RIP Gary William Crawford (1953-2020)

Critic, poet, fiction writer, and small press publisher Gary William Crawford passed away in his native  Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on July 9th, at the age of 67, after a long illness.

Gary published some six booklets of poetry, including Poems of the Divided Self (1992); In Shadow Lands (1998); The Shadow City (2005); The Phantom World (2008); Voices from the Dark: Selected Poems 1979-2009 (2009); and, in collaboration with Bruce Boston, Notes from the Shadow City (2012).

He also published two booklets of his own short fiction, Gothic Fevers (2000) and Mysteries of Von Domarus, and Other Stories (2006).

He was probably best known as a critic and publisher.  He founded Gothic Press in 1979, and edited six issues of the magazine Gothic (1979-1987), which featured criticism as well as fiction and poetry.  (Galad Elflandsson's notable story "The Exile" first appeared in issue 2 in 1979.) A listing of the contents of the six issues can be found here.  Another magazine, Supernatural Poetry, began in 1987, but apparently lasted only for one issue. From 1992 through 1997 he published fourteen issues of Night Songs, another dark poetry magazine.


Of his nonfiction, his work centered in particular on three authors, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Aickman, and Ramsey Campbell.

His massive J. Sheridan Le Fanu: A Bio-Bibliography appeared from Greenwood Press in 1985. With Jim Rockhill and Brian J. Showers he co-edited the seminal collection of Le Fanu criticism, Reflections in a Glass Darkly (2011). And with Brian J. Showers he issued an updated booklet covering Le Fanu's writings as Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: A Concise Bibliography (2011).  In 2006 he founded and edited a twice-yearly online journal Le Fanu Studies.

A booklet-sized study Robert Aickman: An Introduction appeared in 2003. And he edited a booklet of three essays on Aickman, Insufficient Answers (2012). (The three essays are by Philip Challinor, Rebekah Memel Brown, and Isaac Land.) In 2011 he started an online Robert Aickman: A Database, which in 2014 expanded to include a twice-yearly online journal, Aickman Studies.

Ramsey Campbell (1988) was a Starmont Reader's Guide to the author.  Gary's last book was a collection of essays he edited, Ramsey Campbell: Critical Essays on the Modern Master of Horror (2014).  

Other booklets of especial interest published by Gothic Press include poetry collections by Bruce Boston, Conditions of Sentient Life (1996) and Cold Tomorrows (1998); Black Prometheus: A Critical Study of Karl Edward Wagner (2007), edited by Benjamin Szumskyj;  and (apparently the final Gothic Press chapbook) Unburying the Past: The Hermeneutics of Truth in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Novels (2015), by Claudio Di Vaio.

After Gary's increasing health problems, the Le Fanu and Aickman online databases and journals went offline sometime in 2016 or 2017. Some materials can still be found via the Wayback Machine, e.g. for Le Fanu here, or for Aickman here.  He also worked on a larger critical book on Aickman but this was never completed.

He also wrote articles on  Walter de la Mare, Fritz Leiber, and Stephen King, and contributed to various reference books, like Jack Sullivan's Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural (1986) and Marshall B. Tymn's Horror Literature (1981).