Dale Frederick Bailey is an American author of speculative fiction, including science fiction, fantasy and horror, active in the field since 1993. He writes as Dale Bailey.
Bailey has stated, "One of the abiding disappointments of my life is that I’ve never had any of the interesting jobs that writers are supposed to have. I was never a gandy dancer or a stevedore. I never drove an ambulance on the Italian Front. I just went to school to study literature and started writing stories." He has cited Ray Bradbury as his most important literary influence, along with Zenna Henderson, Clifford D. Simak and Stephen King. Other early influences included J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Robert Silverberg, George R. R. Martin, Robert A. Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov. His 2002 story "Death and Suffrage" has been adapted for television as Homecoming, an episode of Showtime’s Masters of Horror series first aired in 2005. Much of Bailey's short work has initially been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, but it has also appeared in various other periodicals and webzines, including Amazing Stories, Asimov's Science Fiction, Clarkesworld Magazine, Lightspeed, Nightmare Magazine, Pulphouse, Sci Fiction, and Tor.com, as well as the original anthologies Echoes, Lovecraft Unbound: Twenty Stories, Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond, Queen Victoria's Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy, and ZvR Diplomacy: A Zombies vs Robots Collection. Some of his works have been translated into French, German, Italian, or Spanish.
American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction
Short non-fiction
"The H Word: The Failure of Fear"
"The H Word: Bringing the Horror Home"
"The H Word: Monsters and Metaphors"
Awards
Bailey's work has been nominated for numerous genre literary awards, and won several. His wins include "Death and Suffrage," which won the 2002 International Horror Guild Award for Best Intermediate Form, "The End of the End of Everything," which won the 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novelette as well as placing 30th in the 2015 Locus Poll Award for Best Novelette, "I Married a Monster from Outer Space," which placed first in the 2017 Asimov's Readers' Poll for Best Novelette. His nominations include:
"The Census Taker," which was nominated for the 2003 International Horror Guild Award for Best Intermediate Form and placed 18th in the 2004 Locus Poll Award for Best Novelette
"Eating at the End-of-the-World Café," which placed 12th in the 2011 Locus Poll Award for Best Novelette
"The Crevasse," which was nominated for the 2011 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Short Fiction
"Mating Habits of the Late Cretaceous," which placed 12th in the 2013 Locus Poll Award for Best Novelette and 4th in the 2013 Asimov's Readers' Poll for Best Novelette
"Snow," which was a preliminary nominee for the 2015 Bram Stoker Award for Short Fiction
The End of the End of Everything, which was nominated for the 2016 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Collection and placed 23rd in the 2016 Locus Poll Award for Best Collection
"Rules of Biology," which was a finalist in the 2019 Asimov's Readers' Poll for Best Short Story
