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Category: Obituary

Suzette Haden Elgin, November 18, 1936 – January 27, 2015

Suzette Haden Elgin, November 18, 1936 – January 27, 2015

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Locus Online is reporting that fantasy author Suzette Haden Elgin, author of The Ozark Trilogy and the Coyote Jones novels, died last month.

Elgin’s first publication, “For the Sake of Grace,” the first part of her long-running series featuring Trigalactic Intelligence Service agent Coyote Jones, appeared in the May 1969 issue of F&SF. Her first novels — The Communipaths (1970), Furthest (1971), and At the Seventh Level (1972) — were part of the same series. They were collected in an omnibus volume from Pocket Books, Communipath Worlds, in 1980 (below, cover by Mara McAfee).

Communipath Worlds-small Twelve Fair Kingdoms-small The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense-small

Twelve Fair Kingdoms, the first novel in The Ozark Trilogy, came in 1981 (above, cover by Michael Flanagan); it was followed by The Grand Jubilee (1981), and And Then There’ll Be Fireworks (1981). Perhaps her most popular genre work, the Native Tongue trilogy — Native Tongue, The Judas Rose, and Earthsong (cover here) — were published between 1984 – 1994.

Elgin’s breakout book, the non-fiction bestseller The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, was published in June 1985. Among the book’s other accomplishments, it helped put fledgling publisher Barnes & Noble on the map, selling over 250,000 copies. Elgin founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association in 1978. She died on January 27, 2015, at the age of 78.

Eugie Foster, December 30, 1971 – September 27, 2014

Eugie Foster, December 30, 1971 – September 27, 2014

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Eugie FosterAuthor and editor Eugie Foster died of respiratory failure today at Emory University in Atlanta.

Eugie announced last October that she has been diagnosed with cancer, a “malignant, fast-growing tumor, around 6cm, in my sinuses and hard and soft palate regions.” She was undergoing aggressive treatments, including a stem cell transplant, which left her vulnerable to infections. In one of her last blog posts, on August 12, 2014, she wrote:

[One] opportunistic bacteria infection has taken up residence in my lower bowels and another one has set up shop in my stomach. Not only is food unpleasant to eat but it’s not doing anything enjoyable once it hits my GI Tract, including staying put. Waaaahhhh!!

They have me on lotso antibiotics and other meds to make this easier on me. I appreciate that but honestly, I just want to be unconscious. None of this is unexpected but it all sucks. Hurry up stem cells. Graft! Graft already!!

I first encountered Eugie when she took over Tangent Online after Dave Truesdale stepped down. Her own short stories were appearing in Interzone, Apex, Fantasy Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, and other places; her story “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast” won the 2009 Nebula Award. Jason Waltz introduced me to Eugie at Dragon*Con in 2010, at her busy press station where she produced the onsite newsletter, the Daily Dragon. I found her charming and highly articulate, filled with drive and energy, and seemingly unstoppable.

Her death was announced in a brief blog post by her husband, Matthew M. Foster. She was 42 years old.

Graham Joyce, October 22, 1954 – September 9, 2014

Graham Joyce, October 22, 1954 – September 9, 2014

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Graham Joyce-smallGraham Joyce, the World Fantasy Award winning writer of The Facts of Life, The Tooth Fairy, and Some Kind of Fairy Tale, died yesterday of lymphoma. His first novel, Dreamside, was published in 1991. He followed it a year later with Dark Sister, the first of his many fantasy novels to be nominated for (and win) the British Fantasy Award. All told, he won the British Fantasy Award for best novel a total of six times, for Requiem (1995), The Tooth Fairy (1996), The Stormwatcher (1998), How To Make Friends With Demons (2009), and Some Kind of Fairy Tale (2012). His 2002 novel The Facts of Life won the World Fantasy Award; his final novel, The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit (published in the UK as The Year of the Ladybird in 2013) was released in 2014.

I met Joyce only a handful of times, most recently at the World Fantasy Convention in San Diego in 2011, where he entertained the Black Gate team — including Katie Redding, Scott Taylor, and I — with his stories and his relentless energy. A month ago Graham wrote of his diagnosis in a powerful post in his blog:

This is what I mean by the shocking clarity that cancer brings… if a dragonfly buzzes my ear like an aeroplane I’ll still be going, ‘What did it say?‘ Because the screw that has for so long been loose in me hasn’t been tightened by cancer. Actually I know what the dragonfly said. It whispered: I have inhabited this earth for three hundred million years old and I can’t answer these mysteries; just cherish it all.

And in turn the Heron asks, with shocking clarity as it flies from right to left and left to right: why can’t our job here on earth be simply to inspire each other?

Graham Joyce died on September 9th, at the age of 59. He is survived by his wife Suzanne and their two children. He will be missed.

Kirby McCauley, September 11, 1941 — August 30, 2014

Kirby McCauley, September 11, 1941 — August 30, 2014

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Kirby McCauleyIn late fall 2000, Dave Truesdale convinced me to reprint Edmond Hamilton’s first published story, the creepy pulp tale “The Monster-God of Mamurth,” from the August 1926 issue of Weird Tales. Harlan Ellison told us “it’s an awful story,” but what does he know? It has ancient lost cities, valiant explorers, horrible curses, and seriously spooky giant spiders. I loved it.

So I dutifully tracked down the rights, and discovered they were controlled by the Pimlico Agency in New York. In short order, I found myself on the phone with a guy named Kirby McCauley, negotiating the right to reprint the story in the second issue of Black Gate for $200.

Now, I’d certainly heard of Kirby McCauley. He was Stephen King’s first agent, and King had famously related some of the guidance McCauley gave him early in his career. More interesting to me, McCauley was also an accomplished editor. His Dark Forces was easily the most acclaimed horror anthology of the 1980s (it included Stephen King’s The Mist, among many other notable stories.) So in between our business dealings, I mentioned to Kirby that I was a fan. He was very gracious and surprisingly easy to deal with.

For a good many years, Kirby McCauley was one of the most successful agents in the industry, with a client list that made his peers green with envy. George R.R. Martin said “Kirby revolutionized agenting in SF and fantasy and horror,” and that was no exaggeration. However, McCauley’s career suffered a significant downturn in the late 90s, and he lost most — but not all — of his biggest clients.

Kirby McCauley passed away last weekend, and his death has largely been ignored by the industry. But today, I found a lengthy appreciation written by his client and friend George R.R. Martin. It’s definitely worth the read, both as a remembrance of a man who made a big difference in the industry and as a wonderful snapshot of what publishing was like in the 70s and 80s.

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R.I.P. Robin Williams (1951-2014)

R.I.P. Robin Williams (1951-2014)

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aladdin genie

Mork has returned to Ork; the Fisher King has departed; the Genie, after granting us the wish for laughter, is gone.

Robin Williams died Monday, an apparent suicide. The Great Jester of my parents’ generation had been battling severe depression in recent months, according to his manager. Those who have followed Williams’s decades-spanning career know that this demon was the dark side to his manic comic talent. Ironically, while he so often made us laugh, there was no healing humor left for himself yesterday. The Jester has exited the stage, leaving an echo of laughter as the curtain falls on this tragic final act.

Here is part of what James Lipton, host of Inside the Actor’s Studio, had to say in remembrance of Williams Monday evening on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell:

I asked him If heaven exists what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?, and this is what Robin Williams said to me: “‘There’s seating near the front. The concert begins at five; it will be Mozart, Elvis, and one of your choosing.’ Or, to know that in heaven there’s laughter. That would be a great thing, just to hear God say, ‘Two Jews walk into a bar…'” And look where he went with that. In fifteen different directions at once. You know, I suppose everybody has said it already, and I’m the last to say it: we are dealing with a real-life pagliacci. This is the clown who laughed, who cried. This the clown who cried, at last, in life, and who breaks our hearts. But in the end…in the end, as so many comedians are, Robin was pagliacci. 

Lawrence Santoro (1942-2014)

Lawrence Santoro (1942-2014)

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Larry and his wife, Tycelia
Larry and his wife, Tycelia

Lawrence Santoro passed away this past Friday. He was a two-time Bram Stoker nominee: once for his novella, “God Screamed and Screamed, Then I Ate Him,” in 2001; again for his audio play adaptation of Gene Wolfe’s “The Tree Is My Hat” in 2008. Two collections of his short fiction, Just North of Nowhere and Drink for the Thirst to Come, provide a great overview of his fantastic work. For the last two years, he’s hosted the horror fiction podcast series, Tales to Terrify.

Those are the highlights, the reasons why a casual reader of Black Gate might recognize Larry’s name. But I’ve been living and writing in Chicago for the last ten years and so I knew him for other reasons. Larry often read at local open mic events and was a fixture at some of them. Larry had a background in theater and he brought all his skill and that amazing voice to every performance. No microphones were ever needed when it was his turn to read and his larger-than-life performances were perfectly suited to the nightmarish tall tales; imagine if Lake Woebegone had a dark side and you’d get an idea of his fictional town of Bluffton. Tony C. Smith at Tales to Terrify provides a nice tribute to Larry, including a previously-unreleased performance by him.

There’s a brief overview of the amazing life Larry led before he ever wrote so much as a poem. At reading events, he was always encouraging other writers to keep writing, as well as offering advice on where to get their stories published. While Tales to Terrify has featured a number of big-name authors, Larry also made certain that it featured at least as many fledgling writers.

Larry leaves behind not just an impressive body of work, but a writing community made stronger by his presence and saddened by his passing.

CJ Henderson, December 26, 1951 – July 4, 2014

CJ Henderson, December 26, 1951 – July 4, 2014

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERANeil Baker, publisher of The Dark Rites of Cthulhu, informs us that fantasy short story writer and novelist CJ Henderson lost his battle with cancer earlier this week.

His first novel, Brooklyn Knight, was published by Tor in 2010; it was followed by one sequel, Central Park Knight (2011); his short story collection, Where Angels Fear, was released by Dark Quest Books in 2010. I first encountered him with Kolchak and the Lost World (Moonstone, May 2012), one of several licensed tie-in novellas he wrote featuring the great occult investigator Carl Kolchak, which I bought at the Moonstone booth at the Windy City Pulp and Paper show in April.

Neil writes:

A prolific writer for decades, CJ had a successful collection of novels to his name, numerous short stories for a wide selection of publishers and comic books for Marvel, DC and others. He also wrote books featuring Kolchak, wrote for Clive Barker’s Hellraiser series and collaborated with William Shatner on Man of War.

Personally, I only got to know him through my first publication, and he was an open and generous soul. He fought the disease all the way to end, determined to make it out to future conventions to sell more books and meet more fans, and in his many emails to me he would discuss his fight, his deep love for his wife and his passion for writing.

CJ leaves a legacy filled with hard-boiled characters, ripping yarns and good humor. He will be missed.

CJ Henderson died on July 4, 2014. He was 62 years old.

Jay Lake, June 6, 1964 – June 1, 2014

Jay Lake, June 6, 1964 – June 1, 2014

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Jay LakeJay Lake’s website, jlake.com, is reporting that Jay passed away this morning.

Jay’s first published story was “The Courtesy of Guests” in the Bruce Holland Rogers anthology Bones of the World in September 2001. I first encountered him in the Black Gate slush pile a few months later. His stories were wildly original, astonishingly varied, and frequently brilliant.

I purchased two, the enigmatic “Fat Jack and the Spider Clown” (BG 8), and the vividly original “Devil on the Wind” (BG 14, co-written with Michael Jasper). It was while working with Jay on the first that I discovered just how much hidden meaning there is in a Jay Lake story, and how carefully constructed they are.

Jay was diagnosed with colon cancer in April 2008 and he reported on the progress of the disease and his tireless efforts to combat it with brutal honesty on his blog. For years after his diagnosis Jay continued writing tirelessly, producing three major series: The City Imperishable (Trial of Flowers, Madness of Flowers, and the forthcoming Reign of Flowers, all from Night Shade), Mainspring (Mainspring, Escapement, Pinion, published by Tor), and three novels in the Green universe (Green, Endurance, and Kalimpura, all from Tor).

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Mary Stewart, September 17, 1916 – May 10, 2014

Mary Stewart, September 17, 1916 – May 10, 2014

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The Hollow Hills-smallMary Stewart, my wife’s favorite author, died last week.

I’ve read only a handful of Stewart’s novels. Her Merlin Trilogy — The Crystal Cave (1970), The Hollow Hills (1973), and The Last Enchantment (1979) — is one of the top-selling Arthurian sagas of all time, hitting bestseller lists around the world. It was her only fantasy series, but it instantly made her one of the most popular fantasy authors of the 70s.

But I got used to seeing the covers of her romantic mystery novels. My wife re-read them constantly. Alice is a voracious reader and she’s read widely in both mystery and contemporary fiction, but at least once a year she pulls out one of her tattered Mary Stewart paperbacks.

“Why are you constantly re-reading those, when you have so many others to choose from?” I asked her once, shortly after we were married.

“Because these are the best,” she said simply.

Mary Stewart’s Merlin Trilogy eventually extended to five novels, including The Wicked Day (1983) and The Prince and the Pilgrim (1995), but her gothic romance included Madam, Will You Talk? (1954), Thunder on the Right (1957), Nine Coaches Waiting (1958), My Brother Michael (1959), The Moon-Spinners (1962) — made into a 1964 Walt Disney film starring Hayley Mills, This Rough Magic (1964), The Gabriel Hounds (1967), Touch Not the Cat (1976), Thornyhold (1988), Stormy Petrel (1991), and her final novel, Rose Cottage (1997).

Mary Stewart lived in Edinburgh, Scotland. She died on May 10th at the age of 97.

Art of the Genre: David Trampier, 1954 – 2014

Art of the Genre: David Trampier, 1954 – 2014

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1509880_10153982624460584_2120060224_nToday is a day of mourning for those gamers who were brought into the industry during the ‘great launch’ of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in 1978. That year the AD&D Player’s Handbook hit the market, and nothing in the life of role-playing would ever be the same again. One reason, and certainly one of the most recognizable not named Gygax, was the cover art by David Trampier. On Monday, March 24th, Mr. Trampier passed away in southern Illinois at the age of 59.

That age in itself is a tragedy, but one that can only be further exacerbated by what could have been for a man many gamers considered the great white whale of RPG fantasy artwork.

More words than can easily be counted have been written about Trampier over the years, most hypothesis and some truths, but in the end all we know now is that he is gone.

As an adept in the industry of RPG artwork, I’ve made it my life’s calling to track down bygone artists. But Trampier was never one of them. Sure, I’ve spoken in depth to his relations, and even as late as last August had a lengthy conversation with a group of RPG power brokers on the best course of action to approach him, including old friends on a road trip and private detectives, but in the end Trampier was even too far removed for me, and honestly I can’t say whether that now makes me happy or sad.

What I do know it that in the late 1980s, during his run with the Wormy comic for TSR’s Dragon magazine, Trampier suddenly went off the grid.  At the time, he’d have been only 34 years of age, and smack in the middle of his prime as an artist. Now, 25 years later, he is gone, and not a single shred of artwork was produced by his hand over the course of those intervening years.

Now that brings me profound sadness.

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