Rebecca Lloyd (1947-2026)

 

Rosalie and I are very sorry to report the death of the author Rebecca Lloyd. We don’t really remember discussing anything with Becca other than books and writing, about which she was very passionate, although we know she was born in New Zealand, studied at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and spent many years in medical healthcare, often abroad. Her Facebook page says that she was formerly a Medical Parasitologist at Gonja Bombo Hospital in Tanzania.

 

We were first in contact when Becca submitted her collection Mercy to us, which was published in 2014. She had been writing and publishing fiction since at least 2002 and had won the Bristol Short Story Prize for her story 'The River' in 2008. She had also been shortlisted in the 2010 for the Dundee International Book Prize and was a semi-finalist in the Hudson Prize for a short story collection in the same year. Her novel Halfling was published by Walker Books in 2011, and in the following year she was co-editor with Indira Chandrasekhar, of Pangea an Anthology of Stories from Around the Globe, with Thames River Press. In 2014, her short story collection Whelp and Other Stories was shortlisted in the Paul Bowles Award for Short Fiction, and her collection The View From Endless Street had been published by WiDo Publishing.

 

We published Becca’s Seven Strange Stories in 2017, and she was also published by Egaeus Press (Ragman and Other Family Curses, 2016) and Zagava (The Bellboy, 2018). Other literary awards in which she has been acknowledged include The World Fantasy Award, The Aestas Short Story Prize, and the Paul Bowles Short Fiction Award. Some of her stories were reprinted in Best British Horror, (Salt Publishing), Best New Horror, (PS Publishing), and in recent volumes of Best Horror of the Year.

 

Personally, my favourite of all Becca’s books is The Child Cephalina (Tartarus Press, 2019), which managed to be a sensitive piece of historical fiction, while being seriously weird and terrifying. In a Facebook Post of 2025, Becca wrote how surprised she was to have been so drawn to historical fiction:

Maybe I like the research, although you can easily bury yourself in it as a writer, but I also like the weirdness of things past. I've never thought horror or weird has to be invented by writers; I see both those things, and a heady mixture of both, in our very human lives.

Becca was a forthright advocate for women’s rights, continually intellectually inquisitive, and with a great sense of humour. We would like to send our condolences to her two daughters, and to her family and wide number of friends.

 

 

R.A. Gilbert (1942-2026)

I am sorry to report the sad news that Bob Gilbert has died, aged 83. Writing as R.A. Gilbert, he was a highly regarded researcher, commentator and critic in the Western Mystery Tradition, publishing important books on the Golden Dawn, Freemasonry and A.E. Waite. He may be best-known to members of the Friends for his co-editorship of Arthur Machen’s Selected Letters, introducing and annotating those written to A.E. Waite.

Bob was a long-time member of the previous Machen Society, as well as FoAM, and many of us relied heavily on his knowledge of the friendship between Machen and Waite. Bob also edited a 2003 edition of The House of the Hidden Light, an exchange of letters previously considered by some (including Crowley) to be an obscure magical text.

Although Bob was fascinated by the occult, he was, in fact, a committed Christian who found himself interested in various elements of Western Esotericism. As he pointed out in his unpublished autobiography, he was always ‘an objective and dispassionate observer’, which meant that he often upset both occultists and Christians, especially those who made outrageous claims that could not be backed up by sound, evidence-based research. Those with any real understanding of these subjects acknowledged Bob’s insight and encyclopaedic knowledge of the occult in general, the Golden Dawn in particular, A.E. Waite, Masonic history, and Christian mysticism.

In his autobiography, Bob admitted to being a lifelong accumulator of not just books, but stamps, pictures, people and ideas, and though he studied philosophy and psychology at the University of Bristol, many will have known him as a secondhand and antiquarian book seller, having a shop for many years in Bristol. He met his second wife, Patricia, in 1969, brought together by not just a passion for books, but an interest in astronomy.

I remember that Bob was keen to publish The House of the Hidden Light because he wanted to set the record straight. In his view, there was enough to be fascinated by in the world of the occult, without resorting to ‘making things up’. He had little time for impostors and frauds, and was therefore initially horrified when I told him I was writing a biography of T. Lobsang Rampa. Once Bob realised I was working from a position of scepticism, he was very happy to help and encourage me. Whenever I chatted with Bob about anything, he would reveal a deep knowledge of yet another subject I hadn’t realised he had studied (and collected), in this case Tibet. He found the country, its history and religion, of the greatest interest and, of course, was therefore an indefatigable opponent of the ‘mystifiers’ of Tibet. But this did not mean that he didn’t have a great sense of humour about subjects that he was drawn to; he sent me a long list of authors who had used Tibet as a background (often with complete ignorance of the country) in their fiction.

I know that Bob will be missed by many from very different,(even apparently opposing, backgrounds. These will be people who appreciated his company, his willingness to share his knowledge, and his delight in opposing charlatans. Of course, his family will miss him even more profoundly, and our thoughts are with them.