Hyder, Alan
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
Working name of Frederick Alan Hyder (?1895-1952), UK civil servant and author who according to biographical data on a 1936 dustjacket saw service in France in World War One and lived at various times in Egypt and the West Indies, perhaps Jamaica (where he set two novels and a lengthy sequence of stories); in youth he swapped the order of his birth names and preferred to be known as Alan Frederick Hyder. He was a prolific contributor of short fiction to the London Evening News (131 stories 1934-1950) and other venues including Britannia and Eve, Empire Youth Annual, Pearson's Weekly, The Star and The Strand Magazine. Hyder is best known and of greatest sf interest for his third novel, the remarkable Vampires Overhead (1935), in which Comet-hopping Vampires invade Earth, causing devastation, first to London, then everywhere. The tale then shifts to a Post-Holocaust mode as three men escape the catastrophe to make a new life in the English countryside. The novel is told with very considerable vigour; but although he later published a fourth novel and two story collections, this author never returned to genre fiction at book length. Vampires Overhead was included in a list prepared in 1983 by Karl Edward Wagner for Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine of the thirteen best Horror in SF novels. [JC/DRL]
Frederick Alan Hyder
born Croydon, Surrey: ?1895 [birth registered January-March 1895]
died The Lizard, Cornwall: 29 June 1952
works (highly selected)
- Vampires Overhead (London: Philip Allen, 1935) [hb/uncredited]
links
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