Even in the festive season the roving and merciless eye of The Curse Of Electric Halibut is seeking out fresh victims, and its latest victim is Joan Didion, essayist and novelist whose novel The Last Thing He Wanted appeared here in late 2010. Didion was probably better known as an essayist and non-fiction writer - she wrote five novels over 33 years and none after The Last Thing He Wanted in 1996.
Didion was 87, which puts her right in the median range for authorial death ages. More interestingly as you can see from the table she is the first person to appear since John le Carré almost exactly a year ago. I have done a quick sweep of the end-of-2021 literary reviews and round-ups and I can't find any reference to anyone else who's ever featured here, which does not definitively mean there wasn't anyone.
The Curse Of Electric Halibut likes to bide its time and play the long game and what the table shows is a whole barn of chickens coming home to roost - five of the last eight victims have featured a curse gestation period of more than ten years. As older long-ago featurees feel the icy hand of death upon them new featurees step in to fill the breach, some of them (e.g. Terry Pratchett) already dead, some of them (e.g. Rachel Cusk) pretty youthful, and some of them right in prime scythe-sharpening range. E. Annie Proulx (86) and Frederick Forsyth (83) are the most obvious recent examples.
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