GOT TO KILL THEM ALL & OTHER STORIES
By Dennis Etchison
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Meet the Author
DENNIS ETCHISON is a three-time winner of both the British Fantasy Award and the World Fantasy Award and served two terms as President of the Horror Writers Association (HWA). Books include the collections The Dark Country, Red Dreams, The Blood Kiss, The Death Artist, Talking in the Dark, Fine Cuts, Got To Kill Them All & Other Stories and It Only Comes Out at Night, the novels Darkside, Shadowman and California Gothic and the anthologies Cutting Edge, Masters of Darkness I-III, MetaHorror, The Museum of Horrors and (with Jack Dann and Ramsey Campbell) Gathering the Bones. He has also written hundreds of scripts for The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas and is currently at work on a volume of new short stories.
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Got To Kill Them All & Other Stories copyright © 2009 by Dennis Etchison. First published by Cemetery Dance Publications (Baltmore), February 2009.
"Foreword" copyright © 2209 by Dennis Etchison.
"Introduction: Disturbing Stories" copyright © 2009 by George Clayton Johnson.
"Sitting in the Corner, Whimpering Quietly" copyright © 1966 by Associated Students, Los Angeles State College, for Statement Magazine. Copyright © 1967 by Dennis Etchison for Nepenthe Magazine. Copyright © 1976 by Stuart David Schiff for Whispers Magazine. This version copyright © 1982 by Dennis Etchison.
"The Walking Man" copyright © 1976 by Looking Glass Publications, Inc. First published in Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine. This version copyright © 1982 by Dennis Etchison.
"The Pitch" copyright © 1978 by Stuart David Schiff. First published in Whispers Magazine. This version copyright © 1982 by Dennis Etchison.
"You Can Go Now" copyright © 1980 by Renown Publications, Inc. First published in Mystery Monthly Magazine. This version copyright © 1982 by Dennis Etchison.
"Today's Special" copyright © 1972 by Dugent Publications Corp. First published in Cavalier Magazine. This version copyright © 1982 by Dennis Etchison.
"Call Home" copyright © 1991 by Dennis Etchison. First published in the anthology Psycho-Paths, edited by Robert Bloch.
"The Machine Demands a Sacrifice" copyright © 1972 by Dugent Publications Corp. First published in Cavalier Magazine. This version copyright © 1982 by Dennis Etchison.
"On the Pike" copyright © 1977 by Dennis Etchison. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
"White Moon Rising" copyright © 1977 by Stuart David Schiff. First published in Whispers Magazine. Copyright © 1984 by Dennis Etchison.
"The Scar" copyright © 1987 by Dennis Etchison. First published in The Horror Show Magazine.
"The Detailer" copyright © 2000 by Dennis Etchison. First published in the collection The Death Artist.
"Home Call" copyright © 1983 by Stuart David Shiff. First published in Whispers Magazine. Copyright © 1987 by Dennis Etchison. This story was conceived in collaboration with CC Palaski.
"Red Dog Down" copyright © 2001 by Dennis Etchison. First published in the collection Talking in the Dark.
"One of Us" copyright © 2001 by Dennis Etchison. First published online in The Spook Magazine and in print in the anthology Keep Out the Night, edited by Stephen Jones.
"In a Silent Way" copyright © 2001 by Dennis Etchison. First published in the anthology J.K. Potter's Embrace the Mutation, edited by William Schafer and Bill Sheehan.
"My Present Wife" copyright © 2000 by Dennis Etchison. First published in the anthology Dark Terrors 5: The Gollancz Book of Horror, edited by Stephen Jones and David Sutton.
"No One You Know" copyright © 1997 by Dennis Etchison. First published in Rage Magazine.
"Got To Kill Them All" copyright © 2001 by Dennis Etchison. First published in Cemetery Dance Magazine.
GOT TO KILL THEM ALL & OTHER STORIES
CONTENTS
Foreword by Dennis Etchison
Introduction: Disturbing Stories by George Clayton Johnson
Sitting in the Corner, Whimpering Quietly
The Walking Man
The Pitch
You Can Go Now
Today's Special
Call Home
The Machine Demands a Sacrifice
On the Pike
White Moon Rising
The Scar
The Detailer
Home Call
Red Dog Down
One of Us
In a Silent Way
My Present Wife
No One You Know
Got to Kill Them All
Foreword
This volume collects short stories that might be called ruthless, cold or even cruel. Yet I do not believe they are heartless. I prefer the word "unflinching." While varying considerably in style and subject matter, each leads to an extreme nexus of personal revelation — what William Burroughs called, in Naked Lunch, the moment when everybody sees what is at the end of every fork. I admit that extremes appeal to me as a writer; they are the Source of the Nile, so to speak, the most obvious material for drama — and melodrama. But I hope these tales express something more than sensationalism. As far as I am concerned they are about a white-knuckled determination to see the end of the night, to make it all the way through to the other side, no matter how shattering the experience may be. There is a curiously life-affirming high that comes from knowing one is alive in the midst of absolute darkness. Or, as Burroughs put it: "If you're still there after the fear then you got the courage, baby, that's all. If you're not, then you're dead."
— Dennis Etchison
Introduction: Disturbing Stories
by George Clayton Johnson
I want to talk to those reviewers among you about Dennis Etchison. I think his stories merit showcase attention from the mainstream. He is a literary treasure, as these stories of his demonstrate.
Consider "Sitting in the Corner, Whimpering Quietly." I first read it in a "little" magazine of
limited circulation called Nepenthe, published at USC, where I discovered it alongside my own story "A Note From Underground." Etchison's name instantly went on my list of writers to learn from.
You see, I love the short story as an artform. Whether it be the result of an effortless afternoon's work or the labor of a lifetime of writing and rewriting to make it appear effortless, little stories like O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi" or Jacob's "The Monkey's Paw" can hold sway over the human mind with all the concentrated power of a novel, gathered into the space of a few brief pages.
Many writers are world-famous chiefly for short stories — O. Henry has been called the American de Maupassant — and I must confess, if asked, that my greatest ambition is to produce a book of short stories as powerful and elegant as Ray Bradbury's The Golden Apples of the Sun, Matheson's Born of Man and Woman, Beaumont's The Hunger and Other Stories or Van Vogt's Destination Universe.
Etchison demonstrates how to take what might have been a sprawling tale if told in regular time sequence and compress it into one time and one place and one action. It is textbook stuff if you want to instruct a fledgling writer in the niceties of dramatic construction. It also demonstrates that if you can find the proper beginning of your story and the right tone of voice to tell it in, the rest unreels itself easily enough. Finding that place of beginning is a great part of the art of storytelling.
His structure is easily understood.
ACT 1: A man wants to be left alone. He goes to a quiet late-night laundromat merely to wash his clothes.
ACT 2: He unexpectedly meets a woman who tells him some very disturbing information (tests and obstacles).
ACT 3: He learns to his dismay that the world won't leave him alone and he must accept this fact.
Or, in a more stripped-down form:
Get your hero up a tree.
Throw rocks at him.
Get him down again.
Remembering with Ray Bradbury, "The plot is merely the footsteps of the protagonist left in the snow as he goes by in pursuit of his goal," you will see that Etchison's story, amazing in its brevity, is a clear demonstration that less is more.
In its first paragraph he puts you right there inside a late-night laundromat so substantial and solid that you could cut it into pieces and haul it away in a truck, an illusion managed with astonishingly few words. A place of porcelain and neon lighting and whitewashed walls…the hot, stifling, humid dryer air…corner detergent dispenser…machine at the far end of the room…leaned my hands against the washer…cold, cracked cement floor. That and an occasional significant word like "water" or "white light" or "steam" and you are in that laundromat. It stands vividly before your mind's eye as you experience the torment of the people trapped there with you, seeing everything with microscopic clarity and a growing sense of dread.
Dennis Etchison has been carving out such glittering gems of literary invention for over forty years and is still as good as he ever was. I find it interesting that he started out at the top of his game, which is a very tasteful, literate mixture of terror and pity, told with artful precision and attention to revealing detail, as this story will testify.
As you can see, "Sitting in the Corner, Whimpering Quietly" is not even a borderline fantasy. It could be happening right now.
Right here.
It's pure mainstream fiction, as are many of Etchison's most disturbing stories.
I think that after you finish "On the Pike," "No One You Know" and "Call Home," you will agree with me that Etchison deserves a shot at the big audience.
Etchison's writings have prompted many big-name writers to praise him fulsomely.
Stephen King antes up with, "One hell of a fiction writer."
Peter Straub calls that with "Absolutely one of horror's most exciting, most radical and most innovative talents."
C.L. Grant raises with, "The best short story writer in the field today."
But Karl Edward Wagner shoots the moon, saying, "The finest writer of psychological horror this genre has seen."
The late Karl Edward Wagner is more precise than the others, and perhaps more aware of what constitutes Dennis Etchison's greatest power.
Etchison is adept at psychological thinking.
Let us examine Karl Edward's term "psychological horror."
What can he mean?
Logical thinking compares two things and chooses between them, true or false, right or wrong, neither or both.
Psychological thinking (what Van Vogt might call "null-A") compares and chooses between many things. It assumes that no single "self" contains the truth — that it takes many selves (i.e., truths) in dialectical encounter with each other to reveal this fact, by demonstrating that each of the parties involved sees the truth differently and partially and that there are many smaller truths within the greater truth.
Psychological thinking assumes that there is more going on than meets the eye — that things have their inner meaning, and that things somehow are connected and controlled by a hidden hand to whom everything counts. Everything one says or does, everything one does not say or do, everything is counted and put for or against one. It is the nature of things. Things themselves make it so. In psychological thinking everything is mental. No real motive is logical. Reasons seemingly lack reason.
In a story of psychological horror, each of the characters (selves) sees things through a different state of mind. Each person perceives a different truth. The hidden hand is the presence of the author behind the scenes, arranging the events to happen so that the hidden meaning (the ending) will emerge and bring into focus similarities within the dissimilar, and perhaps expose a greater truth that is a composite, the reader's judgment having compared and evaluated the differing points of view in the conflict of the characters.
Like Bradbury, one of his strongest influences, Etchison has developed a recognizable voice and a vivid, literate style that reflects his own outlook on a society he finds threatening, merciless and baffling.
Although he is himself a child of the city and thoroughly educated to it, he remains alienated by what he sees — the fact that society, seemingly with malicious intent, doesn't care if it is irrational and poisoned and doomed to a self-inflicted mortal wounding (see "The Machine Demands A Sacrifice," "The Pitch" or "No One You Know"). Etchison is part philosopher and part moralist driven to throwing up his hands in grief at the hopelessness of it while looking at it with fascination.
Unlike Bradbury, however, Etchison rarely himself the wounded victim voicing his outrage in his fiction (see Bradbury's "The Pedestrian"). Etchison is much too intellectual for that. Although he is in his story, as every author is, these atrocities are just things he has witnessed and is merely trying to call them as he sees them, with compassion and sorrow.
You can assume that one of the reasons Etchison is so knowledgeable about the short story is that he has read an awful lot of them. He is the accomplished editor of several notable horror/terror anthologies, including Cutting Edge, Masters of Darkness I-III and MetaHorror, for which he received a World Fantasy Award to match the one he had captured for "The Dark Country," from his first story collection of the same name — the volume that also contains the story I began by discussing here. More of his own dark fiction has been collected in Red Dreams, The Blood Kiss, Talking In the Dark and Fine Cuts. Other anthologies include The Museum of Horrors, for which he won a third World Fantasy Award, and Gathering the Bones (co-edited with Ramsey Campbell and Jack Dann).
Dennis Etchison also writes very suspenseful novels such as Darkside, Shadowman, California Gothic and Double Edge. These books are pure mainstream California Noir and, surprisingly, are as tightly-written, compressed and visual as his short stories. Someone ought to make movies of them.
While Dennis Etchison is still around and able to profit from public acknowledgement, I feel it is the critic's duty to note his brilliance and to call attention to his miraculous existence, which is what I am doing. If you are one who cares about these matte
rs, join with me in recommending Got To Kill Them All & Other Stories to a wider audience, thereby granting Etchison the encouragement he deserves.
Sitting in the Corner, Whimpering Quietly
It was one of those bright places you never expect to find in the middle of the night, a place of porcelain and neon lighting and whitewashed walls. I walked in with my old army bag stuffed full of a month's dirty clothes and swung it on top of one of the long line of waiting, open washing machines.
A quarter to three in the morning.
And nobody in sight for miles and miles.
I let out a sigh, which not surprisingly turned into a yawn, and felt for the change in my pocket.
I didn't see her at first. That is to say, I knew she was there without turning around. I think it was the cigarette smoke. It cut a sharp edge through the hot, stifling, humid dryer air that hung so thick in the laundromat you felt you could stick out your finger and jab a hole in it.
"Well, he finally got what he wanted."
I moved along the wall to the corner detergent dispenser. It was very late and I couldn't sleep and I had come here to be alone, just to have something to do and to be left alone to do it, and I was in no mood to try my hand at winning friends and influencing people.
I heard water running in the sink next to me.
"That's what he thought, all right." Her voice came very close to me now, going on as if picking up a running conversation we might have been having.
I turned my head just long enough for a quick glance at her.
She was young but not too, twenty-nine going on forty, and pretty, too, but not really very. She had long hair hanging down to the middle of her thin back, with blond streaks bleached in, très chic, you know, and one of her phony eyelashes was coming unglued in the warm, wet air.
"A house in the Valley, two cars—no, three—paid vacation in the Virgin Islands, and a son, yeah, a little Vladimir Junior to carry on his glorious family name. Just like he always wanted. But that was all he wanted—that's the part they never tell you in front."
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