"Where to begin when it comes to Dennis Etchison…
"How about this: I owe my writing career to him.
"Here’s how that came about: back in the early ‘80s, when I was living in L.A. as a young (very young!) would-be screenwriter, I dated someone who was close to Ray Bradbury. We got to do a lot of things with Ray, many of which involved hanging around other writers. One of those writers was an interesting, friendly fellow named Dennis Etchison, whose work I was unfamiliar with. I asked my boyfriend about him, and he loaned me a book by Dennis. The book was a collection of short stories called The Dark Country.
"That book changed my life.
"I’d never read anything like it. The stories weren’t just frightening and perfectly crafted, some of them were also set in Los Angeles, but, more importantly, they were set in my Los Angeles. This was the Los Angeles I knew, a place whose sunny reputation hid an underbelly of tension, of dark canyons and all-night convenience stores, of south-of-the-border jaunts gone bad, of greed and class warfare."
To read the entirety of Morton's "A Few Words About Dennis Etchison," click HERE.
If you'd like to read one of Etchison's numerous short stories, check out his 1984 tale "Talking in the Dark," which was reprinted in the July 2014 issue of Nightmare Magazine.
And to learn about the genesis of "Talking in the Dark," you can find Lisa Morton's 2014 interview with Etchison right HERE.
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