David J. Skal (1952-2024)

Author and critic David J. Skal, 71, died January 1, 2024 in a car accident in Los Angeles CA.

David John Skal was born June 21, 1952 in Garfield Heights OH. He attended Ohio University, where he studied journalism and worked as a film critic and editor on the college newspaper, graduating in 1974. He later worked in theater, including with the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and the Theatre Communications Group of New York.

Skal attended the Clarion Writers Workshop in 1970, while he was still a college student. His first work of genre interest was “Chains” in the Clarion anthology (1971). Debut SF novel Scavengers appeared in 1980, followed by When We Were Good (1981) and Antibodies (1988).

As a critic, Skal was an expert in horror cinema, Dracula, and vampires in general. His non-fiction includes Hugo and Stoker Award finalist Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of “Dracula” from Novel to Stage to Screen (1990); World Fantasy and Stoker Award finalist The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (1993); Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, Hollywood’s Master of the Macabre (1995, with Elias Savada); Stoker Award nominee V Is for Vampire: An A to Z Guide to Everything Undead (1996), Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture (1998); Romancing the Vampire: Collectors Vault (2009); Stoker Award finalist Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, The Man Who Wrote Dracula (2016); and Fright Favorites: 31 Movies to Haunt Your Halloween and Beyond (2020). Skal frequently contributed film reviews to F&SF. He also edited Vampires: Encounters with the Undead (2001).

For more, see his entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.