SOURCE: "Death and Dr. Ferron," in Brick: A Journal of Reviews, No. 24, Spring, 1985, pp. 6-9.

In the essay below, Ellenwood discusses Ferron's treatment of death in his stories and novels.

He was obsessed with it; defied it and courted it virtually all his life. His mother died young of tuberculosis, his father committed suicide a few years later, he was tubercular himself and was sent to a sanitarium just after the war. Deciding he wasn't ready for a slow, passive demise, he went over the wall and continued working twenty hours a day, smoking like a chimney, conducting pharmacological experiments on himself, even trying, unsuccessfully, Mithridates' silken escape ladder until death finally caught him napping on the morning of April 22, 1985. Neveurmagne, he'll have the last word. No writer I'm aware of has ever said so much, so wisely, humorously, mordantly, compassionately about death.

In the tales, most of...