SLOANE, William M(illigan)

(1906-1974)

   US playwright, novelist and publisher whose interest in the occult was reflected in his sf novels, To Walk the Night (1937; rev 1954) and The Edge of Running Water (1939; vt The Unquiet Corpse 1946), both later assembled as The Rim of Morning (omni 1964); along with 1 story, "Let Nothing You Dismay" (1954), they are all the sf he wrote. The firstcomplexly combines horror and sf in the story of an ALIEN entrapped in a human life as the widow of a famous physicist, in whose death she seems implicated; the story is absorbing and polished. The second, rather similarly, features a scientist's attempts to communicate with his dead wife and to revive her; horrors ensue, and local prejudice exacts its toll. WMS also ed 2 sf anthologies, Space, Space, Space (anth 1953) and Stories for Tomorrow (anth 1954); the latter was one of the finestcollections of its period.

   JC