The last time I emailed Andrew Pyper it was to send a fan letter. I had spent part of the holiday break reading William, the novel he published last September under the pseudonym Mason Coile. Pyper and I had been occasional correspondents for many years, as a result of his position as one of the most successful writers in CanLit and my erstwhile role as review editor at the Canadian publishing trade magazine Quill & Quire. We met frequently at industry events – his own book launches, but also events celebrating other authors, as Pyper was one of the most supportive and encouraging figures on the scene. We also traded banter back and forth on what was then known as Twitter (before it descended into the far-right hellscape it is now), talking politics, writers and writing, and bemoaning the apparently endless time in the wilderness of his beloved Toronto Maple Leafs.

But although I had long admired Pyper’s fiction, had reviewed it and spoken about it in many different venues over the years, I had never written him to tell him how impressive I thought it was.

Finishing William a couple of weeks ago, I knew I could not remain silent. The experience was so powerful, so invigorating, such a brilliant literary gut punch that I had to reach out to its author and let him know how deeply it worked its way into my psyche. After two decades as a practising literary critic, it takes a lot for any book to surprise me, but William not only did that, it knocked all my preconceptions down a long flight of stairs where they shattered in pieces at the bottom. This is a book – one of the author’s tightest, fastest, and most brutal – that assaults its reader, which is one of the most complimentary things I can think to say of any work of fiction. I simply had to write and tell him how much the reading experience had affected me.

My heartache is that I did not do so much earlier. As the Canadian literary world discovered at the end of last week, Pyper died on January 3 due to complications from cancer. He was 56 years old.

Born in Stratford, Ontario in 1968, Pyper found his calling early; as a grade-school student he carried around copies of the New Yorker and published his first piece of writing – a letter to the editor of the Stratford Beacon-Herald advocating for a stop sign on the street where he and his friends played road hockey – during this period. “He was one of the most fully-formed humans I’ve met,” says Larry McCabe, a childhood friend who is now a city councillor and restaurateur in Stratford.

Pyper got a BA and MA in English from Montreal’s McGill University before attending law school at the University of Toronto, though that profession was never something he felt invested in. “I just hated the law,” Pyper told journalist Greg Quill in 2013. The same year he was called to the bar, 1996, he published his first book, a collection of short stories titled Kiss Me, with the Erin, Ontario press The Porcupine’s Quill.

But it was his first novel, Lost Girls, appearing three years later with HarperFlamingo, that set the author on the trajectory he would follow for the rest of his career. The novel was a Gothic mystery about two missing teenage girls and the high-school teacher accused of killing them. In a starred review for Q&Q, future Toronto Star books editor Deborah Dundas wrote that in the novel Pyper “does for Northern Ontario what Charles Dickens did for the streets of London: he brings the landscape alive, giving it a sense of character and history.”

But more than this, what Pyper did with the novel – what he would continue to do in each of his successive novels – was to obliterate the line between genre and literary writing. This was a separation for which Pyper had little time and even less regard, claiming it was an artificial distinction promulgated by an ingrained literary snobbery. “I detect the unintentionally patronizing flattery of bafflement,” Pyper wrote in 2020. “You’re a good writer, you could sit at the grown-ups table if you chose to, and yet there you are, outside in the dark. Why?”

“I think Andrew was one of the first Canadian writers to force the critical establishment to take the genre more seriously,” says friend and colleague Craig Davidson, who writes horror under the pseudonym Nick Cutter. “Lost Girls wasn’t strictly horror but it was dark, Gothic, there was a ghost. But it was so lyrical, its literary bona fides so obvious, that it couldn’t be fobbed off as horror pulp.”

As Pyper progressed, his books – including novels such as The Killing Circle, The Guardians, The Damned, and Homecoming – became more situated in the genre space. But notwithstanding the genre trappings of whatever Pyper wrote, there was always the sense of an abiding literary intelligence at work. “We used to have the odd chat about the seemingly new phenomenon of ‘elevated horror’ and how even within the genre (which has often been maligned by non-genre readers and academics) there is now an unhelpful hierarchy, and what can seem an arbitrary ranking of merit,” says Davidson. “I think that is just a carryover from Andrew’s long-standing belief that there is little distinction between genre and literary writing. Good, clean, strong, impassioned writing is simply that, regardless of what box some would like to stuff it in.”

That was something else about Pyper: there was never an ounce of pretension in him regardless of the level of fame he achieved. He was not only willing to advocate for the legitimacy of genre fiction, he remained firmly grounded and humble as a person, even as the accolades rolled in and his literary star ascended. When we put him on the cover of Quill & Quire in 2013 for what would become his breakout novel, The Demonologist, the interior shot was a sophisticated author photo featuring Pyper dressed in a black button-down shirt, seated in noirish shadow. But for the cover, Pyper agreed to appear in close-up wearing a crown of thorns, greenish makeup tinges on his face, his mouth agape in a silent scream. This was an author who not only did not take himself too seriously, he was up for pretty much anything.

Asked to describe Pyper’s character, fellow Simon & Schuster author Marissa Stapley refers to his generosity, which was one of the most common descriptors in personal remembrances of the author online. “Andrew was a stalwart of the community,” she says. “He wrote with such heart and compassion and lived that way too.” Indeed, the only thing that seemed to outweigh Pyper’s devotion to his craft was his devotion to his family – his wife Heidi Rittenhouse, daughter Maude, and son Ford.

In the days following the public announcement of Pyper’s death, Stapley went back into her emails and found one from 2018 in which Pyper considers his legacy in the context of his family and, in particular, his children. “He said, ‘I’ve been thinking about what my kids might remember about me when I’m gone, and what I want most is for them to remember not necessarily the stories I wrote that were for everyone else, but more the stories I told them in a tent or walking down the street that were just between us,’” Stapley says. “What a person, that all you have to do is a quick search in your inbox and you find these beautiful words of him contemplating his literary legacy and his feelings about his children.”

Stapley is certain Pyper’s literary reputation is secure and will live on, especially given that there are two more Mason Coile novels in the can that will be published posthumously.

Despite trafficking in undeniably dark material, the author himself was always hopeful and humorous, an attitude he carried with him even after his diagnosis. “Over the past year he often remarked how grateful he was, saying that if someone were to offer him more time, but a different journey, he would not trade any of it,” his obituary reads.

“He always used to sign his emails ‘Onwards!’ with the exclamation point,” Davidson says. “It was very much who Andrew was. Always hurdling over potential misfortune and calamity and dashed hopes, his gaze ever pinned on that happy, hopeful horizon. There are many traits of Andrew’s that I wish were my own, with that one quite high on the pecking order.”

While Andrew Pyper himself is no longer with us, we could all do well to take to solace in a line from The Demonologist that Pyper’s daughter got tattooed on her forearm, a comfort as well as a reminder. In Pyper’s own handwriting, the words read, “I’m here if you are.”