De HAVEN, Tom

(1949-)

   US writer who began publishing sf with his first novel, Freaks' Amour (1979), set in 1988 among a group of MUTANTS created by an atomic mishap, and following their lives as itinerant performers. A similar inclination to place a large connected cast in a surreally threatening world impels the otherwise very different Funny Papers (1985), a kind of urban fantasy/alternate history set at the end of the 19th century in a magic-realist New York (ALTERNATE WORLDS; FABULATION) and concentrating on the newspaper business at the point when COMIC strips were first becoming widely popular. In the long third section of Sunburn Lake (coll of linked stories 1988), TDH applied his easy fabulistic manner to 21st-century New Jersey. Towards the end of the 1980s, however, TDH gave some sense that he was dissipating his energies, producing a sharp but unremarkable tie in U.S.S.A. Book 1 * (1987), a juvenile, Joe Gosh (1988), which may have been SHARECROPPED, and Neuromancer: The Graphic Novel: Volume 1 * (graph 1989) illus Bruce Jensen. But the fantasy sequence Chronicles of the King's Tramp represented a significant return of energy: Walker of Worlds (1990),The End-of-Everything Man (1991), and The Last Human (1992) traverse familiar territory - a sequence of PARALLEL WORLDS nested into an ontological hierarchy - with panache and knowing clarity.

   JC

   Other works: Jersey Luck (1980), associational.

   See also: CHILDREN'S SF.