Chappell, Fred
Entry updated 3 February 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1936-2024) US academic, poet and author who published some early amateur fiction in Robert Silverberg's Fanzine Spaceship 1952-1953. Most of his work within the water margins of Fantastika adheres to the broad remit of the weird, though his best-known novel Dagon (1968) carries its doomed protagonist into the sway of an idiot deity whose gaze – "the god was omnipotent but did not possess intelligence" – and constitutes a prolepsis of things to come (see Cthulhu Mythos; Horror in SF) [for Weird Fiction see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. Set in the eponymous medieval castle, Castle Tzingal (1984 chap) is a book-length poem containing integrated tales of its confabulating inhabitants, as told by a supervising homunculus (see Poetry).
Chappell's most sustained prose work, the Greensboro sequence beginning with I Am One of You Forever (1985), is a regional Bildungsroman set in rural North Carolina, into the reminiscential course of which are interweaved tales of legends and surreal lore; less exorbitant than Donald Harington's long sequence of Stay More tales, it shares with that wilder sequence what in sf terms might readily be described as a Sense of Wonder at the world. A Shadow All of Light (2016) is a fantasy novel which – as often in Chappell's work – consists of interwoven tales, through the course of which an apprentice figure learns his trade and some deeper secrets from the shadow thief who dominates the narrative; some moving echoes of Fritz Leiber and Jack Vance are gracefully absorbed. He won two World Fantasy Awards for short fiction in 1992 and 1994. [JC]
Fred Davis Chappell
born Canton, North Carolina: 28 May 1936
died Greensboro, North Carolina: 5 January 2024
works (selected)
series
Greensboro
- I Am One of You Forever (Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1985) [Greensboro: hb/uncredited]
- Brighten the Corner Where You Are (New York: St Martin's Press, 1989) [Greensboro: hb/James Steinberg]
- Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You (New York: Picador USA, 1996) [Greensboro: hb/Honi Werner]
- Look Back All the Green Valley (New York: Picador USA, 1999) [Greensboro: hb/Honi Werner]
individual titles
- The Inkling (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965) [hb/Anita Walker Scott]
- Dagon (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968) [hb/Richard Bennett]
- Castle Tzingal: A Poem (Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1984) [poem: chap: hb/Albert Crochet]
- A Shadow All of Light (New York: Tor, 2016) [fixup: hb/Sam Weber]
collections and stories
- The Fred Chappell Reader (New York: St Martin's Press, 1987) [coll/omni: shorter works plus Dagon (see above): hb/]
- More Shapes Than One (New York: St Martin's Press, 1991) [coll: hb/Andrea Futter]
- The Lodger (West Warwick, Rhode Island: Necronomicon Press, 1993) [chap: pb/Stephen E Fabian]
- Ancestors and Others (New York: St Martin's Press, 2009) [coll: hb/]
- Fred Chappell: Masters of the Weird Tale (Lakewood, Colorado: Centipede Press, 2015) [coll: hb/]
links
previous versions of this entry