“We Have All Been Here Before” (1979)

Reading stories by the wonderfully unclassifiable Dennis Etchison can stand up to the age-old experience of eating potato chips. It’s hard to consume just one at a time, and all that. But surely these stories have more nutritional value. They can tend to run into one another, with their deliberate Los Angeles settings and often fuzzy high-blown titles: “It Will Be Here Soon,” “The Machine Demands a Sacrifice,” “We Have All Been Here Before.” This one’s a bit of a head-scratcher bound to leave you partly mystified, as Etchison stories often do. It bears a lot of the beats of a mystery story, though ultimately insisting on its place as horror. The scene is a police station and the action is a psychic for hire, doing her thing and upchucking information based on visions. Specifically, a cold-case murder has come to life when a hillside mudslide near a cemetery disinterred dozens of corpses. One of them did not belong and had a bullet in its head—investigation on! The first thing that’s weird about the psychic is she refuses to take money. She appears to be a professional, flying around the country to consult on cases. It’s a full-time occupation but she won’t accept money and doesn’t exactly seem to be independently wealthy either. Then, in the story’s designated primary twist, it turns out that she has her own reasons for helping on these cases. I thought Etchison’s usual genius for settings failed him a little here. Police stations are good for police procedurals, of course—and maybe for formal variety in an Etchison collection—but they’re tired everywhere else. The psychic is intriguing and promising but not enough is done with her and ultimately it all feels a little off. The secret twist about her is not that believable, not that hard to see coming, not that original. I’m also not sure the spectacularly grotesque mudslide works so well. These things happen, and indeed I suspect the genesis of the story could well be some news story about one such—mudslides being a regular point of Los Angeles life, at which Etchison tends to be exceedingly good. Find this one a little shruggable? Next!

Dennis Etchison, Talking in the Dark
Story not available online.