Sue Granquist, the Chicago blogger and technology professional who wrote Black Gate‘s Goth Chick column every Thursday for sixteen years, passed away unexpectedly on Tuesday.

Sue experienced a cancer scare earlier this year that led to an extended hospital stay and multiple surgeries. She was on the mend, and when we spoke Tuesday afternoon, she was already back at work — as the Director of Supply Chain Operations at CDW in downtown Chicago — and was looking forward to returning to her regular Thursday blog spot. She passed away three hours later. She was 59 years old.

I met Sue when we worked in the same building at Motorola — 50 Commerce Drive in Schaumburg, IL — in 1999. Motorola was booming at the time, buoyed by the runaway success of the StarTAC mobile phone, with over a hundred thousand employees and growing rapidly. I was part of the Business Operations team and my boss Bruce Buckingham, who ran the Mobile Devices Technology Office, was in charge of expansion, including our new facility in Downer’s Grove.

The project was by all accounts a long-running nightmare, but our weekly staff meetings were enlivened by the regular stories Bruce shared of the tenacious contractor he’d hired who was doing the work of five people: Sue Granquist. By March of 2000, Bruce had found a way to bring Sue on board full-time, and she joined our small team. I started noticing a black sedan with the license plate VAMPYR in the parking lot.

I launched the first issue of the print version of Black Gate later that year, and Sue’s first article, a review of A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket, appeared in our third issue in Winter 2002. She soon became one of my most reliable contributors, delivering a groundbreaking interview with author Charlaine Harris (long before she became famous for her Sookie Stackhouse series) and many, many others.

On September 11, 2001, Sue and I spent the morning together in the cafeteria at Commerce Drive, watching the World Trade Center collapse. The Dot-Com bubble burst very shortly thereafter, and the U.S. economy slid into a recession. Sue, who had little patience with politics and even less with corporate double-speak, often used to call me when the quarterly update from Motorola’s CEO landed in our inbox, and that’s exactly what she did in late 2001. I helped her translate: layoffs were coming.

The brutal sequence of layoffs that followed hollowed out the entire Internet Software & Content Group (ISCG), gradually reducing our headcount from 1,100 to barely 100. When the Downer’s Grove facility she’d worked so hard to set up was shuttered, throwing 200 people out of work, Sue was pulled into the painful wind down. As chaotic as the buildout had been, it was nothing compared to the downsizing chainsaw. So many people were eliminated in one day that Motorola had to fly in HR contractors from across the country.

No one was spared — not even the small company renting space on the second floor, who were accidently caught up in the layoff and processed alongside everyone else. As Sue later shared over dinner, head in her hands, only one employee had the presence of mind to call his boss in Arizona as he exited the building with his belongings, only to be informed that Motorola couldn’t eliminate his position and offer him a severance package because he did not, in fact, work for Motorola. That embarrassing debacle eventually required a formal apology from the CEO’s office to smooth things over.

By early 2002, there was little of ISCG left. Sue quietly tipped me off that most of my projects were stalled, morale was terrible, and very little was being done, as surviving employees waited for the final axe to fall. Bruce came to see me privately, to pass along that the executive team had noticed that, while most managers were leaving early, I was still putting in long hours. Before I could confess that I’d taken to reading fiction submissions in my office just to have something productive to do, Bruce told me that he’d secured a new role for me. I swallowed my confession, and told Bruce solemnly that I was just trying to do what was best for the team.

I survived the next layoff, thanks primarily to Sue’s timely tip-off (and a stack of Black Gate reading that kept me in the office late). Bruce and Sue did not. Sue went to work for Baxter. She was back at Motorola eighteen months later, in a new role leading Program Management for Neal Campbell’s VIAMOTO location-based software initiative.

In 2004, on my 40th birthday, I found my office filled floor to ceiling with black balloons, a life-size tombstone, and a stuffed black raven. It was done anonymously, but everyone on the floor knew that there was only one person who could’ve pulled off a stunt like that in our high-security facility: Sue Granquist. She already had a reputation as a miracle-worker, and that rep would only grow in the coming years. We worked on numerous projects together until 2006, when I left to become CEO of SourceGear.

Sue was a tireless champion for efficiency and common sense in the workplace. She spoke truth to power, regardless of the consequences, and by the end of her career she had the ear of some of the most influential and powerful executives in Chicago tech. She received an MBA from Lake Forest Graduate School of Management in 2013, and in 2022 graduated with a Ph.D. in International Business from Northcentral University.

Sue had a keen understanding of the complexities of business, and especially the modern job-search. There was no better or more loyal friend to have at your side when you were looking for a job. When I was being considered for the position of Vice President of Sales at Rippleshot, a Chicago AI startup, it was Sue’s recommendation that cinched it for me. As Sue told the tale, a simple 10-minute reference check turned into a far-ranging 40-minute conversation with my future boss, as Sue entertained Marci with blood-chilling tales of our shared exploits in the early days of mobile communications.

While we no longer worked together, Sue and I still had dinner regularly. Sue loved horror and, especially, 80s horror films. She would speak eloquently of her love for Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, the film version of The Shining, and any number of B-grade horror films. She was an endlessly entertaining dinner companion, with a cutting and brilliant wit.

Sue’s love for horror eventually translated into the longest-running column in Black Gate history. Sue began writing for us in August 2009, with An Interview with Midnight Syndicate mastermind Ed Douglas. She contributed an astonishing 712 articles for us over the next sixteen years. Her final Goth Chick News piece, Is Warner Bros Ready to Knife Universal?, appeared on September 11 of this year. With her tireless companion, photographer Chris Zemko, she visited countless horror-themed shows and conventions over the years, reporting here on the highlights. Sue had the most devoted following of any of Black Gate‘s bloggers, and never tired of telling me about the many ways her readers had enriched her life over the years.

On Tuesday afternoon, after she finished work, Sue walked into her her living room and sat on her couch. Terry, her husband of 34 years, was in the kitchen. He heard her say, “Oh shit — I’m bleeding.” Unknown to Sue, the shunt inserted into the artery of her leg after her most recent surgery had failed. Sue lost consciousness in minutes, and by the time the EMTs arrived ten minutes later, there was nothing they could do.

Sue has been an enormous part of the culture and identity of Black Gate since our very beginning. More than that, she was a steadfast and loyal friend. I will miss her profound contributions to the site. But I will also dearly miss her laugh, and the joy she felt at discovering, sharing, and selflessly promoting the talented creatives she met on the floors of horror conventions, in bookstores, and in the lively comments section of her own column.

A light has gone out of our genre. Rest in peace, Sue.