It’s time for you to join me at the table for my final StokerCon conversation, following the ones with my mid-’70s Marvel Comics Bullpen pal Howard Bender and screenwriter, award-winning prose writer, and Halloween expert Lisa Morton. And this might be my most horrific conversation yet! Not merely because of my guest — but because certain scenes from Night of the Living Dead were shot in the basement of our chosen venue, The Original Oyster House!

Michael Bailey is an award-winning writer and editor, having been nominated for a Bram Stoker Award nine times, winning once for the anthology The Library of the Dead, and a four-time Shirley Jackson Award nominee. His novels include Palindrome Hannah (2005) and Phoenix Rose (2009). His short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including Birthing Monsters: Frankenstein’s Cabinet of Curiosities and Cruelties, Lost Highways: Dark Fictions from the Road, Canopic Jars: Tales of Mummies and Mummification, and most recently Hybrid: Misfits, Monsters and Other Phenomena.

Many of these stories have been gathered in the collections Scales and Petals (2010), Inkblots and Blood Spots (2014), Oversight (2018), and The Impossible Weight of Life (2020). He’s the owner of the small press Written Backwards, which has published many excellent anthologies, and I’m not calling them excellent simply because my own short stories have appeared in many of them. He’s currently the screenwriter for the documentary series Madness and Writers: The Untold Truth. Maybe?, which all of us in the horror community are looking forward to seeing.

We discussed his Stoker Award-nominated poetry collaboration with Marge Simon (and how they managed not to kill each other during the writing of it), how he knows when a poem is a poem and not a short story, what reading other anthologies taught him that made his own anthologies better, the economics of small press publishing, how to lose awards gracefully, the way getting an early story torn apart by Douglas E. Winter at Borderlands Boot Camp gave him the boost he needed, why his novel Psychotropic Dragon took 16 years to transform from an idea into a book, how one of the joys of writing is never knowing the end until you get there, his new obsession of making chocolate from fruit to bar, our shared love of revising continually, and so much more.

Here’s how you can join us at The Oyster House —

1) Subscribe at Apple Podcasts — or wherever you choose to consume your podcasts — where I hope you’ll be tempted to sample a few of the 205 previous episodes.

2) Listen via the RSS feed of http://eatingthefantastic.libsyn.com/rss on the device of your choice.

3) Or simply use the embed below.

Here’s what we ate at The Oyster House —

Monster Fish Sandwich

Lorna Doone
listen to the episode and you’ll understand

Communing with Tom Savini
because it turned out we ate at his favorite table

Above the Basement
where night of the living dead was filmed

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Coming up two weeks from today — my lunch with Hildy Silverman, who is perhaps best known for having been the Editor-in-chief of Space and Time Magazine from 2005 through 2018, but is also a writer of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and the interstitial spaces between.

Thanks for listening!