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Peck, Richard

Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.

(1934-2018) US author of children's and Young Adult fiction, including some Fantastika. The Blossom Culp series of supernatural fantasies deals with ghosts [for Ghosts and Ghost Stories see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] and opens with The Ghost Belonged to Me (1975), set in 1913, in which a ghost warns of impending Disaster; this novel was filmed as Child of Glass (1978) directed by John Erman. Of more direct sf interest is Voices After Midnight (1989), whose three young protagonists repeatedly undergo Timeslips from contemporary New York to the city in 1888, with romantic complications and the threat of that year's deadly blizzard. The sf Lost in Cyberspace (1995) features Time Travel via schoolboy Computer shenanigans (though not in fact Cyberspace), with ensuing complications as historical characters impinge on the present day; the sequel is The Great Interactive Dream Machine (1996). Three Quarters Dead (2010) is another ghost/suspense tale, whose main emphasis is on teenage social relations. Animal fantasies [again see links below] include Secrets at Sea (2011), where a Wainscot Society of talking mice follows its human host-family on an ocean voyage from the USA to Europe, and The Mouse with the Question Mark Tail (2013), a tale in similar vein set in Victorian London.

Peck won the Newbery Medal for his Depression-era historical novel A Year Down Yonder (2000). He should not be confused with the US sf author and critic Richard E Peck. [DRL]

Richard Wayne Peck

born Decatur, Illinois: 10 April 1934

died New York: 24 May 2018

works (selected)

series

Blossom Culp

Lost in Cyberspace

individual titles

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