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Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1995. The story can also be found in the anthology Nebula Awards 31 (1997), edited by Pamela Sargent. It is included in the collection The Resurrection Man's Legacy and Other Stories (2003).

A breathtaking collection of wonders and horrors--including robotic surrogate parents and zombie voters--from a new acknowledged master of darkest fantasy

Whether speculating on an all-too-possible future or plumbing the stygian depths of supernatural evil and human degradation, Dale Bailey's award-winning short fiction has been justifiably compared to the work of some of the true giants in the field--Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, and Theodore Sturgeon, to name but a few. In this first collection of astonishing stories, the acclaimed author of the modern horror masterworks The Fallen and House of Bones demonstrates his remarkable range with tales that exhilarate, terrify, and touch the soul.

A young boy comes of age on a secluded farm that grows a particularly grisly crop. The dead rise up to cast their ballots in a close presidential election. An assassin plots his next kill from inside the body of someone frighteningly close to the victim. An African American census taker discovers a hidden bayou town where time has stopped at a nightmarish point in history. Bailey takes readers inside the tents of a circus of shadows and explores an expectant father's dark and terrible legacy for his unborn child. This extraordinary collection runs the gamut from fantasy to horror, from science fiction to heartbreaking reality, speaking in voices, old and young, that brilliantly capture the light and the darkness of their ingeniously imagined worlds.

Table of Contents:

• Dale Bailey: In His Dominion - essay by Barry N. Malzberg
• The Resurrection Man's Legacy - (1995) - novelette
• Death and Suffrage - (2002) - novelette
• The Anencephalic Fields - (2000) - novelette
• Home Burial - (1994) - shortstory
• Quinn's Way - (1997) - novelette
• Touched - (1993) - shortstory
• The Census Taker - (2003) - novelette
• Exodus - (1997) - shortstory
• Cockroach - (1998) - novelette
• Sheep's Clothing - (1995) - novelette
• In Green's Dominion - (2002) - novelette
• Story Notes - essay

Hiding his psychic powers from a paranoid society, Dante Ratkay is forced to act upon a premonition about his own death and delves into his family's forbidden secrets in order to unleash a profound force deep within himself.

It is now 2074. Magic has been in the world for as long as anyone can remember--and has taken over. Children are sacrificed to gods and ghosts. Man-made machines have conquered the inner cities. And people who enter the forests are never seen again...

Galveston had been baptized twice. Once by water in the fall of 1900. Again by magic during Mardi Gras, 2004. Creatures were born of survivors' joy and sufferers' pain: scorpions the size of dogs, the Crying Clown, the Widow who ate her victims. And the Island of Galveston would forever be divided--between the real city and a city locked in a sort of constant Carnival, an endless Mardi Gras...