Dennis Etchison, Got to Kill Them All

Got to Kill Them All

Dennis Etchison

These eighteen tales have appeared in other publications, but never together. The entries represent the four decades with the earliest being 1966 ('Sitting in the Corner, Whimpering Quietly') of award winning writer Dennis Etchison. The entries have in common seemingly normal environs that turn suddenly into a personalized frightening encounter for an individual whether the short takes place at a Laundromat, a butcher shop, or a bar. With six tales published in the 1970s; five in the eighties and nineties; and six in the current decade; readers obtain an evolutionary glimpse of an author who in the short format paints a disturbing landscape using one everyday locale in which one event changes the milieu sort of like the recent killings at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs. Not for the cozy crowd, as Dennis Etchison's dark but entertaining world makes the title apropos in which even the innocent aggress that in this superb anthology GOT TO KILL THEM ALL is the norm.

Harriet Klausner