Chappell, Fred
Entry updated 23 June 2025. Tagged: Author.
(1936-2024) US academic, poet and author who published some early amateur fiction in Robert Silverberg's Fanzine Spaceship 1952-1953; he was professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro from 1964 until his retirement in 2004. 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" – 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