![]() ![]() Indeed, I can even recall precisely the place and time: a stifling summer night in 1983, in a two-room apartment in Lake Worth, Florida, with insects buzzing at the screen and the fan cranked up high. I can still remember, with piercing clarity, my first experience of reading Etchison’s work. While his stories won Etchison a devoted following among horror connoisseurs, it was King’s blockbuster success, and the resultant rise of a horror midlist, that permitted him to expand from being a marginal story writer with a cult audience into a moderately successful author of paperback-original novels. Since the mid-1960s, Etchison had been steadily publishing brilliant short fiction in scattered venues - from genre outlets like Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine to small-press journals such as Stuart David Schiff’s Whispers - meanwhile churning out novelizations of horror films to make ends meet (e.g., The Fog, Halloween II, Halloween III, and Videodrome, the last three as by “Jack Martin”). Undoubtedly the most accomplished of these neglected authors was Dennis Etchison, who died on May 28 at the age of 76. ![]() ![]() ONE SALUTARY EFFECT of the commercial boom in horror fiction precipitated during the 1980s by Stephen King’s best-selling success was the coattail rise to prominence of a number of distinctive talents who had labored in relative obscurity during the preceding decades. ![]()
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