House of Bones

by Dale Bailey

An unconventional billionaire, with the help of four strangers, is determined to unlock the secrets of Dreamland, a place of human suffering that has stood empty for years, before it is demolished, but they get more than they bargained for when they come face-to-face with evil. Original.

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Ghosts, Paranormal, Supernatural

384 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published December 2, 2003

About the author

Dale was born in West Virginia in 1968, and grew up in a town called Princeton, just north of the Virginia line. His stories have appeared in lots of places—The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Sci-Fiction, Lightspeed Magazine, and various anthologies. Several of them have been nominated for awards, and “Death and Suffrage,” later filmed as part of Showtime’s television anthology series Masters of Horror, won the International Horror Guild Award.

In 2003, Golden Gryphon Press collected his stories as The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories. Two novels, The Fallen and House of Bones, came out from Signet books around the same time. A third novel—Sleeping Policemen, written with with his friend Jack Slay, Jr.—came out in 2006. He has also written a study of haunted-house fiction called American Nightmares.

He lives in North Carolina with his wife and daughter.

Reviews

[audrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was really a hard one to rate. First off, holy crow: what a stellar example of the Midwestern Gothic, American horror, eco-horror and haunted house genres. Like, should be taught in schools stellar.

Second off, oy the refrigerators.

Let me explain.

While not necessarily an easy or enjoyable read, this book is nonetheless one of the most skillful stories I've ever read. I stayed up past 2 last night reading, then when I woke up this morning all I could think about was finishing the book. It's very, very well done. The characters are interesting, the back-stories are compelling, and the setting is wonderfully horrible. Bailey does a lot of work here with haunted places, the house as body (and vice versa), scars on the American psyche, the gaping wound of urban planning, and race relations in this country and the conventional horror narrative.

He also stuffs women into refrigerators like it's going out of style, which, hopefully, it is.

I loved so much about this book. It's horrible. It tears off a prime American scab from the sixties and pokes a finger in the wound. So much progress from the post-Depression era fell prey to corruption and inner-city blight in the sixties that it drove a knife into the softening flesh of this country, and we're still trying to clean that wound. The rise of ghettoes and the rise of white people's concepts of and disdain for ghettoes, paired with the brutalism of '60s architecture needs more discussion. We need to talk about this, and a truly frightening ghost story like this one is a great place to start.

But we also need to talk about misogyny in horror culture and the media in general.

While there's all this awesomeness about Bailey's novel, there's also this huge problem with women: they exist as sexual objects, to be fucked or raped or shot (don't get me started on Freud there) or fantasized about. They're drunken, failed mothers, or drunken prostitutes, or drunken girlfriends to be taken advantages of. They're victims, whose inevitably tragic and innocent demises provide all but one of the main characters with motivations for revenge.

Stop and think about that for a second. That's really fucked up.

I mean, I just read nearly 400 pages about an urban housing center that ostensibly comes to life, possesses people and kills them off with a Lovecraftian disdain for emotion, that cosmically large, reptilian uncaring for the human state, and yet while working with all these huge, lofty themes, all but one -- four out of five protagonists lug a woman-in-a-refrigerator behind them through the course of the story.

I call bullshit on that nonsense.

But this is still one helluva good book.

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dale Bailey, House of Bones (Signet, 2003)

Ladies and Gentlemen, let me make this clear from the outset: Dale Bailey is the real deal. This is good, solid haunted house horror that will keep you up late at night turning pages.

The mark of an author who knows what he's doing is the ability to draw you in without you knowing exactly where you got drawn in. King does it well, when he doesn't grab you with the first sentence. Carson McCullers was a master at it. Bailey is the heir apparent. I'm not sure where it happened, but somewhere between pages 25 and 65, I found myself wanting to not eat, not sleep, and not do much of anything else until I had finished this book. (I ended up doing so less than forty-eight hours after that. It would have been less if not for a crisis at work.)

Dreamland is your basic housing project. Except for Building Three, where a whole lot of bad things have happened over the years. Dreamland is slated for demolition, but an eccentric billionaire named Ramsey Lomax has bribed the city to halt the demolition of Building Three and allow him to move into it for two weeks. He contacts a number of seemingly diverse people to spend the time with him, investigating the presence of ghostly activity. Four respond: a journalist who spent the first tree years of his life there, a discredited medium, a veteran with a shady past, and a young doctor on the verge of losing her career. The five lock themselves (with the aid of a convenient blizzard) in Dreamland, and the fun begins.

Put together the words "Chicago" and "projects" and the first thing likely to come to any horror or true crime fan's mind is Cabrini Green. Bailey pulls a nice sleight-of-hand, recognizable only to those of who who've seen it before, to differentiate the two, but there are still obvious comparisons. (Some of the events leading to the ghostly activity have shades of real-life crimes committed at Cabrini Green, as well; readers of the works of Peter Sotos will recognize a few of the things Ramsey Lomax points out as he guides his compatriots on their first tour of Dreamland.) There are a few minor loose threads involved with this angle of things (an aerial photo of Dreamland is referred to as looking like Stonehenge, which Bailey draws attention to, and then it's never mentioned again, for example), but nothing that can't be explained away as a red herring.

Where Bailey's writing suffers, and let me rush to say I use the term "suffers" when benchmarking this stuff against classic haunted house literature that makes everyone and their mother's 100-best lists, is that his characterization is developed a bit on the, well, leisurely side. In other words, by the end of the book, you have three-dimensional characters, but in some cases you have to wait till the end of the book to get there. I understand this is a device for hooking the reader, but (a) it's overused and trite, and (b) Bailey's already got more hooks than the slaughterhouse in the remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. As passe as it may be, this is one place where Bailey could take a few new tricks from the old dog himself, Stephen King (who was, is, and always will be a master of characterization in a few concise lines).

That aside, I cannot say enough good things about Dale Bailey. Read this. You will not regret it. If you download it free online or get it out of the library, I'll even offer a money-back guarantee. ****

[Carl Alves · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is no more tired and overdone trope in the horror genre as the haunted house. I’ve read so many versions of these types of stories that it’s hard to get excited about it. Unfortunately this novel is just one of the many of this sub-genre that fall short. In about the most cliché of all possible ways of doing a haunted house story, Dreamland was a large house that was abandoned and partially dismantled before being resurrected by a wealthy man with an agenda. Even that aspect of the haunted house story has been done and done again. The story moves very slowly and is a bit of a yawner. There is just no new ground taken on in this story. The end result is a novel that is uninspiring and not worth reading. I would skip this one.

Carl Alves – author of Blood Street

[Hugo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had been looking forward to reading this since reading Bailey's The Fallen, a book which just fell shy of a five star rating due to what I felt was its brevity and lack of ambition (no great fault in a debut novelist, and the book was otherwise excellent). Sadly, House of Bones was a disappointment.

The concept is Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House transposed to the projects - a small handful of people summoned to a haunted building and challenged to stay within its walls. Bailey's facility with characters in The Fallen fails him here - too many viewpoint characters, and too many verging on cliche - and the plot does exactly what you'd expect it to do if you've read Jackson's novel, or seen any number of its literary and/or filmic descendants (The House on Haunted Hill, Hell House, 13 Ghosts, etc). Very, very disappointing.

The racial themes (which look to form the backbone of the novel, and which would have seemed to set it apart) are only lightly touched upon, and there's just very little here to get your teeth into. Bailey is still a good - maybe great - writer, but this is just unoriginal work.

But... I hear good things about his short fiction, and I love short stories, so I'm not giving up - I'll try a book of Bailey's short fiction and see where we go.

[Megan Lister · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was a disappointment. While the writing was good, the storyline was agonizingly slow. There was a lot of internal monologue going on among the characters and I was skimming pages just to get to the end.

[David Peterson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Another inconsequential "horror" novel that I did not finish. Got about halfway through and again realized with these types of books that life is just too short to continue reading stuff that simply does not interest me. This is well written but I guess just not to my liking. I didn't identify with any of the characters and found the setting (a huge abandoned "project-style" apartment complex in the ghetto) to be an entirely implausible setting for supernatural horror. Real horror, maybe, because real is so much scarier, but this takes so long to get off the ground my interest had already waned.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love haunted house stories, which was why I was attracted to this book. However, The story was so conveluted with things that didn't always seem to make a difference inthe ultimate conclusion of the story. The pacing was not great by any means. There was no hook to grab the reader, to pull you into the story and take you further. I kept plodding along, weaiting for something sisnister to really take hold of this small group of people, but all it relaly did was lead you to the next personal problem of a character that didn't really need to be brought forth.

I have read alot of haunted stories inthe past, and I had such high hopes for this one, especially after reading reviews of this and seeing the high praise for the author, and how he creates a creepy and sinister novel to grab you and pull you in. For me, that didn't happen. So, I wish I could have given it more than three stars but I just couldn't.

[Allyson Shaw · Rating 2 out of 5]

I know I liked something about this decidedly un-frightening horror novel, but I'm trying to figure out what. I did finish it, waiting for the firing of the Chekov's gun of sexual violence that seemed to be at the heart of the novel-- but it was never detonated. This issue/theme can just be piled up with the ghoulish interest in "race and class" that is explored in only the most rudimentary way. Any metaphysical horror seems almost accidental--the tropes too familiar to be creepy (A mix of The Haunting of Hill House and The Shining, peppered with a bit of The Exorcist). With that said, I liked the characters and almost felt sorry for them- trapped as they were not only in this abandoned high rise of the novel but in the novel itself with its ludicrous premise, their genuine stories lost amongst the overwritten prose. There were beautiful sentences and phrases here-- again, like the characters, lost in the detritus.

[Jasmin Chua · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three-and-a-half-stars. Evocatively told if overwritten story—with (deliberate?) callbacks to "Haunting of Hill House" and "The Shining"—that manages to tell the reader too little and too much at the same time. It takes more than half the book for any real action to get going—the cast is more haunted by the ghosts of their past rather than actual ghosts, but the tension and atmosphere are expertly honed—and then it unspools into slasher movie. Another grouse: It nobly tackles the issue of race and the failures of the welfare system in America, but some of the descriptions of Black people were unnecessarily objectifying to the point of being problematic.

But holy cow, the descriptions, which would make Shirley Jackson would weep:

“Through all that long winter and into the years that followed, Dreamland drowsed, waiting with a patience only concrete and stone can know.

Strange vapors breathed from its open drains, wafted up from the sewers buried far beneath the streets, and even on the hottest days, a thin viscid fluid, almost organic, wept from the dank blocks of its interior. It stank of mildew and urine, of fly-swarmed trash stewing in damp corridors, of spent gunshots. It stank of blood. At night, when darkness clamped down upon the city like the lid of a pressure cooker, pacts of young men roved its corridors and courtyards, driven by hungers they could neither name nor sate."

[TLCH · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lengthy read

This is a long book, 8-9 hrs to read. Pretty wordy in places. The author went in depth on character backgrounds, leaving you guessing in several areas. Different take on good vs evil. Mostly fast paced and held my interest throughout.

[Carl Bluesy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is what good horror is all about! It is full of suspense. Even though it’s a haunted house story, those have being around for as long as house’s, this still comes off as fresh. It’s and old them done in new way and I couldn’t be happier that this book came my way.

[Rory Dunn · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well written little work for the first third, only to feel rushed and incomplete in the middle, and with an ending that barely comes across as coherent.

[Ray · Rating 2 out of 5]

Haunted tenement building and race in America.

[Diane]

not read/available

[Michael Jacoby · Rating 2 out of 5]

Parts were genuinely creepy but for a book that was supposed to be scary and about a haunted house I was expecting to see a ghost well before the last 1/4 of the book. Very easy to put down. Meh.

[Gary Broyhill · Rating 4 out of 5]

www.dalebailey.com