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Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997)
Brennert, Alan

Tagged: Author.

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(1954-    ) US tv producer, writer and author, most of whose work has been Dark Fantasy and Horror, beginning with "Nostalgia Tripping" in Infinity 5 (anth 1973) ed Robert Hoskins. His first novel, City of Masques (1978), is sf. Kindred Spirits (1984) and Time and Chance (1990) are both dark fantasies in which two male protagonists Shadow one another through life crises. The former offers a relatively simple communion of Souls between two suicidal men; in the latter a man finds himself slipping into an Alternate Reality where another version of him lives, and the two swap worlds.

The tales assembled in Her Pilgrim Soul, and Other Stories (coll 1990) and Ma Qui, and Other Phantoms (coll 1991) are also set mainly in the real world: some enlist fantasy or Supernatural-Fiction devices to illuminate Rites of Passage in their (not always adolescent) protagonists; others, like the title story (1990) of the second volume, are powerful Ghost Stories – powerful because Brennert's Ghosts almost invariably cry out to the real world for release from their Bondage ... and do not necessarily gain it. Weird Romance: Two One-Act Musicals of Speculative Fiction (coll 1993) – with book and libretto by David Spencer and music by Alan Menken – is a CD presentation of two stories, the adaptation of Brennert's "Her Pilgrim Soul" being fantasy.

Much of Brennert's fantasy work is in his tv scriptwriting. He was Executive Story Consultant to The New Twilight Zone (1985-1988), writing several of the scripts, and before that wrote for The Adventures of Wonder Woman (1978-1979) and the space opera Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979-1981). He edited The New Twilight Zone * (anth 1991), comprising stories either written especially for the series or on which episodes had been based; his long introduction gives interesting background information about the series.

Brennert's Comics work has mainly been scripts for Batman, some assembled as The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told (graph coll 1989). [JC]

Alan Michael Brennert

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