Chaon, Dan
Entry updated 10 October 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1964- ) US author, most of whose work may be defined as horror (see Horror in SF), the topoi of which are scrutinized with sophisticated intensity; active from the early 1980s; his early stories were assembled as Fitting Ends and Other Stories (coll 1995) and Among the Missing (coll 2001). Like all his work, they are hauntedly illuminating about the family romance between the world and the storyable, especially when children suffer ruptures and reunions gripped by blood. Most of his novels, beginning with You Remind Me of Me (2004), seem intimate with the engines of Fantastika; but it is only with Sleepwalk (2022), which is Near Future sf, that a literal alliance can be detected, manifested with some of the deadpan oracular sublime that can be found in the work of Thomas Pynchon. The protagonist of the tale, a quasi-burned-out drifter purveying "innocently" the wares of a sinister corporation, is hauled back into the familial caltraps Chaon favours after a biological daughter he had been unaware of calls upon him for help; but she may be an AI hauling him into a darker, Dystopian world. [JC]
Dan Chaon
born Sidney, Nebraska: 11 June 1964 [Omaha, Nebraska has also been given]
works
- You Remind Me of Me (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004) [hb/]
- Await Your Reply (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009) [hb/Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich and Thomas Beck Stvan]
- Ill Will (New York: Ballantine Books, 2017) [hb/]
- Sleepwalk (New York: Macmillan/Henry Holt, 2022) [hb/]
collections and stories
- Fitting Ends and Other Stories (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press/Triquarterly, 1995) [coll: hb/]
- Among the Missing (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001) [coll: hb/]
- Stay Awake (New York: Ballantine Books, 2012) [coll: hb/]
- The Beckoning Fair One (no place given: Amazon Original Stories, 2019) [story: ebook: in the publisher's Disorder Collection series: na/]
links
previous versions of this entry