John Crowley has died, at 83. He was my favorite living writer, and remains one of my favorite writers of all time. He was born in 1942 in Maine, and grew up in Vermont, Kentucky and Indiana. He went to the University of Indiana, then to New York, originally with a goal of working in film, and indeed he has written numerous scripts for documentary films.

But his true calling was surely prose, and in 1975 he published his first novel, The Deep. A dozen more novels followed, including a four-book series collectively called Aegypt. He also published more than two dozen short stories, and many essays. He was a Professor of Creative Writing at Yale beginning in 1993. His wife, Laurie Block, is a documentary filmmaker.

The Deep (Bantam Books, January 1984). Cover by Yvonne Gilbert

Crowley’s oeuvre is truly impressive: varied in subject matter (though some key interests are clear), ranging widely over the literary landscape, erudite and intricate, haunting. Common to everything he wrote was mystery and power, elegant and very graceful prose, and an almost elegiac view of the beauty and fragility of human life in this fallen world.

I discovered The Deep, purely fortuitously, at my local library shortly after it was published. It looked intriguing — like a fantasy novel between the “Reds” and the “Blacks,” and I read it, expecting something ordinary but fun. Instead I found something far deeper, far more mysterious: a science fiction novel based on the Wars of the Roses set on a wholly strange planet, dark and very beautiful. And this was his first novel!

Engine Summer (Bantam, December 1983). Cover by Yvonne Gilbert

His third novel, Engine Summer (1979), is my personal favorite, close to my favorite SF novel of all time: a thoroughly lovely, bittersweet novel set in post-collapse future: a bildungsroman in a world in which a bildungsroman might be impossible, a romance, a quest, a heartbreaking novel, a hopeful novel, the story of a young man’s life in an arcadian future.

It was his next novel, Little, Big, that made his reputation in the wider world: a fantasy about fairies, and about a house in the country, and about the history of New York, and about men and women. Harold Bloom called it his favorite romance, Thomas Disch called it “the best fantasy novel ever. Period.” It won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.

Little, Big, (Bantam, October 1983). Cover by Yvonne Gilbert

The profoundly ambitious alchemical tetralogy Aeqypt followed, beginning in 1987, though it had a difficult road to complete publication, with the last volume appearing in 2007. In 2002 he published The Translator, about the relationship between a college student and a visiting poet from Russia, at the time of the Cuban Missile crisis: it is about about Soviet Russia, about translation, and about the Midwest … as with almost everything Crowley wrote, it is mysterious and bittersweet, and deeply moving.

Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr, from 2017, is the story of an immortal crow, and his interaction with humans over a couple of millennia. His last novel, Flint & Mirror, is an historical fantasy set in Elizabethan times, and also lovely and haunting.

Aeqypt (Bantam, September 1994). Cover uncredited

Crowley also wrote some of the best short fiction of the past 50 years. The novellas “Great Work of Time” and “The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines” are brilliant; and short stories such as “Snow,” “Her Bounty to the Dead,” and “Gone” are at least as good.

His range was remarkable — from the early science fiction to the later fantasies, as well as mainstream literary fiction such as “The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines” and Four Freedoms; to such strange products as Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land and The Chemical Wedding by Christian Rosencreutz.

Great Work of Time (Bantam Spectra, 1991). Cover by Thomas Canty

I can be a sentimental reader, and Crowley’s writing brought me to tears over and over again: tears of awe and wonder, tears of regret and sadness, tears of appreciation of beauty. I recall trying to talk about “Great Work of Time” at a convention panel several years ago and simply having to stop: it was too beautiful, too wonderful.

(I met him in person only once, for a brief conversation at a convention. We did correspond a bit, including an invitation to see the discussion of his work I just mentioned, at Readercon or Boskone, and John had to decline (I believe by this time his health was already fading.) He hoped to see a recording of the panel: and indeed that was the plan, and the cameras were on — but, almost as if it was in one of his stories, the recording never appeared.)

He was one of the greatest writers of our time. Some samples of his prose follow.

From The Translator, the poet Falin to his lover Kit.

Well we have kissed at that frontier, my love, haven’t we? We ourselves. I have come into a world where West is away, where freedom does not rhyme with fate, and where alone you can be found. So it is enough, and must be; for unlike Alice I know no way back.

From Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr.

Only the living can travel there from here, cross the river, see and speak to those they know or know of, take away its treasures. The living create the Land of Death and its inhabitants by going there, and returning with a tale. But dead People can’t be there, can’t go there or anywhere: they’re dead.

And finally, my favorite concluding line from any novel, the last words of Engine Summer, spoken by an “angel” to a “saint,” assuring him that his story will be remembered:

Ever after. I promise. Now close your eyes.

And I imagine that somewhere now some sort of angel is telling John Crowley that his stories will be remembered “ever after.”

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Rich Horton’s last article for us was a review of The Vanishing Tower by Michael Moorcock. His website is Strange at Ecbatan. Rich has written over 200 articles for Black Gate, see them all here.