All collections listed below are designed and edited by Michael Bailey, and published independently by Written Backwards, an imprint of Dark Regions Press, unless specified otherwise.

Yes Trespassing by Erik T. Johnson – $16.95 (fiction; 436 pages; doodles and insanity by Erik T. Johnson, introduction by John F.D. Taff). Published by Written Backwards, an imprint of Dark Regions Press.

Yes Trespassing collects twenty-five, or maybe twenty-six or -seven or perhaps twenty-eight (let’s say it’s twenty-eight) individual works by Erik T. Johnson, some previously-published, some appearing in this book for the first time, stories like “The Leaf” and “Krug’s Pen,” “The Depopulation Syndrome,” “The Invention of the Mask” (which you can find on the front cover), “The Depopulation Syndrome” and the novella Scissors Seldom Come. Trespass. Read the horror, the wonder, the mindscrewing. This book will change you.

Bones Are Made To Be Broken by Paul Michael Anderson – $22.95 (fiction; 438 pages; illustrations and cover artwork by Pat R. Steiner, introduction by Damien Angelica Walters). Published by Written Backwards, an imprint of Dark Regions Press.

This collection features 14 works of fiction by Paul Michael Anderson, including “All That You Leave Behind,” “To Touch the Dead,” “Love Song for the Rejected,” and a title novella written specifically for this book. Every story within is illustrated by artist/author extraordinaire Pat R. Steiner, who created the artwork for Qualia Nous Illustrated. The stories in Bones Are Made To Be Broken are a speculative blend of horror, science fiction, and unfiltered emotion. As Marge Simon puts it, “Anderson’s style is tensely exciting. This collection is a treasure for any horror or dark SF fan’s library.” Gene O’Neill sums up this collection with “Paul Michael Anderson writes like no other writer in dark fiction. Simply, he writes a Paul Michael Anderson story—the highest compliment any serious writer can hope to achieve.”

• “An absolute must-read collection.” – Unnerving Magazine
• “Every tale has one thing in common: Anderson’s ability to craft a compelling, thought-provoking, dark and beautifully heart-breaking story displaying the darkest depths of the human soul.” – This is Horror
• “…overall [Bones are Made to be Broken is] a solid entry by a young, extremely talented storyteller that I hope to be reading more of in the future.” – Lit Reactor
  

The Far Future (Cal Wild: Book 4) by Gene O’Neill – $14.95 (fiction; illustrations by Orion Zangara, introduction by Scott Edelman).

Gene O’Neill’s magnum opus of speculative fiction, The Cal Wild Chronicles, comes to a close with The Far Future, a meta-novel with interconnecting tales that takes place shortly after—and also intertwine with—those in The Near Future and the rest of this colorful series. Collecting some of Gene’s more recent works, such as memorable short stories like “Down on the 01 Level,” where for a price one can transform into skins of past celebrities, “Nostalgia,” in which full-body art is commonplace and sometimes useful when hiding from the law, and even “The Hungry Skull” (a love story), which takes place around an illegal histro-bistro where historical events are reenacted in ‘deathplays’ by actors and commonfolk alike, this final book in the series perhaps offers us warning glimpses into possible futures of our own, wherein prejudices and stereotyping might one day take us if we allow them into our lives. Also included are connected novellas such as The Great Northern Sweet Water Raid, and Jade, and two new futuristic novelettes, “On the North Slope of Little Agony” and “The Dark Green Woman,” which further explore post-apocalyptic Cal Wild and its colorful tales of Dyed People, mutants, and other wonderful creatures. With this final piece of the Cal Wild puzzle placed, we can finally understand the metamorphosis and importance of a not-so-unrealistic future.

The Near Future (Cal Wild: Book 3) by Gene O’Neill – $14.95 (fiction; illustrations by Orion Zangara, introduction by Megan Arcuri).

In The Near Future, Gene O’Neill covers an immense spectrum of color in a post-apocalyptic vision of California. A meta-novel of sorts, part three of The Cal Wild Chronicles collects some of Gene’s most memorable fiction, cohesively connecting stories such as “The Armless Conductor,” which was published over thirty years ago in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, to Doc Good’s Travelling Show, a Bram Stoker Award nominated novella, and “Coyote Gambit.” Tying these stories together are completely new chapters of Cal Wild, such as a new short story, “Return of the Ice Man,” as well as a new novelette, Mohave Transfer, and a new novella, The Scarlet Man, in which the lives of colorful DP’s, or Dyed People, cross paths as they try to survive a world left in ruin. Gene O’Neill masterfully blends decades of literary creation in this penultimate book of a genre-building series that may one day be called his magnum opus of his speculative work. Horror, fantasy, and science fiction collide with unforgiving, unflinching abandon as The Near Future of Cal Wild draws closer to The Far Future.

The Burden of Indigo (Cal Wild: Book 2) by Gene O’Neill – $14.95 (fiction; 278 pages; illustrations by Orion Zangara, introduction by Lisa Morton).

The Cal Wild Chronicles continues with The Burden of Indigo, the story that started it all. In 1981 Gene O’Neill published a five thousand word short story in The Twilight Zone Magazine called “The Burden of Indigo,” which launched his award-winning career of writing horror, science fiction, and fantasy. This novel-sized expansion of Gene’s original well-loved story is the second of the four volumes, illustrated throughout by Orion Zangara. The Burden of Indigo begins where The Confessions of St. Zach left off, and follows the story of an indigo man. Dyed long ago for perhaps the ultimate crime, he believes his color is starting to fade, and with visions of a Rainbow Man on his mind, he wants to know why. Is he beginning to heal? Also included in this volume is a short history and background by Gene, as well as the original short story version of “The Burden of Indigo” as it originally appeared in The Twilight Zone Magazine.

The Confessions of St. Zach (Cal Wild: Book 1) by Gene O’Neill – $14.95 (fiction; 380 pages; illustrations by Orion Zangara, introduction by John R. Little).

A post-apocalyptic vision of California comes to life in the first book of The Cal Wild Chronicles, a series of novels by Gene O’Neill that span horror, science fiction, and fantasy. Over the last 30 years, Gene has explored this colorful world called Cal Wild through award-winning short fiction, long fiction, and novels, and now his magnum opus is collected within four volumes, and illustrated throughout by Orion Zangara. It all stars with this recently expanded version of the Bram Stoker Award nominated novella, The Confessions of St. Zach, where the accused are judged and permanently dyed for their crimes. DP’s, or Dyed People, roam Cal Wild, and every day they are faced with prejudice and brutality while they try to survive a new non-colored world. A crimson man, a lime green woman, the rightfully and wrongfully accused, some dyed amber, some dyed indigo … The Confessions of St. Zach will take you from the beginning of the end, and lead you to The Burden of Indigo, the story that started it all.

Inkblots and Blood Spots by Michael Bailey – $15.95 (fiction / poetry; 256 pages; illustrations and cover artwork by Daniele Serra, introduction by Douglas E. Winter). Published by Villipede Publications.

From the mind of award-winning author and editor Michael Bailey comes Inkblots and Blood Spots (published by Villipede), a painfully beautiful collection of short stories and poetry that reaches deep into the imagination, breaking hearts and boundaries along the way…

Stories include the Bram Stoker nominated “Fireman / Primal Tongue,” which also received an Honorable Mention for Year’s Best Horror; “Dandelion Clocks,” a haunting, melodic tribute to the tragedy of 9/11; “I Wanted Black,” where a young boy’s birthday is anything but cause to celebrate; “Mum,” a tale of two sisters unfolding like the bandages on their mother’s badly burned body…

• Inkblots and Blood Spots made the preliminary ballot for the Bram Stoker Awards for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection.
• “Dandelion Clocks” made the preliminary ballot for the Bram Stoker Awards for Superior Achievement in Long Fiction.
• “It Tears Away” made the preliminary ballot for the Bram Stoker Awards for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction.
• “Fireman/Primal Tongue” was nominated for the Bram Stoker Awards Superior Achievement in Short Fiction.

PRAISE

• “I first encountered Michael Bailey’s work at the Borderlands Press Writers Boot Camp. His writing stood out immediately—vibrant, bold, and bursting with original concepts. He showed me he was a writer willing to bypass all the familiar territories and stake out a new narrative landscape all his own. With this collection of dynamic stories and poems, he will show you as well.” —Thomas F. Monteleone
• “Inkblots and Blood Spots is a smart collection of stories that evoke real fear, because they’re grounded in emotional truth. Michael Bailey has that rare ability to terrify readers and break their hearts—often in the same paragraph.” —Norman Prentiss, Bram Stoker Award winner, author of Invisible Fences
• “Most writers are either stylists or story-tellers. The stylists tend to be more common in literary fiction, the storytellers more common in genre work. Michael Bailey’s prose is highly accessible, but very precise . . . he’s a stylist, his prose very clean. Michael is indeed a very literate storyteller. His stories are always darkly sharp-edged in tone, texture, and delivery, easily appropriate for genre fiction. But perhaps most important, his stories are about something . . . each one is built on a meaningful, engaging, intellectual premise. I highly recommend this short story collection, which includes some compelling and delightful poetry.” —Gene O’Neill, The Cal Wild Chronicles
• “Artfully executed. A unique and powerful contribution to speculative literature.” —Tim Deal, Shroud Quarterly
• “Between e-books, Amazon, and new presses springing up seemingly overnight these days, a reader can easily end up with choice overload. Luckily, fans of both traditional horror and the more subtle, complex terrors of the psychological kind need look no further than Michael Bailey’s Inkblots and Blood Spots. His short story and poetry collection is a cornucopia of dark, diverse treasures: richly detailed historical fiction like “The Dying Gaul,” a re-imagining of characters from Lord Byron’s poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage; psychological thrillers like “A Light in the Closet,” in which a little girl receives a most unusual, yet perhaps not entirely unexpected, nocturnal visitor; classic Gothic chillers like “I Wanted Black,” about one man’s harrowing reckoning with the past; genre-defying stories like the Fahrenheit 451-inspired “Fireman / Primal Tongue” and the sci-fi/horror
  nightmare “Bootstrap;” as well as more traditional sleep-withthe-lights-on stories like “The Mascot” and “Not the Child.” With Inkblots and Blood Spots, Michael Bailey delivers the kind of startlingly original, beautifully imagined, and deeply affecting stories that linger long in the mind, and even longer in the psyche.” —B.E. Scully, author of the critically acclaimed novel Verland: The Transformation and the upcoming novella The Eye That Blinds
• “This collection of captivating stories and poems is both haunting and poignant. Filled with love and loss, the weight of these resolutions echoes out into the darkness with a heartbreaking permanence.” —Richard Thomas, author of Disintegration
• “With Inkblots and Blood Spots, Michael Bailey gives us a dazzling assortment of stories and poems. They bleed into our souls like knives and leave us breathless. Bailey is a fabulous writer, unique and fresh, and these stories are his best. Go buy this book. Now. You don’t want to miss this one. It has my highest recommendation.” —John R. Little, Bram Stoker Award winning author of DarkNet, Miranda, and The Memory Tree
• “Michael Bailey continues to amaze. He is on track to becoming his generation’s Ray Bradbury.” —F. Paul Wilson

Scales and Petals by Michael Bailey – $9.95 (fiction / poetry; 214 pages; cover artwork by John Hornor Jacobs).

Michael Bailey’s first short story and poetry collection was published soon after Phoenix Rose. The stories within are categorized as psychological horror, and the poems are dark in nature. Published in March 2010 by Written Backwards, this book contains thirteen short stories and thirteen poems within 196 pages, an important number revealed in the novel Palindrome Hannah.

The sick imagination of Michael Bailey brings you thirteen dark poems and thirteen tales of the macabre that will make you think twice before turning your room dark for the night. A young woman chews her fingernails raw, unable to stop; a television set dangles from an apartment complex window;  a large chest is found containing only a banded bouquet of wilted flowers; a stitched bear named Thatch bleeds at the neck, his stuffing torn out; a man wakes up duct-taped to a mammoth wooden chair.

Between writing the novels Palindrome Hannah and Phoenix Rose, Michael Bailey penned and published a number of these dark short fiction and poetry pieces, some of which can be found in literary magazines and  anthologies  around the world.  A few of these fallen dragon scales and flower petals, as he likes to call them, are reprinted here, while others are seeing print for the first time, hand selected and arranged by the author. Once you crack the spine, there’s no going back.

CONTENT

Fiction:

• Plasty
• Habit
• Defenestrate
• Wilted Flowers
• Without Face
• The Shower Curtain Man
• Fix
• Golden Rule
• Empty Canvas
• Unstitched Love
• The Girl in the Red Flower Pattern Dress
• Brick House
• The Trial Chair (novelette)

Poetry:

• The Seed, Part One
• Lost
• Mon Autumn
• Moth
• The Box
• Strangers
• The Hand
• Feast of Crows
• The Most Beautiful Place
• War
• Black
• The Betrayer
• The Seed, Part Two

AWARDS

• International Book Awards, Winner – Fiction: Short-Story Fiction (2011)
• USA Best Book Awards, Winner – Fiction: Short-Story (2011)

PRAISE

“Talk about disturbing. If you’re looking for a quick summer read, if you’re looking for something easy-going with a few cheap scares, then look elsewhere. Scales and Petals is a collection of poetry and fiction that dangles hope like a carrot on a stick and delights in yanking it away.” – Dark Recesses Press

“Bailey’s style is captivating. He has a wonderful way of integrating really over-the-top, out-there horror with mundane, every-day events; so that by the time the reader reaches the end of the story, he/she is entirely off-balance… but in a good way. The man has a powerful hand with a plot line.” – Shroud Magazine

ARTWORK

The cover artwork was designed by John Horner Jacobs, a fellow writer who attended a writing boot camp with Michael during the creation process of Phoenix Rose. For those interested, the author highly recommends visiting borderlandspress.com.