The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

1991: Obituaries

As in any year, 1991 robbed us of a number of people whose talents brought us great edification and pleasure in the fields of fantasy and horror. Perhaps the most important figure to die last year was Theodor Seuss Geisel, 87, better known to children of all ages as Dr. Seuss. His whimsical and charming books were enormous best-sellers all around the world, and he taught generations of people how to have fun while learning important lessons of morality and ethics. His best-known works included The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. He worked as an illustrator before becoming a best-selling author, and he also wrote a novel for adults, The Seven Lady Godivas (1937), but it wasn’t terribly successful. He wrote another book for adults, You re Only Old Once, in 1987, and it was understandably much more successful than his previous effort. He also made films, including the cartoon Gerald McBoing-Boing.

Frank Capra, 94, was a major motion-picture director, counting among his successes the now-beloved but initially neglected fantasy It’s a Wonderful Life, along with Lost Horizon and a number of other fine films, most notably It Happened One Night, a romantic comedy that nearly killed the men’s undershirt business when Clark Gable took his off. Also lost from the world of film was a much younger, but equally creative man, Howard Ashman, 40, who wrote the screenplay and lyrics for the musical adaptation of Roger Corman’s horror film, Little Shop of Horrors. First a play and then a film, it took Ashman to Hollywood where he then proceeded to produce Disney’s The Little Mermaid, and to write lyrics for the film’s songs, one of which won him a Best Song Oscar for “Under the Sea.” He and his collaborator Alan Mencken then wrote songs for another successful animated feature, Beauty and the Beast. Ashman was a playwright first, and had some of his plays, including The Confirmation and Dreamstuff (the latter an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest) produced before his screen successes. His one Broadway show, Smile, for which Marvin Hamlisch wrote the music, closed quickly despite a talented cast and strong production values. Ashman was a singular talent, and his combination of wit and sensitivity brought new life to Disney’s animated productions.

John Bellairs, 53, wrote a number of young adult fantasies, including The House with a Clock in its Walls, his most famous, and others. His first book was The Face in the Frost (1969), which, while ostensibly written for a young audience, was one of the landmark fantasies of the 1960s for adults as well. His work had deep feeling and a sense of the laughter and terror in life.

Several major literary authors whose work touched on the field died last year. Graham Greene, 86, was best known for his thrillers, including The Third Man, for which he also wrote the screenplay, and The Honorary Consul. Isaac Bashevis Singer, 87, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, wrote stories that touched on moral and emotional issues of broad universality, in a style and context that were his own unique brand of philosophical fantasy. Jerzy Kosinski, 57, best known for The Painted Bird, was a concentration camp victim during World War II. His work dealt with the survivor's experience in a uniquely charged way.

Authors firmly within the genre who died last year included Thomas Tryon, 65, an actor for many years who successfully began a career writing horror fiction later in life. His novel The Other put him on the map; Harvest Home was also successful. Both were filmed. Chester Anderson, 58, was a free spirit, best known for his fantasy novel of Greenwhich Village, The Butterfly Kid. He also collaborated with Michael Kurland on Ten Years to Doomsday, and wrote other fiction as well. Anderson was a figure of some cult interest because of his involvement with the beat life. He expanded the scope of Crawdaddy when he was the editor of that magazine. A mainstream novel, also about Greenwhich Village, Fox and Hare, was published in 1980. Joyce Ballou Gregorian, 44, was the author of the Tredana trilogy that consisted of The Broken Citadel, Castledown, and The Great Wheel. Sharon Baker, 53, was the author of Quarreling, They Met the Dragon, set on an exotic, richly detailed world, Naphar, on which her novels Journey to Membliar and Burning Tears ofSassurum were also set. Married and the mother of four children, she was a person who reached out to those around her, providing a home to exchange students and working with runaways in Seattle, where she and her family lived. Her deep social concerns were mirrored in all her work, enriching it considerably. In addition to other interests, she was active in academic circles within the field. Jonathan Etra, 38, was the author of the children’s book A liens for Breakfast and other fantastical works, including the outrageous trade paperback collaborative extravaganza Junk Food.

We lost editors as well. Eleanor Sullivan, 62, was an editor at Ellery Queens Mystery Magazine for many years, serving as Managing Editor from 1970 to 1982, then as Editor-in-Chief. She was also Editor-in-Chief of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, from 1976 to 1982. Before her years with the mystery magazines where she became famous, she worked at Pocket Books and then Charles Scribner’s Sons. She edited a number of anthologies as well, and wrote Whodunit (1984), a memoir about Frederick Dannay, one of the two cousins who together wrote as Ellery Queen, and who was Editor-in-Chief of the magazine of the same name until his death in 1982. She also wrote fiction herself, and was nominated for an Edgar Award in 1989 for her story, “Ted Bundy’s Father.’’ In 1987 she was honored with the Mystery Writers of America’s Ellery Queen Award for Excellence.

Thaddeus (Ted) Dikty, 71, was an editor and publisher of many small-press books, both academic and fiction. He was the cofounder of Shasta, one of the first hardcover publishers of science fiction and fantasy; he also edited a number of anthologies over the years. Years after the demise of Shasta, he cofounded Fax Collectors Editions, and after that, Starmont House. Dikty was married to author Julian May, and they worked together on many projects. Clarence Paget, 82, was first an agent, then an editor and publisher. He was Editor-in-Chief of Pan Books and founded their long-running series, The Pan Book of Horror Stories, edited by Herbert Van Thai for many years. After Van Thai’s death, Paget edited the series alone for several years.

George T. Delacorte, 97, was a major publisher, founding Dell Books and Delacorte Press. Before publishing books, he distributed and published magazines. He was active in the company until its sale in 1976 to Doubleday. From the start, he was aided by the presence of Helen Meyer who, starting as his secretary, became the person most responsible for Dell’s success for over a half century until her departure a year after Doubleday’s acquisition. W. Howard Baker, 65, was a British publisher, writer and editor. He edited the Sexton Blake Library, directing the series of detective novels and writing some of them himself as Peter Saxon and others as William Arthur. He also edited and wrote a number of other books, principally horror and mystery novels, including The Darkest Night (1966) and Drums of the Dark Gods, the latter written as W. A. Ballinger. Harry Shorten, 76, was a publisher. He founded Tower Publications, a low-end publisher of magazines and mass-market paperbacks. Shorten also gained some fame for his syndicated newspaper feature, There Oughta Be a Law. Henry Steeger III, 87, was another pulp publisher, founding and running Popular Publications from its inception in 1930 until he sold it in 1970. Included in Popular’s stable of pulp magazines in the thirties and forties were a number of SF and Fantasy titles.

Northrop Frye, 78, was an influential literary critic, one of the leading proponents of the symbolist movement in literary criticism. Among his major works were the 1947 study of William Blake’s works, Fearful Symmetry and Anatomy of Criticism. Chad Walsh, 76, was a noted academic, a poet and a writer, justly respected for his C. S. Lewis scholarship in such works as The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis (1979). He wrote many book reviews and several volumes of children’s fantasy.

Many actors associated in one way or another with the field died last year, including stars of stage, film and television. Joan Bennett, 80, starred in many films, and late in her career was a featured player in television’s dark fantasy soap opera, Dark Shadows. Gene Tierney, 70, was a charming romantic comedienne in Heaven Can Wait (1943), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) and many other films. Jean Rogers, 74, was best known for playing Dale Arden to Buster Crabbe’s Flash Gordon. Michael Landon, 54, was successful in a string of television series, and never escaped the notoriety of his early stint in the low-budget film I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Keye Luke, 86, played Charlie Chan s Number 1 Son in the film series; he was a fine character actor for decades on big screen and small, bringing dignity to the TV series Kung Fu.

A number of people involved in the creative process of film and television production left us last year. Milton Subotsky, 70, while never an award-caliber producer, was responsible for the production of a great number of horror films in the sixties and seventies. Starting as a screenwriter, he formed Amicus Productions, which made the very successful film Tales from the Crypt in 1971, among many other features. David Lean, 83, was a fine producer and director, best known for Lawrence of Arabia and Bridge on the River Kwai, both of which won him Oscars. Don Siegel, 78, is best remembered for his classic chiller, the original production of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He also directed a number of adventure films and thrillers, including Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry and War of the Worlds. Irwin Allen, 75, was a writer, producer and director who became famous in the 1970s for making big-scale disaster films such as The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. In 1960 he produced The Lost World, based on the Conan Doyle novel. In 1961 he made a film, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, which he followed up with a television series of the same title. William Dozier, 83, produced the Batman television series as well as other shows.

French artist and author Jean Bruller, 89, wrote fiction under the name Vercors, starting when he wrote for the French resistance during World War II. His best-known work was Les Animaux Denatures, (1952), translated as You Shall Know Them. It was given the title Borderline in the U.K., then reprinted as The Murder of the Missing Link in the U.S. His works were sophisticated fantasies, including a novel about the transformation of a vixen into a human woman, Sylva, which was a 1963 nominee for the Hugo Award for best SF novel. Roger Stine, 39, was an artist who did a number of paintings for Cinefantastique, and for various science fiction and fantasy books and magazines. Rick Griffin, 47, was a noted artist whose work was famous in the underground comix of the sixties and seventies. He also did numerous psychedelic rock posters, and album covers for bands such as The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. British animator Joy Batchelor, 77, was best known for her collaboration with her husband, John Halas, on the 1954 feature, Animal Farm, based on the George Orwell novel.

Dan Henderson, 38, was nominated for the Compton Crook Award for his first novel, Paradise (1982). He had a number of short stories published, and was a journalist. Dave Pedneau, 47, was a writer of mystery and horror best known for his “initials” series of hardboiled novels, D.O.A., A.P.B., B.O.L.O., A.K.A., and B. & E., all paperback originals. He wrote horror pseudonymously as Marc Eliot. He was the first editor of the Horror Writers of America’s newsletter. Other writers who died in 1991 included the fantasy poet Vera Bishop Konrick, 90, Ward Hawkins, 77, a pulp writer whose career spanned many genres and six decades, and Lovecraftian poet Walter Shedlofsky, 71.

Many character actors died last year, including John Hoyt, 87, and Fred MacMurray, 83, who starred in The Shaggy Dog, and the TV series “My Three Sons.” After years of playing heavies, Berry Kroger, 78, Ronald Lacey, 55, who like Kroger, was known for playing evil villains opposite many big stars in film and TV, Coral Browne, 77, a stage and screen actress who married Vincent Price after costarring with him in Theater of Blood, Wilfred Hyde-White, 87, Gloria Holden, 82, and the very tall Kevin Peter Hall, 35, whose face was never seen in his best-known roles, Harry in Harry and the Hendersons, and the alien in Predator also died. Other actors who died last year included Nita Krebs, 85, a 3 feet 8 inch actress who appeared in The Wizard of Oz and other films, Glenn Langan, 73, Ralph Bates, 50, who starred in many Hammer Films horror productions, Thorley Walters, 78, also a Hammer regular, English actress Lillian Bond, 83, French actress Delphine Seyrig, 58, Jackie Moran, 65, Angelo Rossitto, 83, a dwarf who starred in a number of major films and Dwight Weist, 81, an actor in many radio productions whose voice talents earned him the title, “the man of a thousand voices,” in radio and later in films as well.

Others of the film industry’s creative community who had fantasy credits and died last year were producer Lester Cowan, 83, best known for One Touch of Venus, screenwriter Warren Skaaren, 44, who worked on many films, most notably Beetlejuice, art director Robert E. Franklin, 46, of HBO’s Tales of the Crypt series, Oscar-winning art director Gene Callahan, 67, British film director Don ChafFey, 72, screenwriter Howard Dimsdale, 78, screenwriter/director Andy Milligan, 62, film director/art director Eugene Lourie, 89, director Edward R. Blatt, 88, sound effects engineer James MacDonald, 84, who also was the voice of Mickey Mouse for many years, screenwriter for film and television Roger Swaybill, 47, special effects technician Roy Seawright, 85, producer George J. Morgan, 77, and directors George Sherman, 82, Richard Thorpe, 95 and Samuel G. Gallu, 73. Not directly involved with fantasy or horror, but nonetheless heavily involved with works of fantastical imagination, was Gene Roddenberry, 70, who created Star Trek and was associated with the various incarnations and spin-offs of this vastly successful television series until his death. His show introduced hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide to science fiction and the realm of imagination upon which science fiction opens the door, and for that alone, Roddenberry deserves mention here. He, and all the other creative, talented people who died in 1991, will be missed, but their works and their vision will remain a part of all those who experienced their art. Through the works of those they influenced to create new art, their legacy grows, and will never die.