Al Sarrantonio

Al Sarrantonio (May 25, 1952 – January 27, 2025) spent roughly half a century telling stories that moved between horror, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and the Western. He was born in New York City, raised on Long Island, and stayed a New York writer his whole life, setting much of his most personal work in a fictional upstate town that felt drawn from the same autumn light he grew up under.

He earned a B.A. in English from Manhattan College in 1974 and, that same year, attended the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop at Michigan State University, the training ground that shaped a generation of speculative writers. His first published story, "Ahead of the Joneses," appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in 1979. By 1982 he had left a publishing-house job to write full time.

Over the decades that followed he produced more than fifty books and roughly ninety short stories. A reader could find him in the horror section, the science fiction aisle, the mystery rack, and the Western spinner, and the same steady, fast-moving voice was underneath all of it.

His reputation in horror was built as much in the short form as the long. Stories like "Pumpkin Head" and "Richard's Head" were anthologized again and again, and they carried the flavor that would define his signature project: a loose saga of Halloween centered on the invented town of Orangefield, New York.

In the second half of his career he became one of the most respected anthology editors in the field. 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense (1999) gathered original work from Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, and others, and won the Bram Stoker Award. A decade later he co-edited Stories: All-New Tales with Neil Gaiman, which won the Shirley Jackson Award and an Audie.

He died on January 27, 2025, at the age of 72. Tributes followed from across the field, including peers like Robert McCammon and institutions such as Locus that track the genre's history.