Scales and Petals

The sick imagination of nonlinear horror novelist 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 up 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 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.