Background
Joseph Brennan was born on December 20, 1918, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, United States. Later Brennan's family moved to New Haven, where he lived thereafter.
Joseph Payne Brennan
Joseph Payne Brennan
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0883240386/?tag=2022091-20
1974
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0937986070/?tag=2022091-20
1977
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0937986534/?tag=2022091-20
1982
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1985
https://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Lucius-Leffing-Joseph-Brennan/dp/093798695X/?tag=2022091-20
1989
https://www.amazon.com/FEASTER-AFAR-OTHER-GHASTLY-VISITANTS/dp/B001OFHMX8/?tag=2022091-20
Joseph Brennan was born on December 20, 1918, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, United States. Later Brennan's family moved to New Haven, where he lived thereafter.
Joseph was forced to drop out of college in his sophomore year owing to an illness in the family; thus, he was largely self-educated.
Joseph Brennan took a position in the advertising department at The New Haven Journal-Courier from 1937 to 1939. In 1941 he began working at the Yale University Library, where he spent most of his long career as a senior assistant in the acquisitions department, a position he held until his retirement in 1985.
Brennan's first professional sale came in December 1940 with the publication of the poem, "When Snow Is Hung", which appeared in the Christian Science Monitor Home Forum, and he continued writing poetry up until the time of his death. As a fiction witer, Brennan started out writing westerns stories for the pulps, then switched to horror stories for Weird Tales in 1952.
He began publishing his own magazine Macabre, which ran from 1957 to 1976. Several of his short story collections concern an occult detective named Lucius Leffing in the vein of Carnacki and Algernon Blackwood's John Silence. His 1958 collection Nine Horrors and a Dream, containing classic stories like "Slime" and "Canavan's Back Yard", is celebrated in an essay by Stephen Gallagher in the book Horror: 100 Best Books, edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman.
In 1980, twelve of Brennan's classic horror stories were collected in the paperback-only collection The Shapes at Midnight, with an introduction by Stephen King. 1985's poetry collection Sixty Selected Poems represents the gamut of Brennan's poetic work, from poems published in his first collection up until the date of publication. Brennan died, aged 70, a few months prior to the issuance of his fourth Leffing book, the third collection of short stories to feature the character.
Almost all of Brennan's work takes place in or around New England, especially coastal and northwestern Connecticut. Many of Brennan's best tales are set within the environs of New Haven and East Hartland, some within the mythical New England town of Juniper Hill, and feature seemingly semi-autobiographical elements throughout. He often goes to great lengths describing vast stretches of forest, scenery, small towns, and so on. His characters are often reclusive, and stick to these desolate places. As Alan Warren points out, many of Brennan's tales involve ghosts or apparitions that make frightening, unexpected appearances in old houses, hospital rooms, or even, as in 'The Man in Grey tweeds", on the highway. In his poetry, he himself identified his main themes as "death, loss, the mystery of time, Nature".
Brennan was a member of the Praed Street Irregulars.
Brennan's personality was described as "reserved: he is friendly but not flamboyant. He is most comfortable with his wife and his dog. He is a gentle, softspoken, modest man. But beware, for beneath that ordinary exterior lurks the mind of a modern master of fright."
Quotes from others about the person
"Brennan is a master of the unashamed horror tale" - Stephen King
"His stories were noteworthy for their effective development of suspense and terror without the excesses of violence which characterise modern horror fiction" - Don D'Amassa
In 1970, Brennan married the former Doris M. Philbrick, who was herself a published poet.
