“It Only Comes Out at Night” (1976)

This mood piece by Dennis Etchison, who mostly wrote canny little mood pieces in the form of short stories, comes with his typically nice assortment of elements. One of his strong suits is evocative settings. In 1976, perhaps, roadside rest areas had not yet quite won their subsequent quasi-irrational reputation as hunting grounds for serial killers and other miscreants. They were safe places, more or less, part of President Eisenhower’s ambitious interstate freeway system—“see the USA in your Chevrolet” and all that. Here they are made more suggestive of danger, an unpleasantly effective view. Etchison piles on the nighttime scene with insidious strange details, proceeding to unnerve simply by noticing them. Our couple is traveling across the Mojave by night to beat the heat. He drives. She spends most of the story sleeping in the backseat. When he pulls up for a break, he notices all the cars parked at the rest area appear to be empty. His first assumption is the people must by lying down in them sleeping. But he sees no bodies when he surreptitiously examines them more closely, and the cars are covered with thick films of dust and other evidence they have been there for a long time. It makes no sense. Abandoned cars at a rest area would be cleared out long before they got this dusty. And we don’t miss that whatever gets back in their car in the backseat is never definitively identified as his wife. Again and again, the story draws away from telling us anything definitive, all the way to the end. It’s almost too subtle and improbable. The menace is not clear, yet it is palpably felt. It appears to be supernatural, which elevates it above rote serial killer fare. But like the more recent Terrifier movies somehow it might be both serial killer and supernatural. Etchison’s reticence to spell anything out only contributes more to the suffocating unease of the drift of our thoughts. “It” may only come out at night but, while we know the story takes place at night, we never learn at all what “it” is. Perhaps the rest area itself is visible only at night, luring in these unsuspecting travelers. There’s something desperate about them, certainly about our couple, who talk like they are looking for a motel but seem even more intent on moving down the road no matter what. For all the ambiguities of the story Etchison writes with a chiseled precision and the story has a disquieting and almost violent lack of tidy resolution.

Dennis Etchison, Talking in the Dark
The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Read story online.