"Got to Kill Them All" (2001)

I was impressed with this Dennis Etchison story, which I found on the Trigger Warning website. It might be my favorite by Etchison yet, though he remains something of a puzzle for me. So far, I only know Dark Country by him, a collection of stories from the '70s and early '80s, which is where we're generally told to start. His stuff is cryptic and yet evocatively over-the-top, elusive but packing a punch. Literal monsters stalk Los Angeles, killer robots, strange beasts. They show up in places like freeway rest stops and 24-hour laundromats. This much later story has a lot of his usual stuff—the closely observed worlds of Los Angeles, notably after hours—but somehow revs up an extra notch. He is always playing with fractured perception, but here it feels more psychotic and scarier than usual. The disassociations are visceral. Reality phase-shifts on us. This is also typical of Etchison, who generally manages to hang on to a narrative arc. Our first-person narrator here is a game-show host. The themes of the show rattle in his head, multiple-choice questions in which contestants must pick the wrong answer. His punctuation and syntax slip and become sloppy, a sign of his internal stress. He is mad at his wife and has thoughts of killing her—more than thoughts. He has bought the materials to knock her out, tie her up, and burn the house down. That's the plan. This comes to us in pieces as he picks up a guy wandering the streets who recognizes him. It's a random Los Angeles street encounter but he lets the guy in his car. The guy has been having his own fights with his girlfriend. "They're all the same," our narrator says. "Think about it." They both have bad attitudes, and encourage each other, but the new guy seems to be thinking of how he can make amends. They stop at a quicky mart and he buys cleaning products. He's going to clean as a peace offering when he gets home, hoping she will take him back. But the narrator still has poisonous thoughts. What's only clear about him is that he's not thinking clearly, and this passenger becomes a wild-card element in the seesawing misogyny and noirish Los Angeles tension. Etchison keeps us at a distance but drawn continually back into it too, fighting to close these gaps of reality and hallucination, delivered in cool evocative banalities. In this one everything explodes at the end. Spoiler alert.

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