The Mammoth Book of Terror by Stephen Jones Page A

“the
finest writer of psychological horror this genre has produced”.
    Etchison’s stories have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies since 1961, and some of his best work has been collected in The Dark Country, Red Dreams, The Blood Kiss and The Death Artist. Talking in the Dark is a massive retrospective volume from Stealth Press marking the fortieth anniversary of his first professional sale, and Fine Cuts is a volume
of stories about the dark side of Hollywood, from PS Publishing.
    Etchison is also well known as a novelist ( TheFog, Darkside, Shadowman, California Gothic and Double Edge ) and has published the movie novelizations Halloween II, Halloween
III and Videodrome under the pseudonym “Jack Martin”.
    As an acclaimed anthologist, he has edited Cutting Edge, Masters of Darkness I-III, MetaHorror, The Museum of Horrors and Gathering the Bones (with Jack Dann and Ramsey
Campbell).
    More recently, Etchison has written thousands of script pages for The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas , broadcast world-wide and available on audiocassette and CD. He also reads his stories
“The Dog Park” and “Inside the Cackle Factory” on Don’t Turn on the Lights! The Audio Library of Modern Horror, Vol. 1.
    “In 2000 I was asked to assemble a retrospective collection of my stories,” remembers the author, “to be entitled A Long Time Till Morning. This required me to re-read
forty years’ worth of short stories, and the experience was a shock to the system. They were not at all as I remembered them. Those I had believed were the best now seemed tedious and
embarrassingly overwrought, and some of the minor pieces, while not very good stories, contained quirky, idiosyncratic material that surprised and fascinated in ways I could not have anticipated.
All of which suggests that we are not reliable, objective judges of even the most important events in our lives at the time we live through them.
    “I lived through a lot, some of it not very pleasant, while this story was written at the beginning of the 1980s. But that could be said about any period of my life after the age of five
or six, and I suspect the same applies to everyone. My stories usually reflect personal events and obsessions, either directly or metaphorically. I won’t bore you with autobiographical
details, except to say that I felt very alone for several years and began to wonder when if ever my real life, the one I had always looked forward to, would begin. Poor me. But the feeling was very
real.
    “It was difficult to talk about this in a way that might be entertaining or interesting to other people, who surely had problems of their own. Then one day, as is often the case, several
unrelated entries from my notebooks suddenly came together, and I began to see a story that might convey some of what I had held inside for so long, in the manner of a song that serves as a vehicle
for a singer’s deepest emotions. The working title was ‘The Sources of the Nile’, and it began with my recollections of a well-known (and benign) editor and personality in the
science fiction field who once took a car trip across America for the sole purpose of meeting fans with whom he had corresponded over the years.
    “Victor Ripon’s name derives from two waterfalls located on the River Nile, and Gezira, the fictional town in which he resides, refers to a point where the two Niles, the blue and
the white, come together, as well as to the school colours in my hometown, where my uncle Harold owned an ice cream parlour called ‘The Blue and White’ across the street from Stockton
High. The naive, painfully heartfelt words Victor writes to his favourite author, the imaginary Rex Christian, were inspired by actual letters sent to a very real horror writer, containing his
readers’ comments about a non-fiction book he had published, after he asked me to read and evaluate them in case there were any factual errors that needed to be corrected for the