Alan Ryan

Ryan was born on May 17, 1943 in Bronx, New York. He had Irish ancestry through his grandmother, and Irish motifs were sometimes featured in his fiction, such as in the short story "The Bones Wizard" (1984). An American author of Irish ancestry visiting Ireland for the first time is the main character in Cast a Cold Eye. He was a nominee for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1980. During the following years he published several horror novels and short stories, but around 1990 he abandoned literature for about twenty years. He returned in 2011 with a new novel, Amazonas, which came out after his death of pancreatic cancer at the age of 68 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he lived. In 2012, a posthumous collection of his latest stories appeared, entitled The Back of Beyond: New Stories. Both posthumous books were published by Cemetery Dance.