Dennis Etchison

Dennis William Etchison (March 30, 1943 – May 29, 2019) was an American writer and editor of fantasy and horror fiction. Etchison referred to his own work as "rather dark, depressing, almost pathologically inward fiction about the individual in relation to the world". Stephen King has called Dennis Etchison "one hell of a fiction writer" and he has been called "the most original living horror writer in America" (The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural).

While he has achieved some acclaim as a novelist, it is Etchison's work in the short story format that is especially well-regarded by critics and genre fans, as with his debut collection The Dark Country (1982), selected as one of the 100 best horror books. He was President of the Horror Writers Association from 1992 to 1994. He was a multi-award winner, having won the British Fantasy Award three times for fiction, and the World Fantasy Award, once for short fiction and twice for anthologies he edited.

Early life Etchison was born in Stockton, California. An only child, the earliest years of his life were spent growing up in a household devoid of men (World War II was still raging across the globe). Etchison has remarked that he was greatly spoiled during his early years and largely isolated from other children. This sense of isolation and need to interact with society would later form the themes to many of his works.

In 1984, ZBS Media produced a 90-minute radio version of Stephen King's The Mist, based on Etchison's script. A film, "Killing Time", was made by Patrick Aumont and Damian Harris (Graymatter Productions) from Etchison's story "The Late Shift". The script would have primarily focused on Tommy and Lindsey (the kids from the first Halloween movie) who were teenagers. Halloween is banned in Haddonfield. Dr. Loomis and Michael Myers both died in the explosion, but Michael returned as a spirit and he grew 12 feet tall at the climax in the Lost River Drive in theater. Dennis wanted a poster of Halloween 4 depicting Michael Myers bursting from a patch of pumpkins which match the scene where Michael killed D'Arcy at a pumpkin patch.

"Halloween was banned in Haddonfield and I think that the basic idea was that if you tried to suppress something, it would only rear its head more strongly. By the very [attempt] of trying to erase the memory of Michael Myers, [the teenagers] were going to ironically bring him back into existence." — Dennis Etchison on his idea for Halloween 4.

However, franchise producer Moustapha Akkad rejected the Etchison script, calling it "too cerebral" and insisting that any new Halloween sequel must feature Myers as a flesh and blood killer. Etchison said, "I received a call from Debra Hill and she said, 'Dennis, I just wanted you to know that John and I have sold our interest in the title 'Halloween' and unfortunately, your script was not part of the deal."

Fiction Etchison's fiction has appeared regularly since 1961 in a wide range of publications including Cavalier, The Oneota Review, Rogue, Seventeen, Statement, Fantastic Stories, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Mystery Monthly, Escapade, Adelina, Comet (Germany), Fiction (France), Universe (France), Fantasy Tales, Weirdbook, Whispers, Fantasy Book and in such anthologies as Orbit, New Writings in SF, Rod Serling's Other Worlds, Prize Stories from Seventeen, The Pseudo-People, and The Future is Now. (tied with Stephen King), as well as the British Fantasy Award for Best Collection of that year – the first time one writer received both major awards for a single work.

Etchison nearly had his first short story collection appear eleven years earlier. In 1971 he sold Powell Books, a low-budget Los Angeles based publisher who published Karl Edward Wagner's Darkness Weaves, a collection of his science fiction and fantasy under the title The Night of the Eye. The book went into galley proofs and beyond – Etchison received a cover proof, and was assigned. On the eve of its publication, Powell Publications went bankrupt. Etchison would wait over a decade before his actual first collection The Dark Country would appear, to critical acclaim.

Several more collections have been published since, including a career retrospective, Talking in the Dark (2001), which consists of stories personally selected by the author. He was nominated for the British Fantasy Award for "The Late Shift" (1981), and as well as winning the ward in 1982 for "The Dark Country", has won it since for Best Short Story, for "The Olympic Runner" (1986) and "The Dog Park" (1994). Locus magazine published Etchison's obituary on May 29, 2019. Charles L. Grant called Etchison "the best short story writer in the field today, bar none."

Critical studies of Etchison's work can be found in Darrell Schweitzer's Discovering Modern Horror Fiction, Richard Bleiler's Supernatural Fiction Writers and "Dennis Etchison: Spanning the Genres" in S. T. Joshi's book The Evolution of the Weird Tale (2004), 178–89.