The Best New Horror 7

by Stephen Jones

  Screenwriter/producer/director Derek Ford died of a heart attack on May 19th, aged 62. With his brother Donald he scripted such films as The Black Torment, A Study in Terror and Corruption, while his solo work includes Don’t Open Till Christmas and Blood Tracks.

  Pulp writer W. (Walter) Ryerson “Johnny” Johnson, died on May 24th from complications following a stroke. He was 93. Best known as a prolific writer of western stories, he also contributed two novels to the Doc Savage series, Land of Always-Night and The Fantastic Island, both in collaboration with creator Lester Dent, and Dent’s The Motion Menace was based on a plot by Johnson.

  Science fiction writer Mike (Dennis) McQuay died of a heart attack on May 27th, aged 45. At the time, he was completing the final revisions to Richter 10, a collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke. His other novels include Life-Keeper, Jitterbug, Memories (winner of the Philip K. Dick Special Award), Puppetmaster, State of Siege, The Nexus, Pure Blood, Mother Earth and entries in the Isaac Asimov Robot City series. He also wrote the novelizations of My Science Project and Escape from New York as well as various Tom Swift and Nancy Drew books.

  Novelist, playwright and television writer Thomas P. Cullinan, whose Southern Gothic novel The Beguiled was made into a 1971 movie starring Clint Eastwood, died on June 11th of a heart attack. He was 75.

  Multiple Hugo and Nebula Award-winning SF and fantasy author Roger Zelazny died on June 14th from kidney failure as a result of colon/rectal cancer. He was 58 and kept his illness secret from all but his family and a few close friends. His first story was published in 1962, and he became a full-time writer in 1969. His many books include This Immortal, Lord of Light, Jack of Shadows, Isle of the Dead, Doorways in the Sand, Roadmarks, Eye of Cat, Damnation Alley (filmed disappointingly in 1977), the delightful A Night in the Lonesome October (illustrated by Gahan Wilson) and the classic Nine Princes in Amber and its nine sequels. Among his most memorable short stories are “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth”, “A Rose for Ecclesiastes”, “The Furies”, “Home is the Hangman” and “The Last Defender of Camelot” (produced as an episode of the revived Twilight Zone TV series). At the time of his death he was working on a major new SF novel, Donnerjack, the first in a projected trilogy.

  Screenwriter Charles Bennett, remembered for his long-time collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock, died in Los Angeles on June 15th, aged 95. He adapted his own play Blackmail for Hitchcock in 1929, and it became Britain’s first talking movie. His other credits include The Secret of the Loch, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), King Solomon’s Mines (1937), Reap the Wild Wind, The Story of Mankind, The Lost World, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (plus episodes of the TV series), Five Weeks in a Balloon, City Under the Sea (US: War-Gods of the Deep) and various episodes of TV’s The Wild Wild West. In March 1995 he received the Screen Writers Guild of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

  Popular French science fiction author Pierre Barbet (the pseudonym for Dr Claude [Pierre Marie] Avice) died on July 20th of cancer, aged 70. A professional pharmacist and expert in bionics, he was the author of 71 novels, some under the pseudonyms ‘Olivier Sprigel’ and ‘David Maine’. His books encompassed hard science fiction, space opera and heroic fantasy, and included Survivants de l’Apocalypse, Baphomet’s Meteor and Games Psyborgs Play.

  Elleston Trevor, the author of eighteen Quiller spy novels, died of cancer on July 21st, aged 75. Born Trevor Dudley-Smith in Britain in 1920, he wrote more than 100 novels, including science fiction, horror and children’s fantasies under such pseudonyms as ‘Warwick Scott’ and ‘Adam Hall’.

  Jerry Garcia, composer and leader of the 1960s counter-culture band the Grateful Dead, died in a drug rehabilitation centre on August 8th, aged 53.

  Journalist Stanley Asimov, younger brother of Isaac Asimov, died of leukaemia on August 15th, aged 66. In 1995 he edited a collection of his late brother’s letters, Yours, Isaac Asimov.

  Screenwriter Howard Koch died on August 17th from pneumonia, aged 93. He scripted the infamous Mercury Theatre radio broadcast of War of the Worlds for Orson Welles in October 1938, and he worked on such movie scripts as The Sea Hawk and Casablanca (for which he won an Oscar). In 1950 he was blacklisted during the McCarthy witchhunts. His autobiography is titled As Time Goes By: Memoirs of a Writer in Hollywood, New York and Europe.

  Hugo Award-winning author and poet John Brunner died on August 25th after suffering a stroke at the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow. He was 60. A couple of months earlier he had been Guest of Honour at the 26th Science Fiction Research Association Conference in Grand Forks, North Dakota. In the early 1950s, under the pseudonym “Gil Hunt” he sold his first science fiction novel at the age of seventeen. After publishing a series of space operas, often in the Ace doubles series, he began to attract more serious attention in the 1960s with such novels as Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, Shockwave Rider, The Jagged Orbit and the Traveler in Black fantasy series. In 1967 he scripted the low-budget Amicus movie The Terrornauts, based on a novel by Murray Leinster. He won numerous awards for his science fiction, but in recent years Brunner felt that the SF community had turned its back on him, and he began contributing stories to various horror anthologies, including three volumes of Dark Voices: The Pan Book of Horror, Best New Horror 4, Touch Wood, The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein, and the revived Weird Tales magazine.

  German fantasy author Michael (Andreas Helmuth) Ende died of stomach cancer on August 27th, aged 65. After publishing two successful children’s books in the early 1960s, he moved to Rome where in 1973 he wrote Momo and, six years later, The Neverending Story (filmed in 1984 and followed by two sequels). His final children’s book, Lirum Larum, was published in Germany in 1995.

  Television writer John L. Greene, who created My Favorite Martian and also worked on Bewitched, The Flying Nun and I Dream of Jeannie, died on October 4th, aged 82.

  Eric Garber, who edited the gay horror anthology Embracing the Dark and the gay and lesbian science fiction anthology Worlds Apart, died on October 8th, aged 40.

  Edith (Mary) Pargeter, best known for her series of Brother Cadfael medieval mystery novels written under the pseudonym Ellis Peters, died on October 15th, aged 82. Her other books include such fantasies as The City Lies Four-Square, By Firelight (US: By This Strange Fire) and the collection The Lily Hand and Other Stories.

  Screenwriter/producer Jack Rose, who often collaborated with Melville Shavelson, died of cancer on October 20th, aged 84. His many credits include My Favorite Brunette, Road to Rio, The Incredible Mr. Limpet and The Great Muppet Caper.

  Iconoclastic British novelist, poet and critic Sir Kingsley (William) Amis died on October 22nd following a fall a few months earlier when he suffered crushed vertebrae. He was aged 73. He graduated from St John’s College, Oxford and his first novel, Lucky Jim, was published in 1954 to instant acclaim. Although he will be remembered as one of the “Angry Young Men” of British literature, he also wrote the 1960 book-length study of science fiction, New Maps in Hell; a supernatural novel, The Green Man (made into a TV movie); the John W. Campbell Award-winning SF novel The Alteration; the futuristic Russian Hide-and-Seek, and Colonel Sun, the first non-Ian Fleming James Bond novel, written under the pseudonym “Robert Markham”. He also co-edited (with Robert Conquest) five volumes of the Spectrum SF anthology series, and edited The Golden Age of Science Fiction. His 1986 novel The Old Devils won the Booker prize.

  Don Pendleton (Donald Eugene Pendleton), who wrote the men’s adventure series The Executioner, died of a heart attack on October 23rd, aged 67. He also wrote a number of science fiction novels in the late 1960s (some as ‘Dan Britain’), including The Guns of Terra 10, Cataclysm, Civil War II: The Day it Finally Happened, The Olympians, 1989: Population Doomsday and The Godmakers. His Executioner books were so popular, he licensed his name as a “house name” and also produced six novels featuring psychic spy Asthon Ford. His final book (co-written with his wife Linda) was Dance With Angels, a
non-fiction account of their channelling experiences.

  Novelist and screenwriter Terry Southern died of respiratory failure on October 29th, aged 71. He had collapsed four days earlier while on his way to teach a screenwriting class at Columbia University. His 1959 novel The Magic Christian was filmed ten years later with an eclectic cast, and he was also involved in the scripts for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and Barbarella.

  World Fantasy Award-winning American writer Jack Finney (Walter Braden Finney) died of pneumonia on November 14th, aged 84. Best known as author of the science fiction horror novel The Body Snatchers (1955), originally published as a serial in Collier’s, the book gained further currency through three remarkably effective film versions directed by Don Siegel (as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956), Philip Kaufman (as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1978) and Abel Ferrara (as Body Snatchers, 1994). Finney’s other novels ranged from smart, urban comedy (Good Neighbor Sam) through heist thrillers (Assault on a Queen, Five Against the House, The House of Numbers) to nightmarish, urban comedy (The Night People). Most of these became glossy, expensive Hollywood films top-lining the likes of Kim Novak, Frank Sinatra and Jack Lemmon. Time and Again (1970), Finney’s most substantial novel, was a romantic mystery with a modern-day hero who thinks himself back into a richly imagined turn-of-the-century New York. Similar in tone, if jokier, were The Woodrow Wilson Dime and Marion’s Wall (filmed as Maxie). His short stories (collected in The Third Level, I Love Galesburg in the Springtime: Fantasy and Time Stories and About Time: Twelve Stories) define the area that Rod Serling would call The Twilight Zone. In 1995, Finney published From Time to Time, a belated sequel to Time and Again.

  Robie Macauley, who was fiction editor for Playboy magazine from 1966 to 1977, died of lymphoma on November 20th, aged 76. He was also a senior and executive editor at publisher Houghton Mifflin (1977–1988) and wrote the 1979 science fiction novel A Secret History of Time to Come. He won the O. Henry Short Story Award in 1967.

  Author Margaret St Clair (Margaret Neeley) died on November 22nd, aged 84. Her first science fiction story, ‘Rocket to Limbo’, appeared in Fantastic Adventures in 1946, and she went on to publish many short stories during the 1950s (many under the name ‘Idris Seabright’) which were collected in Three Worlds of Futurity, Change the Sky and Other Stories and The Best of Margaret St. Clair. Several of her science fiction novels appeared as Ace Doubles, beginning with Agent of the Unknown in 1956.

  Canadian novelist, playwright, actor and critic (William) Robertson Davies died on December 2nd, aged 82, several days after suffering a stroke. The author of more than thirty plays and novels, his best known books include the Deptford Trilogy (Fifth Business, The Manticore and World of Wonders), The Rebel Angels, What’s Bred in the Bone, The Lyre of Orpheus, Murther and Walking Spirits and his most recent novel, The Cunning Man. His 1982 collection High Spirits won the World Fantasy Award.

  Scottish author Fred Urquhart (Frederick Burrows Urquhart), best know for his short stories, died the same day, aged 83. After an early novel, Time Will Knit (1938), his short fiction appeared in a wide variety of literary magazines and such anthologies as The Fourth Ghost Book, The Unlikely Ghosts and several volumes edited by Denys Val Baker. A collection of his stories, Seven Ghosts in Search, was published in 1983.

  Mexican-born science fiction author G.C. Edmondson (José Mario Garry Ordonez Edmondson y Cotton) died of cancer on December 14th, aged 73. He began writing SF in 1965 and his books include the short novel The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream, its sequel To Sail the Century Sea, Star Slaver (with Andrew J. Offutt, as by “John Cleve”), four collaborations with C.M. Kotlan and the collection Stranger Than You Think. He also wrote westerns and thrillers as “Kelly P. Gast” and under the house names “J.B. Masterson” and “Jake Logan”.

  ACTORS/ACTRESSES

  Leading lady Nancy Kelly died on January 2nd of apparent complications from diabetes. She was aged 73. Her film credits include Tarzan’s Desert Mystery, The Woman Who Came Back and The Bad Seed (1956), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award.

  British comedian Peter Cook died of a gastrointestinal haemorrhage on January 9th, aged 57. Best known for his satiric revues and TV appearances, he starred in such films as Bedazzled, The Bed Sitting Room and as Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1977), all opposite his regular collaborator Dudley Moore, and Supergirl.

  Patricia Welsh, who provided the voice for Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, died of pneumonia on January 26th, aged 79.

  Cecil H. Roy, known as “The Girl of a Thousand Voices”, died the same day, aged 94. She provided the voices for the cartoon exploits of Casper the Friendly Ghost and Little Lulu, and worked in numerous radio shows during the 1930s and 40s.

  Character actor Donald Pleasence died at his home in southern France while recovering from a heart operation on February 2nd, aged 75. He usually appeared in menacing or eccentric roles, beginning with the BBC’s 1954 adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and continuing in such movies as The Flesh and the Fiends (US: Mania/The Fiendish Ghouls), Circus of Horrors, The Hands of Orlac (1960), What a Carve Up! (US: No Place Like Homicide), Dr. Crippen, Fantastic Voyage, Cul-De-Sac, Eye of the Devil (US: 13), You Only Live Twice (as Blofeld), THX 1138, Death Line (US: Raw Meat), From Beyond the Grave, Tales That Witness Madness, I Don’t Want to Be Born (US: The Devil Within Her), The Mutations, The Devil’s Men (US: Land of the Minotaur), The Uncanny, The Monster Club, Alone in the Dark, Frankenstein’s Great-Aunt Tillie, The Devonsville Terror, Phenomena, Vampire in Venice, Buried Alive, The House of Usher (1989) and Paganini Horror. In 1978 he portrayed Dr Sam Loomis in John Carpenter’s classic Halloween, and he recreated the character in four sequels, completing Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers just prior to his death. His other genre movie credits include Dracula (1979, as Dr Seward), Carpenter’s Escape from New York and Prince of Darkness, and Woody Allen’s Shadows and Fog.

  American actor Doug McClure died of lung cancer on February 5th, aged 59. Although best known for his western roles on TV, he starred in three film adaptations of Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Land That Time Forgot, At the Earth’s Core and The People That Time Forgot, as well as Satan’s Triangle, Warlords of Atlantis, Firebird 2015 AD, Humanoids from the Deep (UK: Monster) and The House Where Evil Dwells.

  Character actor David Wayne (David McKeekan), perhaps best know for his role as the Mad Hatter in the 1960s Batman TV series, died of cancer on February 9th, aged 81. His many film credits include Portrait of Jennie, M (1951), and The Andromeda Strain, and he received the first ever Tony Award for his portrayal of the leprechaun in Finian’s Rainbow on Broadway.

  Tough-guy actor Michael V. Gazzo died of a stroke on February 14th, aged 71. He appeared in Alligator, Fear City and Last Action Hero, amongst many other films.

  Hollywood leading man John Howard (John Cox) died of heart failure on February 19th, aged 82. Among his numerous film credits are Lost Horizon (1937), the title hero in Bulldog Drummond Comes Back, Bulldog Drummond’s Peril, Bulldog Drummond in Africa, Arrest Bulldog Drummond and Bulldog Drummond’s Secret Police, The Invisible Woman, The Mad Doctor, The Undying Monster (as the werewolf), Crazy Knights, The Unknown Terror, Destination Inner Space and So Evil, My Sister (aka Psycho Sisters).

  American character actor and Truman impersonator Ed Flanders committed suicide on February 22nd, aged 60. His film and television appearances include The Legend of Lizzie Borden, The Ninth Configuration, Salem’s Lot, Special Bulletin and Exorcist III.

  British DJ and comedian Kenny Everett died on March 17th of AIDS, aged 50. Fired twice by the BBC, his satiric The Kenny Everett Video Show appeared on TV on both sides of the Atlantic. He contributed all the voices to the SF spoof Kremmen the Movie (1980) and co-starred with Vincent Price in the dire Bloodbath at the House of Death (1983).

  The same day saw the death of iconoclastic musician Vivian Stanshal
l, who wrote and appeared in the 1980 film Sir Henry at Rawlinson End, based on his radio serial and stage play.

  Scottish actor Robert Urquhart died on March 20th, aged 73. He co-starred with Peter Cushing in Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) as well as appearing in numerous TV series.

  Priscilla Lane (Priscilla Mulligan), the perky heroine of Arsenic and Old Lace, died on April 4th after a brief illness. One of five sisters, all actresses, she was aged 76.

  American actor and ballad singer Burl Ives (Burl Icle Ivanhoe) died of mouth cancer on April 14th, aged 85. His film and TV credits include East of Eden, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Brass Bottle, Rocket to the Moon, The Man Who Wanted to Live Forever (UK: The Only Way Out is Dead), The Bermuda Depths and Earthbound.

  Hollywood actress, dancer and comedienne Ginger Rogers died of natural causes on April 25th, aged 83. Best remembered for her 1930s musicals with Fred Astaire, she also appeared in The 13th Guest, A Shriek in the Night and Monkey Business.

  The same day, Canadian-born actor Alexander Knox died of bone cancer in England, aged 88. He appeared in The Son of Dr Jekyll, Hammer’s The Damned (US: These Are the Damned), Crack in the World, The Psychopath, Modesty Blaise, Skullduggery, Holocaust 2000 (US: The Chosen) and Gorky Park.

  British character actor Sir Michael Hordern died from kidney disease after a long illness on May 2nd, aged 83. His numerous film credits include Passport to Pimlico, Scrooge (1951), The Night My Number Came Up, The Spaniard’s Curse, Man in the Moon, Dr. Syn Alias the Scarecrow, The Bed-Sitting Room, Hammer’s Demons of the Mind, A Christmas Carol (1971), The Possession of Joel Delaney, The Pied Piper, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Theatre of Blood with Vincent Price, The Slipper and the Rose, The Medusa Touch, Watership Down, Labyrinth, Young Sherlock Holmes and the TV ghost stories Whistle and I’ll Come to You and The Green Man.