In his early years, Etchison also became an avid wrestling fan. This sense of isolation and need to interact with society would later form the themes to many of his works. Etchison has remarked that he was greatly spoiled during his early years and largely isolated from other children. 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). He was a multi-award winner, having won the British Fantasy Award three times for fiction, and the World Fantasy Award for anthologies he edited.Įtchison was born in Stockton, California.

He was President of the Horror Writers Association from 1992 to 1994. 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. 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 Viking-Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural). Etchison referred to his own work as 'rather dark, depressing, almost pathologically inward fiction about the individual in relation to the world'. The truth, however bleak, was almost comforting.Dennis William Etchison (Ma– May 29, 2019) was an American writer and editor of fantasy and horror fiction. It's as simple, and as enormous, as that. The trick is to see it and not flinch- there's no future in denial. There is more than enough to account for it all without falling back on the unnameable. The undead? What a cheapjack explanation for so much misery. And all this while the billions sweat and grow old like the living dead, their lifeblood sucked dry by the takers of souls who need our labor to feed a hunger for power without end. the footprints of assassins and neo-fascists and government officials with secret closets full of tutus, private armies training in ships named after the wives of oilmen, of drunken presidents in bed with the mob and the cartels that slice up the world and stick FOR SALE signs on the pieces while the real kings of earth lie moldering in their graves, their brains stolen away in the night and their bullet wounds altered to match storybook plots that would be laughed out of any preschool classroom. Only the horror doesn't have anything to do with necrophilia or black masses or crosses hung upside down, or with vampires who can't swim or zombies who work in sugar cane fields and can't stop shambling off cliffs when some guy with a jawbreaker accent says so, No, this is real life. “I'm living in a horror movie, all right.

The dark country dennis etchison