It’s with a heavy heart that we report the passing of writer Dennis Etchison.
A major contributor and editor of horror fiction, Etchison’s work is most known to Halloween fans via his novelizations of several genre films, the first being John Carpenter’s classic The Fog, under the pseudonym “Jack Martin,” with novelizations of both Halloween II and Halloween III to follow (under the same nom de plume).
Born March 30th, 1943 in Stockton, CA, Dennis William Etchison showed an early interest in writing literary fiction. As a teenager his first published story, “Odd Boy Out,” appeared in the gentlemen’s magazine Escapade, and emboldened he continued, attending UCLA film school in the 1960s (where he would later teach classes on creative writing) before becoming a full-time writer in the 1970s.
Etchison’s work went on to include the original novels Darkside (1986), Shadowman (1993), California Gothic (1995) and Double Edge (1996), as well as several well-regarded horror anthologies, including Cutting Edge (1986), a trio of volumes of the Masters of Darkness books, and the award-winning tomes MetaHorror in 1992 and The Museum of Horrors in 2001, among many others. Elected president of the Horror Writer’s Association from 1992-94 and the recipient of the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2017, Etchison was proclaimed by author Stephen King as, “one hell of a fiction writer,” as well as, “the finest writer of psychological horror this genre has ever produced,” by Karl Edward Wagner.
In addition to his considerable talent for literary fiction, Etchison’s elephantine knowledge of film was also brought to light in King’s non-fiction 1981 book on the horror genre Danse Macabre, on which Etchison served as a historian and consultant. Other efforts within television and film included a gig as a staff writer on the HBO series The Hitchhiker (1983-87), as well as having co-written with John Carpenter an unproduced script for Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers in 1986.
Our sincere condolences to his wife Kristina and surviving family.
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Dennis Etchison (May 30th, 1943 – May 28th, 2019)
