Best New Horror #26, page 55
American publisher Oscar Dystel, who turned around failing US imprint Bantam Books in the early 1950s and remained as Chairman until 1980, died on May 28, aged 101. Among his best-selling acquisitions were William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, Peter Benchley’s Jaws and the Star Trek franchise.
American movie and television historian and critic Steven H. (Henry) Scheuer died of congestive heart failure on May 31, aged 88. He edited seventeen editions of the innovative reference guide Movies on TV (1958-93), and his other books include Who’s Who in Television and Cable and The Complete Guide to Videocassette Movies.
American SF and fantasy author Jay Lake (Joseph Edward Lake, Jr.) died on June 1, aged 49. He had been suffering from cancer since 2008. His novels include Rocket Science, Trial of Flowers, Mainspring, Escapement, Madness of Flowers, Green, Pinion, Endurance, Kalimpura and Lady of the Islands (with Shannon Page). He also edited the anthologies All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories (with David Moles), TEL: Stories, Spicy Slipstream Stories (with Nick Mamatas), The Exquisite Corpuscle (with Frank Wu), Other Earths (with Nick Gevers), Footprints (with Eric T. Reynolds) and the first six volumes of Polyphony (with Deborah Layne, 2002-06). Lake’s acclaimed short fiction was collected in Greetings from Lake Wu, Green Grow the Rushes-Oh, American Sorrows, Dogs in the Moonlight, The River Knows Its Own, The Sky That Wraps and the posthumous The Last Plane to Heaven, while his stories ‘The Goat Cutter’ and ‘The American Dead’ appeared, respectively, in volumes #15 and #18 of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. In 2004, Lake received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
Herb (Herbert) Yellin, who founded the Californian literary imprint Lord John Press in 1978 to publish signed limited editions of modern authors, died on June 13, aged 79. Amongst the many writers he published were Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, Ursual K. Le Guin, Dan Simmons, Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike. Dennis Etchison edited the original anthology Lord John Ten in 1987, which included contributions from Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, William F. Nolan, Whitley Strieber, Roberta Lannes and many others.
American author Daniel Keyes died on June 15, aged 86. He was best known for his Hugo Award-winning SF short story ‘Flowers for Algernon’ (in the April 1959 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) and the Nebula Award-winning expanded novel version in 1966. It was subsequently filmed as Charly (1968) starring Cliff Robertson, who won an Academy Award for his performance. In the early 1950s, Lester del Rey helped Keyes get a job as an associate editor with the pulp publisher Stadium Publications, where he worked on Marvel Science Stories and the struggling Atlas Comics line. Under the pen names “Kris Daniels” and “A.D. Locke”, he also wrote scripts for such EC comics as Shock Illustrated and Confessions Illustrated. ‘Flowers for Algernon’ was adapted for radio and TV, and as a stage play, a modern dance work, and a musical. Keyes received the SFWA Author Emeritus Life Achievement Award in 2000.
74-year-old American film historian John Cocchi (John Robert Cocchi, Jr.), author of the ground-breaking reference work Second Feature: The Best of the ‘B’ Films (1991) from Citadel Press, was determined to have died circa June 16 after having gone missing on April 25. His body was found in a shipping channel off Sandy Hook, Staten Island. Cocchi also wrote The Westerns: A Picture Quiz Book, contributed to such magazines as Castle of Frankenstein, Box Office and Classic Images, and worked (uncredited) on publicity for Al Adamson’s 1969 movie Five Bloody Graves.
Ditmar Award-winning Australian SF author Philippa [Catherine “Pip”] Maddern died of cancer the same day. She was also an expert on, and teacher of, medieval history.
American graphic designer Anthony Goldschmidt died of liver cancer on June 17, aged 71. Through his firm Intralink Film Graphic Design he created many iconic movie posters, including Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-terrestial, and worked on the title designs for such movies as Young Frankenstein, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, The Witches of Eastwick, Spaceballs, The Lost Boys, Scrooged, Stargate, Batman Forever and Batman & Robin.
British publisher Felix Dennis, whose roster of magazines included Fortean Times, died on June 22, aged 67.
American YA, children’s and LGBT author Nancy Garden (Antoinette Elisabeth Garden) died on June 24, aged 76. Her controversial 1982 novel, Annie on My Mind, was banned in the Kansas City school system because of its teen lesbian characters. Her many other books include Vampires, Werewolves, Witches, Devils and Demons, Fours Crossing, Mystery of the Night Raiders, The Ghost Inside Me, Prisoner of the Vampires, My Sister the Vampire and My Brother the Werewolf.
American musical composer and children’s author Mary Rodgers, the daughter of composer Richard Rodgers, died on June 26, aged 83. She is best known for her body-swap fantasies Freaky Friday (which has been filmed by Disney three times), A Billion for Boris and Summer Switch. Rodgers also collaborated with lyricist Sammy Cahn on the children’s album Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves for Little Golden Records, which featured performances by Bing Crosby. Her other projects include Once Upon a Mattress (1959), based on the story ‘The Princess and the Pea’ by Hans Christian Anderson; The Mad Show, a 1966 Off Broadway musical review based on MAD Magazine; the screenplay for Disney’s The Devil and Max Devlin (1981), and a 1991 musical adaption of her own novel Freaky Friday.
Jan Shepherd (Janet E. Evenden), who was the first art editor of British comic 2000 AD in 1977 (she created the iconic ‘Judge Dredd’ title logo), died on June 27, aged around 79. She also worked as a designer on such comics as Valiant, Starlord, Tornado, Eagle and Scream!.
American author Jory [Tecumseh] Sherman (aka “Cort Martin”), best known for his series of “Gunn” adult Westerns, died on June 28, aged 81. He published more than 300 books, including seven psychic investigator “Chill” Chillders titles between 1978-80, beginning with Satan’s Seed.
Author, editor and pulp magazine collector Frank M. (Malcolm) Robinson died on June 30, aged 87. He had suffered from health problems, including heart trouble, in recent years. In the early 1940s Robinson had worked as an office boy at Amazing Stories before World War II intervened. His first SF sale was to Astounding Stories in 1950, and his first novel, The Power (1956), was filmed by George Pal in 1967. With Thomas N. Scortia he co-wrote the techno-thrillers The Glass Inferno (filmed as The Towering Inferno), The Prometheus Crisis, The Nightmare Factor, The Gold Crew and Blowout!, while his own books include The Dark Beyond the Stars, Waiting and The Donor, along with the collections A Life in the Day of…and Other Short Stories, Through My Glasses Darkly and The Worlds of Joe Shannon. Robinson was an expert on pulp magazines, and he shared his knowledge in Pulp Culture: The Art of Fiction Magazines (with Lawrence Davidson), the Hugo Award-winning Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century: An Illustrated History, Art of Imagination (with Robert Weinberg and Randy Broecker) and The Incredible Pulps: A Gallery of Fiction Magazine Art. He was also managing editor at Rogue (1959-65) and Cavalier (1965-66), a staff writer for Playboy (1969-73), and during the 1970s he was a speech-writer for openly gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk (Robinson basically played himself in a cameo in the 2008 movie).
British fan writer and editor Di Reynolds (aka Di Wathen) also died in June. She had been suffering from bowel cancer for a couple of years. With her former husband, Mike Wathen, she was involved in running the British Fantasy Society and various Fantasycons during the 1980s and early ‘90s, and they were in charge of registration and hotel bookings for the 1988 World Fantasy Convention in London.
American YA and children’s author Walter Dean Myers (Walter Milton Myers), died on July 1, aged 76. He wrote more than 100 books, including the fantasies Shadow of the Red Moon and Dope Stick, along with the ghost story ‘Things That Go Gleep in the Night’.
American space expert Frederick I. (Ira) Ordway, III died the same day, aged 87. Inspired by the SF pulp magazines as a child, in his early twenties he met and befriended Arthur C. Clarke. Fifteen years later Ordway was a top official at NASA, working closely with the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, when on Clarke’s reccomendation he became the chief technical consultant and scientific advisor on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Ordway wrote more than two dozen books, including History of Rocketry and Space Travel (1975) with von Braun and 2001: The Heritage and Legacy of the Space Odyssey (2014) with Robert Godwin.
41-year-old Hachette Australia CEO and Hachette New Zealand chairman Matthew Richell was was killed in a surfing accident in New South Wales on July 2, when he was swept onto rocks and suffered a fatal head injury. Richell worked in the UK for such imprints as Bloomsbury, Pan Macmillan and John Murray before taking over as marketing director of Headline and Hodder in Australia in 2006. He was promoted to CEO in 2013.
American horror, hard-boiled crime and comics writer C. (Christopher) J. (John) Henderson (Christopher Henderson) died of cancer on July 4, aged 62. Best known for his “Teddy London” supernatural detective series (written as “Robert Morgan”), under his own name he also wrote the “Jack Hagee” and “Piers Knight” series, along with Misery and Pity, Baby’s First Mythos, To Battle Beyond, The Reign of the Dragon Lord, A Rattling of Bones, The Spider: Shadow of Evil and a Quantum Leap tie-in. His short fiction is collected in numerous volumes, including The Occult Detectives of C.J. Henderson, The Tales of Inspector Legrasse (with H.P. Lovecraft) and Degrees of Fear and Others. Henderson co-edited the anthology Hear Them Roar (with Patrick Thomas), wrote the graphic novel William Shatner Presents Man O’ War, contributed to such comics series as Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight and Neil Gaiman’s Lady Justice, and combined investigative journalist Carl Kolchak with various Lovecraftian horrors in a series of illustrated novellas for Moonstone Books. His non-fiction includes The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies: From 1987 to the Present and Breaking Into Fiction Writing! (with Bruce Gehweiler).
Hungarian-born British children’s author and illustrator Val Biro (Balint Stephen Biro) died the same day, aged 92. Best known for his adventures about the vintage car “Gumdrop”, which appeared in thirty-seven picture books between 1966-2001, he also published such titles as Charles Perrault’s Mother Goose Fairy Tales and Tales from the Arabian Nights, illustrated numerous book covers (most notably for the “Hornblower” series), and was a regular contributor to Radio Times magazine for twenty-one years.
American author James H. (Harvey) Cobb, best known for his quartet of “Amanda Garrrett” futuristic naval techno-thrillers starting with Choosers of the Slain (1996), died of cancer on July 8, aged 61. He also “collaborated” with Robert Ludlum on the “Covert-One” thriller The Arctic Event (2007).
American author Curt Gentry, whose 1968 disaster novel The Last Days of the Late, Great State of California saw most of the West Coast disappear into the sea following a giant earthquake, died after a long battle with lung cancer on July 10, aged 83. His other twelve books include the Edgar Award-wining Helter Skelter (co-written with Vincent Bugliosi), about the Charles Manson murders.
Reclusive American author Thomas [Louis] Berger, best known for his satirical Western Little Big Man (1964), subsequently filmed starring Dustin Hoffman, died on July 13, aged 89. His books also include the horror novel Killing Time, the fantasies Being Invisible, Changing the Past and Arthur Rex: A Legendary Novel, and the SF-themed Vital Parts, Regiment of Women and Adventures of the Artificial Woman. Berger’s serio-comic novels Neighbours (filmed in 1981), The Houseguest, Meeting Evil and Suspects also contain nightmarish elements.
British book collector and film fan Jeffrey Myers died in an East Sussex nursing home on July 15, aged around 67. A stalwart of the British Fantasy Society and H.G. Wells Society for many years, he had been suffering from multiple sclerosis for some time. From 1987-88 Myers was the publisher of the groundbreaking genre movie magazine Shock Xpress, allowing the title to move to professional design and full-colour covers.
Best-selling, but often controversial, British Western author J. (John) T. (Thomas) Edson died after a long illness on July 17, aged 86. He had 137 books published, selling more than 27 million copies around the world. Between 1975-90 he published four novels in the Tarzan-related “Bunduki” series (a fifth title remains unpublished), along with four short stories. The first three books were issued with permission of both the Edgar Rice Burroughs Estate and Philip José Farmer due to connections with those authors’ work.
Nancy Carrigan who, with her husband Richard, collaborated on the 1971 SF novel The Siren Stars and had a story in a 1976 issue of Analog, died on July 18, aged 81.
American horror author, actor, director and podcast host Lawrence P. Santoro died of cancer of the duodenum on July 25, aged 71. His 2000 novella God Screamed and Screamed, and Then I Ate Him was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award, as was his audio-drama version of Gene Wolfe’s The Tree is My Hat (2002) starring Neil Gaiman, P.D. Cacek and Gahan Wilson. He also published the novel Just North of Nowhere in 2007 and Drink for the Thirst to Come, a collection of short fiction, appeared four years later. Santoro was known as the “Vincent Price of Podcasts” for his award-winning Tales to Terrify series, and during the 1990s he wrote a Weekender section on film for the Chicago Sun-Times.
American author, radio journalist and Wiccan high priestess Margot Adler, whose books include the non-fiction study Vampires Are Us: Understanding Our Love Affair with the Immortal Dark Side (2014), died of cancer on July 28, aged 68. In 1972, Adler founded the Hour of the Wolf radio show, devoted to SF, fantasy and related fields. As a correspondent for National Public Radio she interviewed J.K. Rowling for the first time on American radio, and her best known book is the neo-paganism study Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today (1979).
Italian film composer Giorgio Gaslini died on July 29, aged 84. His credits include Night of the Devils, So Sweet So Dead (aka The Slasher), Five Women for the Killer, Dario Argento’s Deep Red and the TV series La porta sul buio (Door Into Darkness).
Indian-born British journalist and espionage author [Harry] Chapman Pincher died on August 5, aged 100. He had suffered a small stroke seven weeks earlier. He joined the Daily Express in 1946, and worked for the newspaper for thirty years reporting on science and defence. His books include the SF novel Not With a Bang (1965), while The Giantkiller, The Penthouse Conspiracy, The Eye of the Tornado and One Dog and Her Man by Dido contain genre elements.
American literary agent and anthologist Kirby McCauley died of renal failure on August 30, aged 72. He had been suffering from diabetes. In the 1980s he famously represented such soon-to-be-Big Names as Stephen King, Peter Straub, George R.R. Martin, Roger Zelazny and others, including many of the older pulp authors. He edited the horror anthologies Night Chills and the World Fantasy Award-winning Frights and Dark Forces. McCauley helped found, and chaired, the first World Fantasy Convention in 1975 in Providence, Rhode Island. He received the Special Convention Award at World Fantasy in 1979.
American comics artist Stan Goldberg who, in the 1960s, created the original colour designs for Spider-Man, the Hulk and the Fantastic Four, died on August 31, aged 82.
Frederic Mullally, British author, journalist and publicist (clients included Frank Sinatra and Audrey Hepburn), died on September 7, aged 96. Amongst his books is the 1975 alternate-history novel Hitler Has Won. Mullally was married to actress Rosemary Nicols (TV’s Department S).
British scriptwriter Jane Baker died on September 8. With her husband Pip she scripted the movie Captain Nemo and the Underwater City, along with additional scenes and dialogue for Night of the Big Heat (aka Island of the Burning Damned, starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing). For TV the couple also worked on Doctor Who, creating the character of renegade female Time Lord “The Rani” (memorably portrayed by Kate O’Mara), as well as an episode of Space: 1999. The pair also co-wrote the Doctor Who novelisations Mark of the Rani, Ultimate Foe, Time and the Rani and Terror of the Vervoids, along with the Doctor Who “find your fate” book, Race Against Time.
British author Graham [William] Joyce died of aggressive lymphoma on September 9, aged 59. He made his debut in 1991 with the novel Dreamside, and followed it up with the British Fantasy Award-winning Dark Sister, Requiem, The Tooth Fairy, The Stormwatcher, Memoirs of a Master Builder (as by “William Heaney”), Some Kind of Fairy Tale and the World Fantasy Award-winning The Limits of Enchantment, along with House of Lost Dreams, Spiderbite, Indigo, Smoking Poppy, How to Make Friends with Demons, The Silent Land and The Year of the Ladybird (aka The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit). Joyce’s books for teens include TWOC, Do the Creepy Thing (aka The Exchange), Three Way to Snog an Alien and The Devil’s Ladder. His short fiction was collected in Partial Eclipse and Other Stories and the retrospective 25 Years in the Word Mines from PS Publishing, and he had stories in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror #4, #12, #13 and #14.
American screenwriter [Allison] Sam(uel) Hall died on September 26, aged 93. He was a head writer on the daily Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows (1967-71) and also wrote the spin-off movies House of Dark Shadows and Night of Dark Shadows. Hall co-scripted (with producer Dan Curtis) the pilot for Dead of Night: A Darkness in Blaisedon (1969), which starred Kerwin Mathews as psychic investigator “Jonathan Fletcher”, and he wrote the TV movies Frankenstein (1973) and The Two Deaths of Sean Doolittle. He was married to Dark Shadows star Grayson Hall (who died in 1985) and was a creative consultant during the show’s brief revival in the early 1990s.
Nebula Award-winning American short story writer Eugie Foster died of respiratory failure on September 27, aged 42. She had been diagnosed with a cancer in her sinuses a year earlier. A director of Dragon*Con and editor of their newsletter, The Daily Dragon, her stories appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including A Vampire Quintet: Five Sinister and Seductive Vampire Stories, and her short fiction was collected in Returning My Sister’s Face (2009).
