones, Bailey fully displays his talents. With only two books and one collection under his belt, he has already become one of the brightest voices in genre fiction. The fact that he never sacrifices character development for plot is a thing most new authors take years to learn. The fact that he carefully construct his stories, where each word has a purpose, only makes this book greater. This is quiet horror at its very best.

About this time last year I called Dale Bailey's The Fallen one of the best contemporary fantasies I'd read in some time. Hardly a year later, Bailey comes round with a second novel, this one contemporary horror -- and how pleasing it is to say that this one's even better.House of Bones is a haunted house novel for the twenty-first century. Though Bailey fills his story with familiar trappings--a small band of disparate characters, each of whom harbors a secret, tossed into a building haunted, an inner-city highrise that harbors an unknowable and unspeakable evil (a pinch of The Shining, a dash of The Haunting of Hill House) -- he spins these archetypes in wholly new directions. As this crew settles into the haunted Dreamland, reality unspirals around them: disembodied voices, automatic writing, the blood-chilling laughter of a faraway child. Bailey takes writerly care with each of his characters: by novel's end we know their secrets, their fears, their haunted dreams. In the end, they are like family.I defy anyone to read the last 75 pages in anything but a single sitting: it comes with a roaring, shattering violence that, though horrifying, rings true. Dale Bailey's House of Bones is a novel that will remain with you long after the doors of Dreamland have closed.