Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

Philip J. Rahman, one half of the publishing imprint Fedogan & Bremer, took his own life on 23 July, aged fifty-nine. He had been in declining health for some years and suffering personal difficulties. F&B was set up in the late 1980s by Rahman and Dennis Weiler (who named the imprint after nicknames they had in college — Weiler was “Fedogan” and Rahman was “Bremer”) to produce the kind of books they no longer felt Arkham House was publishing. Following an audio version of H. P. Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth , the first F&B book title was Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei , and they went on to publish collections and novels by Robert Bloch, Hugh B. Cave, Howard Wandrei, Carl Jacobi, Basil Copper, Karl Edward Wagner, Richard L. Tierney, Brian Lumley, R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Richard A. Lupoff and Adam Niswander, along with anthologies edited by Robert M. Price and Stephen Jones. The imprint won the World Fantasy Award — Non-Professional, and many of the titles it published were also award winners or nominees.

Cryonics advocate Robert C.(Chester) W.(Wilson) Ettinger, who wrote a number of non-fiction books about extending life through cryonic freezing, died the same day, aged ninety-two. He also published some SF stories, beginning with “The Penultimate Trump” in Startling Stories (1948). Not surprisingly, his body was cryopreserved at the Cryonics Institute, which he founded in 1976.

Eighty-year-old Japanese SF writer Sakyo Komatsu(Minoru Komatsu), best known for his 1973 disaster novel Nippon Chinbotsu ( Japan Sinks , filmed in 1974 and 2006), died of pneumonia on 26 July. He was also a prolific writer of short stories, articles and anime scripts.

Best-selling urban fantasy and paranormal romance writer L. A. Banks(Leslie Esdaile Banks) died of a rare form of adrenal cancer on 2 August, aged fifty-one. The author of more than forty books since her debut in 1996, her popular “Vampire Huntress Legends” series began in 2003 with Minion and continued with The Awakening, The Hunted, The Bitten, The Forbidden, The Damned, The Forsaken, The Wicked, The Cursed, The Darkness, The Shadows and The Thirteenth . She also wrote the “Crimson Moon” werewolf series, comprising Bad Blood (2008), Bite the Bullet, Undead on Arrival, Cursed to Death, Never Cry Werewolf and Left for Dead. Surrender the Dark and Conquer the Dark were the first two books in a new series about angels. Banks also wrote romance, crime and media tie-ins under various pseudonyms.

American children’s and young adult author William Sleator(William Warner Sleator III) died in Thailand the same day, aged sixty-six. His more than thirty books include The Angry Moon, Blackbriar, House of Stairs, Fingers, Interstellar Pig, Singularity, The Duplicate, The Boy Who Reversed Himself, Rewind, The Boy Who Couldn’t Die and The Phantom Limb . Sleator was also an accomplished pianist, playing for a number of ballet schools.

American comics writer and editor Del Connelldied of complications from Alzheimer’s disease on 12 August, aged ninety-three. He started out as a character sculptor for the Walt Disney Studio in 1939, where he worked on the stories for The Three Caballeros and Alice in Wonderland (1951). After moving to Western Publishing’s Dell Comics in 1954, he wrote thousands of comics (usually uncredited), including Space Family Robinson (which was turned into the TV series Lost in Space ) and numerous Disney titles. For more than twenty years Connell also wrote the daily and Sunday Mickey Mouse newspaper strip.

Fifty-year-old British fantasy and SF author Colin Harveydied on 15 August, having suffered a massive stroke the day before. His novels include Vengeance, Lightning Days, The Silk Palace, Blind Faith, Winter Song and Damage Time , and his stories appeared in such magazines and anthologies as Albedo One, Interzone, Apex, Daily Science Fiction, Fearology and Gothic.net . His short fiction was collected in Displacement , and he also edited the anthologies Killers, Future Bristol, Dark Spires and Transtories . While working for Unilever, Harvey helped launch Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream in Iceland.

British artist John Holmes, best known for his iconic cover for Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970), died on 17 August, aged seventy-six. His other credits include the cover of Peter Benchley’s Jaws , the Ballentine editions of H. P. Lovecraft, the Peter Haining anthologies The Evil People and The Midnight People , plus reissues of Pan’s two volumes of The Hammer Horror Omnibus and various editions of The Fontana Book of Horror edited by Mary Danby.

Veteran Hammer scriptwriter, producer and director Jimmy Sangster(James Henry Kimmel Sangster, aka “John Sansom”) died on 19 August, aged eighty-three. He began his career at the studio as an assistant director on Man in Black, Dick Barton Strikes Back, Room to Let, Stolen Face and Spaceways . However, starting as a scriptwriter with X: The Unknown in 1956, Sangster was responsible (with director Terrence Fisher and others) for ushering the Hammer House of Horror era with The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula (aka Horror of Dracula ), The Revenge of Frankenstein, The Snorkel, The Man Who Could Cheat Death, The Mummy (1959), The Brides of Dracula, The Terror of the Tongs, Taste of Fear, Paranoiac, Maniac, Nightmare, Hysteria, The Nanny, Dracula Prince of Darkness, The Anniversary and Crescendo . For Hammer he also directed The Horror of Frankenstein, Lust for a Vampire and Fear in the Night , and he novelised a number of his screenplays. Sangster worked for other production companies, and his film credits also include Blood of the Vampire, The Trollenberg Terror (aka The Crawling Eye ), Jack the Ripper (1959), The Hellfire Club, Deadlier Than the Male, A Taste of Evil, Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? Scream Pretty Peggy, Maneater, Good Against Evil, The Legacy, The Billion Dollar Threat, Phobia, Once Upon a Spy , Disney’s The Devil and Max Devlin and Flashback — Mörderisc Ferien . During the 1970s he wrote numerous scripts for American TV shows, including Ghost Story, The Six Million Dollar Man, Kolchak: The Night Stalker and Wonder Woman . His autobiography, Do You Want it Good or Tuesday? was published in 1997.

Sixty-three-year-old American bookseller Bill Trojan(William T. Trojan) died of a massive heart attack in his hotel room on 21 August, the final day of Renovation, the 2011 World Science Fiction Convention in Reno, Nevada. He had been suffering with health problems for several years. Trojan was one of the chairs of the 1996 World Horror Convention in Eugene, Oregon, and was a major financial supporter of Pulphouse Publishing in the late 1980s.

Fifty-nine-year-old American SF fan Dan Hoey, who chaired the 1995 Disclave convention in Washington DC, committed suicide on 31 August.

American journalist and cartoonist Bill Kunkel(William Henry Patrick Kunkel), who co-created Electronic Games , the first video and computer game magazine, died of an apparent heart attack on 4 September, aged sixty-one. He also wrote comic books for Marvel and DC Comics and created video games.

Digital publishing pioneer Michael S.(Stern) Heart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, the world’s oldest digital library, died of a heart attack on 6 September, aged sixty-four. He is often credited as the “creator” of the ebook, having made an electronic copy of the American Declaration of Independence available for download at the University of Illinois in Urbana in 1971.