The End of the End of Everything

by Dale Bailey, Victo Ngai (Illustrator)

“The End of the End of Everything" is an sf/horror story about a long-married couple invited by an old friend to an exclusive artist’s colony. The inhabitants of the colony indulge in suicide parties as the world teeters on the brink of extinction, worn away by some weird entropy.

Genres: Short Stories, Horror, Science Fiction, Fiction, Fantasy, Apocalyptic, Speculative Fiction

38 pages, ebook

First published April 23, 2014

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

[karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

this story is a kind of riff on The Masque of the Red Death. instead of the wealthy and titled thinking themselves safe from the plague behind fortified walls and having a big old party about it, here we have a group of aaaartists celebrating in the face of encroaching death; realizing its inevitability and thumbing their noses at it as they hold "suicide parties" where their death becomes a work of art itself, and one of their choosing.

the threat in this case is known as "ruin." it seems to be similar to "the nothing" in michael ende's The Neverending Story:



a wave of destruction creeping ever closer, withering everything in its path:

Ruin had lately devoured most of the city and it encroached on either side of the abandoned interstate: derelict cars rusting back to the elements, skeletal trees stark against a gray horizon, an ashen, baked-looking landscape, though no fire had burned there. In some places the road was all but impassable.

ben and his wife lois are visiting their more-successful friend stan and his new trophy wife mackenzie. ben is a poet, who has had some measure of success, but his accomplishments are dwarfed by stan's, with his oscars and much-younger model wife. there is some discomfort in the form of jealousy, and mixed feelings about stan's having cast off his old wife in favor of a younger model, but since the end is coming, the party mood prevails. the suicide party mood.

every night they all, including mackenzie's nine-year-old daughter cecilia, attend a party thrown at the beach home mansions of a different glittering artist, at the conclusion of which the host will off themselves in a showy way, to the applause of the gathered guests.

at one of these parties, ben meets a woman named victoria glass, who is a "mutilation artist." what she does is not dissimilar to this:



but in her case, the participants are always willing.

the story is not all spectacular bloodshed, though. it is similar to On the Beach in its casual reaction to the end of the world. there isn't any panic, and there is plenty of room for quiet meditations on marriage and fidelity and the necessity of art and truth and nipples.

because, yeah, there's plenty of this kind of stuff:

Her sheer dress blew back in some vagary of the wind, exposing her body so that he could see the weight of her breasts and the dark triangle of her sex. Another jolt of desire convulsed him and once again he turned away.

there are all these tedious sexual asides, as ben becomes aroused by many different women; by their nipples and pubic hair. because in the coming apocalypse, casual nudity is the way of things. and that shit just always bores me. i'm not a prude or anything (I Fucked the Puppet, anyone?) but you know how there are people who write sex scenes and they just make you wince? *koff* harry turtledove *koff.* i just didn't see the necessity of all the sexxiness, and it took away from the really interesting dark fantasy, which was lurid and sensationalist enough without these generic and clunky arousal scenes.

now, had it been a "the world is ending, let's all bang" orgy situation, i would totally understand and say "yes, that is a scenario that would happen." but while some characters do indeed embrace the "what happens in apocalypse stays in apocalypse" attitude, the things i am icky at are not these scenes, but just two people talking and suddenly there is a nipple. and staring. and arousal.

it was just tonally off, to me, in the midst of this very strong story about art and defiance and cruelty.

but overall, a really interesting story, and another great tor freebie. and because the illustrations on these are so amazing, and not as impressive when they are just in that tiny bookcover size:



nice.

read it for yourself here: http://www.tor.com/stories/2014/04/th...

come to my blog!

[Karl]

Contents:

001 - "The End of the World as We Know It"
021 - "The Bluehole"
047 - "The Creature Recants"
062 - "Mating Habits of the Late Cretaceous"
097 - "A Rumor of Angels"
121 - "Eating at the End-of-the-World CafŽ"
147 - "Lightning Jack's Last Ride"
171 - "Troop 9"
185 - "The End of the End of Everything"

Cover Art - Galen Dara

[Cynnamon · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very disturbing story of apocalypse.

[Kasia · Rating 3 out of 5]

When it comes to reading, length is not an indication of greatness but it can greatly enhance tension and it's mission, which is to blast a story into the reader's eyes that will make them live though it's delicately constructed world in a believable fashion. And that is quite a feat which balances on personal preference as well, some will love this some wont, I was in the middle, it had a bit of both.

As I read this story I felt like it encompassed The Great Gatsby, The Never Ending Story and a Damien Hirst exhibit all in one. It was wild but sometimes it felt like not much more than words. Words trying to describe colorful lush images were just that, words standing on the page like a wooden fence, I wasn't seeing it as it was meant to be seen. Author seems more focused on cramming as much info as possible without letting the reader settle in and understand the surroundings. I was told the story, I wish I was shown the story from a more organic delicate angle. My issue with it is that it didn't feel like a short story, it felt as if someone was trying to cram a whole novel full of adjectives and adverbs into 30 pages.

I did however really like the brazen idea, the ruin, facing death in such a different manner, as people are very uncomfortable around the topic, which is part of life. You cant have valleys without the mountains. I liked it even though I never got the sense of the urgency or the threat of the ravaging/ ruin, as in what is it rather than a backdrop for the excess and strange behavior but if I had a choice to go back in time and not read it, would I have left it alone? No :P so go figure, nice stuff in here, go find it.

-Kasia S.

[Figgy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Ruin is coming, and you can wait and let it take you, let it turn you to ash.
Or you can go out with a bang, something for people to remember in the last days before their own ruin. Something that will eventually be remembered by no one because there will be no one around to remember it.

Art for art’s sake.


My rating of this book is in two parts; 2 stars for the first half, 4 stars for the second half.


The opening paragraph was far too wordy for a short story(in my opinion). It wasn’t snappy, it didn’t draw the reader in, and it tried to give a whole lot of information that I found myself having to scroll back to early in the story, trying to remember who was who, and married to whom.

It seemed like it let its literary ambitions get in the way of telling a good story.

The last time Ben and Lois Devine saw Veronica Glass, the noted mutilation artist, was at a suicide party in Cerulean Cliffs, an artist’s colony far beyond their means. That they happened to be there at all was a simple matter of chance. Stan Miles, for whom Ben had twice served as best man, had invited them to his beach house to see things through with his new wife, MacKenzie, and her nine-year-old daughter Cecilia. Though the Devines had no great enthusiasm for the new wife—Stan had traded up, was how Lois put it—they still loved Stan and had resolved to put the best face on the thing. Besides, the prospect of watching ruin engulf the world among such glittering company was, for Ben at least, irresistible. He made his living on the college circuit as a poet, albeit a minor one, so when Stan said they would fit right in, his statement was not entirely without truth.

I was struggling to make myself continue to read, and the only things that kept me going were that it was only 38 pages long, and the premise was really cool and creepy.

But at about halfway through the story, something happened.

I wasn’t finding the writing as horribly wordy anymore, which could be that it wasn’t as wordy, or just that I had managed to get used to it. I feel like it might be a little bit of both. I was getting more used to it and, having done the infodump in the first part of the story, the author was able to actually get on with the party.

I feel like this might have been a much snappier story if it started at the party where Ben met Veronica Glass for the first time, and the other information had been revealed as the story went on. This would have been just as successful at leaving the reader uncertain as to what was going on.

I do understand that this is supposed to be a study of the way people might handle a big, unknown “thing” coming to erase them from existence, but I felt like a lot more of this was shown in the second half of the story, and in the last definitive scene for sure, than in the first half of the story.

I would have also liked to know more about the Ruin. There’s talk about the few stars left in the sky when Ben is pointing out constellations to Cecy, but how does this work in the grand scheme of things? Does the Ruin move with the rotation of the Earth? If so, why has the sun not blinked out of existence yet, why do they get mornings, afternoons, nights, but stars are disappearing?

Once again, I understand that this is not something we get to know, because Ben does not know, but there are inconsistencies with how this Ruin works, and it would be possible to give us more information indirectly and without infodumping just in making sure the Ruin sticks to its own laws.

There were a lot of scenes in the book that I didn’t really count as scenes because they were told to us in such a way to make them blur together, with nothing in particular happening, with the reader not getting caught up in the here and now of the story, but watching it happen more passively:

As ruin spread, Cerulean Cliffs retreated. On the second night, Ben stood on the verandah and counted lights like a strand of Christmas bulbs strung along the coastline; in the days that followed they began to wink out. One afternoon, he and Stan hiked inland to the edge of the destruction: half a mile down the gravel driveway, and two more miles after that, along the narrow two-lane state road until it intersected with the expressway.

The second last ACTUAL scene was what made me upgrade the last half of the story to 4 stars from 3. It was disturbing, it was cringe worthy, and it showed just how twisted and desperate people can get when they know the end is coming and there’s nothing they can do about it.

But MAN did it take a long time to get to that scene.

I enjoyed the story. I think.

And I’m definitely curious enough to check out other works by this author, but I’m glad to be done with the wordiness and passive scenes of this particular story.

The Ruin was a really interesting concept. Interesting, and terrifying. A disaster that not only cannot be stopped, but cannot be explained.

The End of the End of Everything was one of those stark, sad tales which you know is not going to have a happy ending. Eventually you resign yourself to the fact that the characters might grow and do things with their last days, but that those will, without a doubt, BE their last days.

But happiness has got to relative, right? Otherwise we'll likely fall into a pit of despair and do crazy things. Sometimes it's not about what we leave behind, but what we do with the time we have.

Art for art's sake.

You can read this story for free, here: http://www.tor.com/stories/2014/04/th...

[Adam Nevill · Rating 4 out of 5]

New writer for me, but another fine voice that seems to sweep effortlessly across styles and directions. The title story is superb. It seized me.

[Karlyflower *The Vampire Ninja, Luminescent Monster & Wendigo Nerd Goddess of Canada (according to The Hulk)* · Rating 3 out of 5]

I forgot to do a review for you..... can you ever forgive me?!

Okay so this short story is not for the faint of heart! It's pretty gross - like Hunter S. Thompson kind of gross, people, not eww don't show me your food gross - but if you have morbid sensibilities it's well worth the spot of time it takes to read it!

Set in the end of days, when suicide parties are a thing, this is a twisted piece of grotesque beauty.

[Maico Morellini · Rating 5 out of 5]

"L'ultima volta che Ben e Lois Devine videro Veronica Glass, la nota artista delle mutilazioni, fu a una festa suicida a Cerulean Cliffs, una colonia di artisti ben al di là delle loro possibilità"

Inizia così. Inizia esponendomi alla cinica ironia delle divinità letterarie che a gennaio del 2000 avevano piazzato sul mio sentiero di lettore Cecità, e che oggi si prendono gioco di me offrendomi "La fine della fine di ogni cosa". Cosa ho trovato tra le pagine di questo racconto?
Ci sono degli artisti. C'è una villa in riva al mare, aggrappata alle rocce di una scogliera. Ci sono delle feste e tutto intorno "la rovina". Un male indefinito e indefinibile che sta piano piano rosicchiando ogni cosa. Divora luci. Divora la vita. Trasforma tutto in polvere spazzando via l'eredità materiale dell'uomo.
Tra le città distrutte, tra le onde di un mare reso grigio e morto, tra i prati aridi che Dale Bailey racconta ha risuonato nella mia testa una poesia scritta in un altro luogo e in un altro tempo, l'Ozymandias di Percy Bysshe Shelley.

"Null'altro rimane. Intorno alle rovine
Di quel rudere colossale, spoglie e sterminate,
Le piatte sabbie solitarie si estendono oltre confine"

Perché? Forse perché quella parola, 'rovine', che tanto bene si sposa alla fine delle cose di Bailey. O forse - soprattutto - perché Ben Levine è un poeta. È un poeta che odia e ama la sua arte. Odia e ama la semplicità delle cose che possiede, odia e ama la lussuria di ciò che potrebbe avere e che non ha. O non vuole. O che ha senza volerle davvero. Nella villa alla fine delle cose si ritrovano artisti. Artisti che dovrebbero conoscere il mondo, che dovrebbero averlo esplorato nelle sue parti più nascoste e che proprio per questo, in qualche maniera, dovrebbero resistere più di tutti alla "rovina". È forse quello, in realtà, il senso delle feste suicida? Un ultimo fronte di resistenza, una sorta di legge del più forte, un tentativo non tanto di sopravvivere quando di morire per ultimi?

"L'arte per l'arte"

È il mantra di Veronica Glass. Opaco personaggio che sembra aver danzato sulla fine del mondo prima che il mondo iniziasse davvero a finire. Veronica Glass è tutto ciò che Ben vuole e tutto ciò di cui ha paura. È la risposta alle domande che non vengono fatte. È a suo modo l'inizio e la fine della rovina, ma di una rovina persino più profonda di quella fisica che Ben e gli altri affrontano. Una rovina morale. Una resa all'arte per l'arte.

"Perché c'è bellezza nel dolore e nella nostra capacità, nel nostro coraggio, di sopportarlo"

Eppure. Eppure Bailey riesce a distillare speranza. A riportare la bellezza al centro. Nel caleidoscopio di morte e dolore e sofferenza e resa e nichilismo che Veronica Glass incarna e in cui tutti gli altri guardano, Bailey riesce a dare colore alla rovina. Riesce a raccontare che la bellezza perdura anche se non c'è più nessuno a guardarla.
Oggi, più che in altri momenti, ne avevo bisogno.

[Kinsey_m · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting short story about two married couples waiting for the end of the world in an artist's colony (rich artists, mind you).
Lately I've read several books or stories where there has been some element (in this case "the ruin") that I wouldn't have been to visualize in the past but now I can do it with crisp clarity, but also a nagging feeling that it's because I've seen a similar especial effect in a movie. Not the author's fault, I suppose.
Also, there is Veronica, who is a mutilation artist. Basically a mix of the Chinese political prisoners used in the Bodies exhibition (proof that reality is always stranger and crueller than fiction) and the German man who gave permission to another to b killed and eaten in a very misguided erotic game. It wasn't clear to me that Veronica's career started post-ruin and therefore is somewhat more acceptable, like th suicide parties in the colony. I would have liked Veronica to be scrier and the ending to have more of a punch, but I have to say the writing was great and the interactions between characters were very interesting.

As an only child myself, I loved this paragraph about Cecy, Mackenzie's 9 year old daughter:

Cecilia joined them for a while and then wandered off to the other end of the verandah to play some game of her own invention. She had the virtues and the vices of the only child—she was both intensely independent, playing solo games of her own devising, and profoundly dependent. She had been too early inducted into the mysteries of adult life and she had not yet the emotional maturity to understand them.

[Hélène Louise · Rating 3 out of 5]

The novella was really good, with a strong atmosphere, in a (maybe metaphorical?) ending apocalyptic world. If I didn't appreciate it more it's very probably because it also was quite too "adult" for my taste: disillusioned sex, toxic indulgences (sex, alcool, drugs) and a very very weird, disgusting, awful, disturbing idea (some very very weird, disgusting, awful, disturbing art). The end, and its moral, was rather sweet, comparatively (if not an happy one, obviously)

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was well written, but a rather hard read.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dark and beautiful, and didn't realize until after I read it that the author is from my corner of the world.

[Mehsi · Rating 1 out of 5]

WTF did I just read? It was entrancing, horrible, scary, why the fuck would you let a child see this, short story. I am curious what is ruining the world that causes people to have these parties, to commit suicide. We read about some things that happen in the world, but it is too little for me. At times I just wanted to stop reading, but for some reason I had to know how it would end for Ben, for his companions. Would they suicide? Or would they get away?
Trigger warnings: Gore, suicide, death, cheating, orgies, mutilation, alcohol, drugs.

[Acid Free Pulp · Rating 4 out of 5]

REVIEWED AT http://acidfreepulp.com/2014/05/01/th...

If you unfamiliar with artist/writer gatherings, the good ones usually include loads of booze, that one über-pretentious person, personal crises and looming entropy. This is all captured in Dale Bailey’s novelette/short story, “The End of the End of Everything.”

Ben and Lois Devine are invited by their close friend to an artists’ colony during the summertime. Ben is a poet, who readily admits that he is mediocre, but squeaks by doing the MFA circuit. He’s had a few publications, but doesn’t expect people to know him or his work.

They are unaware that the daily evening parties are actually suicide parties where guests mingle at a Gatsbyesque grotesque soiree not short on small talk, overly long readings of writers’ works, and finally, with the suicide of one of the guests. Their deaths are quite brutal, but somehow Dale Bailey has made them a work of art that exceeds their own assumed pedestrian output. The idea of art for art’s sake is repeated throughout, a rhetorical device that becomes even more realized when Ben meets the “mutilation artist,” Veronica Glass (her name, alone, invokes an image of an unreal and severe individual).

Anytime she bumps into him, Veronica continues to ask Ben how he will end his life. The poet is reluctant to the whole idea, even with the impending “ruin” that seems to be swallowing up the world around them. The term is used to elicit images of a battered world, but also to isolate the artists’ colony even more. Every day, ruin seems to roll closer, dispatching anyone who goes into it. The world feels suffocated. It’s almost as if the colony, which is aptly named Cerulean Cliffs, hangs on the edge of where earth meets the sky with any wrong misstep sending you over and into the abyss.

Somehow Bailey is able to write a story that feels more like a painting. The entire time, I felt like I was staring closely at a canvas, observing the individual brushstrokes and captivated at how they appear like textured expressions making up a whole. Even when Ben sees in person the type of art Veronica Glass creates, I couldn’t look away even though imagining it reminded me of all the layers of my own skin and the complicated system that lies beneath.

This is one of those stories that I hope to come back to again, so I can take in the rich and destructive world Dale Bailey has created. Part of me would like to see this as a novel, but I wonder if in doing so would negate the overwhelming feeling of anxiety and the richness of this grotesque situation.

[Lacey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow, that was pretty amazing. What would you do with the limited time you have left to live when the slow wave of ruin surrounds you. Ben and Lois end up at the isolated community of Cerulean Cliffs as houseguests to an old friend to wait out the end of the world. It is slowly being enveloped by the ruin, which destroys everything in it's path, leaving only scorched earth and ash behind. This was a well written, descriptive and disturbing story about how a small community celebrates each night with a suicide party where the house closest to the ruin is consumed the following day and the host ends their life before the partygoers. This story brought up so many thoughts and questions for me that to write more would give too much away. The ending was excellent!

[Spencer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short story is about an unknown cataclysm slowly destroying the world and a poet experiencing the end at an artists colony where life, death, morality and decadence are mused over.
I liked the writing, which was quite succinct as is the story and effectively used the end of the world as a framing device for an exploration into nihilism and humanity's ability to overcome these inherent thoughts.
I'd also like to compliment the cover illustration by Victo Ngai, which is part of these reason I chose to read this and really captures the atmosphere of the book.

[Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a story that will stay with you. After finishing, my mind kept returning to it over and over again. Wondering about characters motivations, what that world would be like to live in, how I would deal with it. There is a LOT to unpack in this short story.

[Malapata · Rating 1 out of 5]

Se me ha hecho eterna. Una paja mental con el transfondo el fin del mundo.

[Maggie Gordon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I expected to hate The End of the End of Everything. I'm still burnt out on stories about the end of the world, particularly the type that dwell on the endless bad aspects of humanity. But Bailey's piece didn't end the way that I expected. You will need to sift through a rocky beginning. While the prose is nice, it's still more verbose that it needs to be, and I think some of the focus on the bloodier, sexier aspects of the end of the world was unnecessary. I would have started the story later in the narrative, well into the downward spiral of the rich beach dwellers.

For a story where the end of the world seems inevitable, it ends on a fairly positive note. The story, at its heart, is about art and humanity and the value these things hold. The development of the main character in the last half of the piece was quite refreshing compared to most apocalyptic scenarios, and despite the gloom of the piece, I finished my read feeling less mired in mope than I expected. Though I do not want to give the impression that this was a happy tale. The ending is still fairly bleak, it is avoids focusing on that aspect. Overall, it was a fascinating world with terrible people and I found myself entirely captured by their desperate attempts to find meaning in their final days.

[Margaryta · Rating 3 out of 5]

My God this was terrifying...and yet it had such a great series of thoughts imbued into it, and while something like mutilation is absolutely horrible to read about, in any context, pretty much, it didn't feel extraneous here. The whole story kind of made sense all together, wrapped into one entity. I just don't know if I fully agree with some of the things here, nor whether I can fully stand behind some of the characters, especially Ben, in this case. It's was interesting enough to read in terms of pacing, although the writing itself wasn't anything magnificent. And while the generic "end of the world" trope is very contrived and almost stereotypical here, it still invites the reader to consider and compare our own society to this other time, which can easily become our own.

[Emily Perkovich · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was very intriguing, but I think it would have worked better as a full length. For me, the length made all of the supposed sexual tension feel like I was being told it exists, so I must believe it exists, even though nothing is making me feel it as palpable. The lack of tension that I actually felt, made all of the mentions of sex seem unnecessary and misogynist in a way. I wanted more buildup on everything. More back story. More character development. I actually enjoyed the vagueness surrounding what the ruin is and how it started, but I want to know how everyone got here together and why they are making their choices.

[Charlie Eskew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bailey's work here, most notably in the prose is rich and delightful. I'd likely give it a 5 but unfortunately one or two of the shorts just didn't resonate with me, not that they were any less beautiful in composition but I'd found my mind wandering during the story, (A Rumour of Angels specifically). In most of these I was taken in by the realism over the supernatural elements or action. The way he weaved relatable character conflict and loneliness into his work was marvellous. Wonderful read.

[chatshire · Rating 3 out of 5]

Do you see how gorgeous the cover is? Victor Ngai's art is breathtaking. As for the content, I was immediately drawn to a reversed concept of "The Masque of the Red Death" - a story that made a tremendous impact on me I have a tattoo for it. People here run towards death and hold debauched "suicide parties" in the midst of the apocalypse. I had problems with the execution but I was entertained and disgusted for the whole read, and I'm pretty surprised the the author did a complete 180 with the reader's expectations by giving THAT ending.

[Carlo Salvoni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Penso che chiunque abbia velleità artistiche dovrebbe leggere questo racconto: perché lo facciamo? Ne vale davvero la pena? E soprattutto, fin dove siamo disposti a spingerci? Una distopia potente tenta di spogliare l'uomo da moralità e convenzioni, in un contesto estremo, in cui "l'arte per l'arte" rischia di far perdere ogni valore, laddove non c'è più futuro. E tuttavia questa lettura ci costringe a guardarci allo specchio per chiederci cosa cerchiamo davvero quando ci chiudiamo in una stanza per scrivere, dipingere, dare forma alle nostre idee perché qualcuno le apprezzi...

[Ayesha · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was terrifyingly good.

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

It lives up to it's title. Phenomenal short stories with a ~80% hit rate. The first and last stories were my favorites.

[Steve · Rating 2 out of 5]

The concept is an interesting riff on "The Masque of the Red Death," but the narrative seems to wander. Which is not ideal considering the already wordy purple writing.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful story.

[Lauren Henderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a well written short story and the premise was interesting. It was just fine.

[Sara G · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like this concept has been done infinitely better.