12/19/2023 0 Comments Night shift 1982 themeAbducted by the corporation – its name is never revealed – Macklin finds himself in a van full of living corpses. In that film, Romero used zombies mindlessly wandering a shopping mall as stand-ins for the American consumer. Etchison’s story broadens that idea to include the people who sell to those consumers as well.Įtchison’s anti-capitalist message is fully expressed in an extraordinary moment late in the story. In concept, this struck me as a sort of extension of George A. In a true capitalist system, which is interested in utilizing its resources to the max, they might find a way to make money off of you during that time, before your body is planted in the ground.” There is that mysterious period of time, two or three days between the time you died and the time that you’re cremated or buried. “The idea was how the capitalist system can extract its pound of flesh from you in labor even after you died. The basic thrust of the story is that a man named Macklin discovers a clandestine corporation that reanimates corpses during the 48-or-so hours before they are buried and shops them out to gas stations, garages, convenience stores, and the like for cheap nighttime labor – a literal graveyard shift. In an interview, Etchison elaborates: It was later included in Etchison’s 1982 collection The Dark Country. The Viking-Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror & The Supernatural describes him as “the most original living horror writer in America.” He has won the British Fantasy Award three times for his writing and two World Fantasy Awards for his editorial work. “The Late Shift” first appeared in the legendary 1980 anthology Dark Forces, edited by Kirby McCauley (the same collection that gave us Stephen King’s “The Mist”). Like zombies, almost…ĭennis Etchison was born in Stockton, California in 1943, and has been publishing fiction regularly since 1961. Have you ever found yourself in, say, a gas station, or one of those 24-hour diners? The employees behind the counter don’t really seem all there, do they? Sure, they’ll ring up your order and give you change, but they seem to look right through you. Have you ever been out really late at night? I mean late, like two in the morning, when almost nothing is open and nobody is out. The blog will resume its standard format in November. This is the second entry in a month-long series focusing on a horror anthology edited by Patton Oswalt called The Ghost Box (buy it here).
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