Dennis Etchison passed away yesterday, May 28, in his sleep. He had been battling cancer.
Etchison was a giant in the field of horror. He wrote screenplays, novels, and edited anthologies. But his major contribution was as a writer of short fiction. Some of his collections include The Dark Country, The Death Artist, and Got to Kill Them All.
I’ll honor his memory later this evening by reading some of his fiction.
This came across my Twitter feed earlier today, and it was too good not to pass along. David Eyck at pulprev.com is launching the Pulp Classics Reading Club. It’s free, and each Friday you’ll get a pulp story in your inbox. You can read the details and sign up here.
It’s been a while since I posted anything, and so I was going to do an update. The I realized it was Manly Wade Wellman’s birthday (b. May 21, 1903) and instead could write about something that would be of interest to people.
“The Finger of Halugra” is vintage Wellman, but it may not be familiar to many of you. It was originally written in the early 70s for a small press publication that folded before the story could see print. The story languished in Wellman’s files and wasn’t rediscovered until some years after the author’s death, when Karl Edward Wagner came across it. The story first saw print in another small press publication, Deathrealm, in the spring 1995 issue. It was reprinted in The Best New Horror Volume 7 (AKA The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume 7). Sin’s Doorway is the only collection of Wellman’s in which “The Finger of Halugra” has appeared. And that collection is out of print and never had an electronic edition, although copies can be had on the secondary market. Continue reading
We lost Gene Wolfe recently. Today would have been his 88th birthday. I’ve got jury duty and lab grades due, but if I can squeeze in a few minutes, I’m going to read one of his short stories.
I was going to post about E. E. “Doc” Smith today, but I was just scolded by a shrew about something on the bulletin board outside my office. So instead I’m going to vent. Continue reading