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Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997)
Heard, Gerald

Tagged: Author.

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Working name of UK author and journalist Henry Fitzgerald Heard (1889-1971), used by him for all his UK work; in the USA, where he lived from 1937, he wrote as H F Heard. Much of his work vacillates between metaphysical sf, hopeful studies in mysticism in association with his friend Aldous Huxley, and credulous examinations of topics like UFOs. In the Sherlock Holmes pastiche A Taste for Honey (1941; vt A Taste for Murder 1955), filmed as The Deadly Bees (1966), there is a touch of ambiguously supernatural Horror; but Heard is mostly of genre interest for some of the fantasy tales and Supernatural Fictions assembled in The Great Fog and Other Weird Tales (coll 1944; vt Weird Tales of Terror and Detection 1946; rev with 2 stories added and 1 dropped under original title 1947 UK) and The Lost Cavern and Other Tales of the Fantastic (coll 1948). In the first volume, "Dromenon" combines Ghost Story with theological speculation, interestingly suggesting that mystical truths are attainable by acts of Perception which unravel the patterns within actual cathedrals, and "The Cat, 'I Am'" describes a supernatural Cat. In the second volume, "The Cup" pits a Grail chalice against metaphysical Evil. The Black Fox: A Novel of the Seventies (1950 UK) faces a Victorian canon with profound moral problems; his sister, dying in his stead, saves him from the grasp of an affronted Anubis. [JC]

other works: Gabriel and the Creatures (1952).

Henry Fitzgerald Heard

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