Todd Grimson, the Portland writer who won an Oregon Book Award for his first novel, Within Normal Limits, in 1988 and saw his 2011 novel Brand New Cherry Flavor turned into a Netflix series in 2021, died January 30 at age 73. He had lived with multiple sclerosis since the 1980s, working for many years and several books through the disease.

Jim Redden of The Portland Tribune wrote two fine stories about Grimson’s life and death — the first, on Feb. 17, announcing his death and giving some background on his career; the second, on Feb. 20, about the circumstances of his death, “five days after being seriously injured during a Jan. 24 medical transportation trip to a hospital.” As Redden reports, a “medical transport driver slammed on the brakes during a trip to the Good Samaritan Hospital in Northwest Portland, throwing Grimson out of his wheelchair, causing him to strike his head on something hard and fracturing his leg. Instead of calling for police or an ambulance, Grimson said, the driver put him back in his wheelchair and returned him to his adult foster care home.”

Grimson’s books also included the short-story collection Stabs at Happiness and Stainless: A Modern Romance, which will be re-released in a new edition Oct. 7 of this year. Writing in The Guardian in 2011, Damien Walter called Grimson “the greatest horror writer you’ve never read.”

“In Stainless,” Walter wrote, “Todd Grimson set out to write ‘the Ultimate, Final Vampire Novel’ – and succeeded. Set against the backdrop of a 1990s Los Angeles rotten with sex, drugs and indie rock music, Stainless follows the 400-year-old Justine, sufferer of a rare glandular condition that makes her long-lived but dependent on regular transfusions of blood, and Keith, a rock musician with shattered hands and a shattered life following the suicide of his girlfriend. A cast of social misfits in a seedy California setting are far from unique in vampire fiction, but it’s in the detail that Stainless shines.”

Like many writers and other artists, Grimson made money in a lot of ways, including working in the surgical intensive care unit at the V.A. hospital and working night shifts in the emergency room at Emanuel Hospital. As Redden wrote, he also typed the first manuscript of his neighbor Katherine Dunn’s breakout novel Geek Love. “Todd really is a lot of fun,” Redden quoted Dunn from a 2011 profile of Grimson in The Oregonian. “We met at a party and started talking about a book or something, and we’ve been bickering and arguing ever since. He reads more than anyone I’ve ever known, and he takes it all in.”

Grimson’s writing life was active, sometimes under different names (he was born in Seattle with the name Todd Spillum). “In recent years,” his Amazon Books biography reads, “Grimson has been writing and publishing short fiction online under the nom de plume ‘I. Fontana,’ appearing in such literary reviews as BOMB, Bikini Girl, Juked, New Dead Families, Spork, Lamination Colony and Spork, while working on a new novel, sickgirl101, a thriller which delves into the online Alt Sex underworld, exploring and exposing the darker side of contemporary sexuality as perhaps no one else has done before.”

“He was working on a memoir packed with eye-popping stories about being a literary gadabout (he was friends with Paul Bowles and Katherine Dunn, and enemies with more) in the ’70s and ’80s,” his friend Christopher Schelling wrote on Instagram, adding: “Todd was cantankerous and funny, the king of the endless phone call who deserved much wider acclaim and readership. And still does.”