| Bailing Water is John Dempsey's vision of life on the edge of reason. On the other hand, it might portray life on the verge of success (or total failure). Dempsey is hard to pin down.
Bailing Water is either a brutal commentary on reality today or pure creative fantasy concocted by a man trapped in modern society's overwhelming maze of conventions and expectations. The reader must decide.
Whether Dempsey writes to entertain or to exercise personal demons, his work evokes widely varying emotions from readers. It has been called realistic, thought-provoking, humorous, disturbing, artistic, obscene, unconventional, sad, and illuminating (among other things).
The disquieting yet amusing quality of Dempsey's work is that readers often recognize themselves in his stories. Therein lies Dempsey's talent; the ability to draw the reader into a story and force a memory of the way things once were or the way readers always hoped things would never turn out.
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