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    Black Static #35 Horror Magazine
    Black Static #35 Horror Magazine
    Black Static #35 Horror Magazine
    Ebook240 pages2 hours

    Black Static #35 Horror Magazine

    By TTA Press

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    About this ebook

    Black Static is essentially a fiction magazine containing short stories in the horror and dark fantasy genres. But it covers other aspects of the genre via reviews of books, movies, DVDs and TV.

    Fiction this issue:
    Isaac's Room by Daniel Mills
    Men Playing Ghosts, Playing God by Steven J. Dines
    The Monster Makers by Steve Rasnic Tem
    Arches and Pillars by Michael Griffin
    Summer Girls by Caspian Gray
    What Would You Say If I Asked You To Love Me? by Jason Gould
    If You Can Read This, You're Too Close by Carole Johnstone

    The issue's artists are Richard Wagner (cover & interior), Richard Sampson,
    Vincent Sammy, Dave Senecal & Geoffrey Grisso

    Peter Tennant's Case Notes reviews include
    The 13 Ghosts of Christmas editor Simon Marshall-Jones
    Dark World: Ghost Stories editor Timothy Parker Russell
    Hauntings editor Ellen Datlow
    This House is Haunted John Boyne
    The White Devil Justin Evans
    A Haunting of Ghosts Maynard Sims
    In a Season of Dead Weather Mark Fuller Dillon
    A Natural History of Ghosts Roger Clarke
    Darker Minds editors Ross Warren and Anthony Watson
    Shadows Edge editor Simon Strantzas
    Roadkill Joseph D’Lacey
    Touch Me With Your Cold, Hard Fingers Elizabeth Stott
    The Jungle Conrad Williams
    An Antique Land John Shire
    Everything is Always Wrong Graham Tugwell
    Little Red Transistor Radio From Trieste Dragan Todorovic
    Girls & Monsters Anne Michaud
    Soul Screams Sara Jayne Townsend
    Busy Blood Stuart Hughes & D.F. Lewis’
    Danse Macabre editor Nancy Kilpatrick
    Vampyric Variations editor Nancy Kilpatrick
    The Texas Chain Saw Massacre James Rose
    The Descent James Marriott
    The Shadow Out Of Time H.P. Lovecraft, Graphic adaptor N.J. Culbard
    The Castle Franz Kafka, Graphic adaptors David Zane Mairowitz & Jaromir 99

    Tony Lee's DVD reviews this issue:
    Curandero: Dawn of the Demon, In their Skin, Texas Chainsaw, Apartment 1303, Beautiful Creatures, Mama, Warm Bodies, Maniac, Stoker
    Black Sabbath, The Brood, Kuroneko, The Legend of Hell House, The Man who Haunted Himself, Motel Hell, Spider Baby
    The Incident, Kill for Me, Death Game, Static

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTTA Press
    Release dateAug 6, 2013
    ISBN9781301031788
    Black Static #35 Horror Magazine
    Author

    TTA Press

    TTA Press is the publisher of the magazines Interzone (science fiction/fantasy) and Black Static (horror/dark fantasy), the Crimewave anthology series, TTA Novellas, plus the occasional story collection and novel.

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      Book preview

      Black Static #35 Horror Magazine - TTA Press

      BLACK STATIC

      #35

      A magazine of horror and dark fantasy.

      Cover:

      by Richard Wagner

      * * * * *

      Black Static

      Issue 35 (JULY - AUG 2013)

      Print edition ISSN 1753-0709 © 2013 Black Static and its contributors

      Published bimonthly by TTA Press

      TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, United Kingdom

      * * * * *

      Website: ttapress.com

      Email: [email protected]

      * * * * *

      TTA Press on Smashwords ISBN: 9781301031788

      First draft v2 RG

      * * * * *

      Editor: Andy Cox

      Contributing Editors: Peter Tennant, Tony Lee, Christopher Fowler, Stephen Volk, Mike O’Driscoll

      Podcast: Pete Bullock, transmissionsfrombeyond.com

      Twitter + Facebook: Marc-Anthony Taylor, facebook.com/TTAPress

      Events/Publicity/E editions: Roy Gray

      * * * * *

      Print issue retail distribution: Pineapple Media, pineapple-media.com; Central Books, centralbooks.com

      * * * * *

      Smashwords Edition License Notes

      This emagazine is licensed for your personal use/enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this magazine with others please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this magazine and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please go to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the contributors and editors

      * * * * *

      To obtain the print edition of Black Static in Europe or North America where your retailer may not stock it please ask them to order it for you, or buy it from one of several online mail order distributors...or, better yet, subscribe direct with us!

      Subscriptions: Print edition subscriptions available online at ttapress.com/shop

      Note we have some illustrations in this edition and you can also see these at http://ttapress.com/1656/black-static-34/0/5/

      Unsolicited submissions of short stories are always welcome. Please follow the contributors’ guidelines on the website.

      * * * * *

      CRIMEWAVE 12 DUE soon.

      cover art (seen here) by Ben Baldwin

      With new stories from:

      Christopher Priest, Tim Lees, Melanie Tem, Stephen Volk,

      Antony Mann, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Steven J. Dines,

      Ray Cluley, Joel Lane, Danny Rhodes, Janice Law

      Simon Avery, James Cooper,

      Stephen Bacon

      CW 11 still available in print & as e book.

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      EDITORIAL NOTES

      COMMENT/COLUMNS

      COFFINMAKER'S BLUES - by Stephen Volk

      BLOOD PUDDING - by Lynda E. Rucker

      FICTION

      ISAAC'S ROOM by Daniel Mills

      story illustrated by Richard Sampson

      MEN PLAYING GHOSTS, PLAYING GOD by Steven J. Dines

      novelette illustrated by Richard Wagner

      THE MONSTER MAKERS by Steve Rasnic Tem

      story illustrated by Vincent Sammy

      ARCHES AND PILLARS by Michael Griffin

      story illustrated by Dave Senecal

      SUMMER GIRLS by Caspian Gray

      WHAT WOULD YOU SAY IF I ASKED YOU TO LOVE ME? by Jason Gould

      IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU'RE TOO CLOSE by Carole Johnstone

      story illustrated by Geoffrey Grisso

      REVIEWS

      CASE NOTES - book reviews by Peter Tennant

      BLOOD SPECTRUM - DVD/Blu-ray reviews by Tony Lee

      NOTES TO THE READER – links etc.

      BACKPAGE

      * * * * *

      EDITORIAL NOTES –

      The following Black Static people are amongst those shortlisted for British Fantasy Awards.

      Best Short Story: Shark! Shark! by Ray Cluley, Sunshine by Nina Allan (both issue 29, still available in print and E book)

      Best Non-Fiction: Coffinmakers Blues by Stephen Volk

      Best Novella: Eyepennies by Mike O’Driscoll

      (Copies are still available! Subscribe for just 25 pounds and receive Nina Allans Spin as well, plus the next three novellas by Carole Johnstone, Simon Avery and James Cooper)

      Best Artist: Ben Baldwin

      Best Magazine: Black Static, Interzone

      Best Small Press: TTA Press

      Congratulations and good luck to you, and all the other good people on the shortlists.

      * *

      TTA NOVELLAS

      Don’t forget that you can buy SPIN (and Eyepennies) for just £6 in the UK (£7 Europe, £8 RoW) or as part of a much cheaper subscription (just £25 for five, free postage worldwide), which, relatively speaking, is a bargain for such high quality, good looking, limited editions.

      Both Eyepennies and SPIN are out now as E books with links in the endnotes.

      Hopefully readers will be pleased to hear that we added Novella #6 to the list, a new Quay-Endula story from Paul Meloy called Reclamation Yard.

      * *

      The print magazine often starts a story with a double page spread incorporating the illustration, titles and the first paragraph of the story text. So once again, to give a flavour of the print edition, we are including some of these in this E book. As much of that 'incorporated text' will be unreadable on some devices we will repeat it 'outwith' the spread. So if you read this issue on a large screen don't be surprised if we seem to repeat a story's first paragraphs. If you notice this please let me know your views.

      * *

      Internal hyperlinks I've continued to experiment. Again please let me know your views.

      * *

      E-Edition (An Apology): This E edition of Black Static 35 has been uploaded later than I hoped but at least, Black Static 36 (printed.) will not be published when this is uploaded. Please accept our apologies for delays. Keep checking Smashwords or Amazon for new issues. Thanks for your patience! This issue, #35, has been out in print since July 18.

      * *

      Our podcast site Transmissions from Beyond may close soon so why not listen to a few stories while you can. TFB has stories from Black Static, Interzone and Crimewave and they are all free to download.

      * *

      This issue's cover and back page form connected images, both by Richard Wagner.

      * *

      The next print issue, Black Static 36, with a Vincent Sammy cover, dated Sept/Oct 2013, will be on our table at World Fantasy Con in Brighton from 30th October, as will many other issues & TTA Press publications.

      * *

      Submissions of short stories are always welcome, but please follow the website's guidelines.

      COFFINMAKER'S BLUES

      by Stephen Volk

      WRONG IS GOOD

      Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, says American cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz. I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science…but an interpretive one in search of meaning. But interpretation is, by definition, subjective, right? Take Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle, banned by the BBC in 1976 for being nauseating, according to then-Director of Programmes Alasdair Milne, who pulled it ignominiously before its scheduled transmission. I (equally subjectively) consider it the acclaimed TV writer’s masterwork. What’s more, having watched the movie version again recently, I think it has a few things to teach us about horror.

      The TV play, stage play and film all feature the central dynamic of middle-class, middle-aged Tom (Denholm Elliott) and Amy (or Norma Bates in the movie: an obvious in-joke) struggling to make sense of their shattered lives after a hit-and-run has rendered their daughter Pattie little more than a vegetable. Amy/Norma copes by turning to God, uttering fripperies about her belief in miracles. Tom, by contrast, has given up all hope of Pattie’s recovery and buries his sexually-motivated guilt in a hatred of that same God, continuing to compose crassly sentimental homilies for greeting cards while sinking ever deeper into self-loathing and misanthropic bitterness. (So far, so Joe Egg.)

      Crucially, into this world steps Martin, a mysterious stranger who might be an escaped lunatic, might be an angel, or might be The Actual Devil. First seen in the movie exiting a church and munching a rancid apple, he gets to work on the household he’s lied his way into, and becomes emblematic of the needs of each of them. (So far, so Pasolini’s Theorem.)

      What undoubtedly made it unacceptable to some wasn’t Tom’s virulent antitheism – though that is still hard-hitting, even now – but the climax in which, having won over Mum by unctuous flattery and Dad by cooking a good boeuf bourguignon, Martin proceeds to rape Pattie, causing her return to full consciousness, a mixed blessing as her immediate reaction is to accuse her father of screwing somebody other than his wife: the very act that precipitated her accident.

      Vile, yes. Shocking, yes. But more than anything – morally ambiguous. Made mere months before Star Wars was to hit our screens, the original production of Brimstone refused to give clear black hats or white hats to the forces of good and evil.

      Five years before the banned TV play was eventually transmitted by the BBC in 1987, starring a trendy, mop-top Michael Kitchen as Martin and using ‘That Old Black Magic’ with Kubrickian irony, a feature film version had been released, directed by Richard Loncraine, contemporary of Ridley Scott and Alan Parker and lover of the gothic who made not only Potter’s Blade on the Feather but also Full Circle, based on Peter Straub’s novel Julia. This I know because in 1982 I was working with Loncraine on my script Gothic, which he was going to direct. In fact, after one of our sessions I was invited to an early screening of Brimstone and Treacle after which I had the pleasure of shaking Dennis Potter by his arthritically-clawed hands. Both men asked me whether Sting was good. I said I thought he was fine – though it’s intriguing to imagine the actor Loncraine wanted to play the part, someone he’d directed in The Missionary: Michael Palin.

      Of course, Old Nick makes his appearance in films fairly regularly, whether as Burgess Meredith, Robert De Niro or Peter Cook. But the realism demanded of the camera can add a new dimension to a subject formerly consigned to medieval manuscripts (Sacred Songs and Solos, as Potter might say). Jean-Luc Godard said that there is the theatre and there is documentary realism, but that at its highest level both are the same. And so it is with Brimstone: a Mystery Play produced like a social realist drama, creating a delicious example of what painter Graham Sutherland called the precarious tension of opposites.

      It also struck me that the movie version emphasises many of the hallmarks of a fairy tale. The cottage hemmed in by an overgrown garden. The childless couple, one of whom at least makes a wish – except it isn’t Tom Thumb who arrives on their doorstep. Even Martin’s second name – Taylor – also evokes ‘The Valiant Little Tailor’ of the Grimms. But has he come to tailor them a new life, or is it a stitch-up?

      Fairy tales are always moral instruction enmeshed with rules of survival, physical and psychological. Don’t go into the woods. Don’t kiss the wrong person. But Potter doesn’t give you easy options. While you loathe Martin, you chuckle at his antics too. And part of you thinks the self-absorbed Tom and his God-bothering wife deserve all they get. Way to go, Satan.

      The most delicious irony is that Martin may not be The Devil at all. He might just be a random opportunist. We never really know who he is, beyond the fact this story seems only one in his endless journey of people he transforms, or cadges off.

      But surely salvation and revelation can only happen in the presence of God, not The Devil? And here Potter’s perverse ambiguity soars. What if you pray to God and The Devil hears? Then, what if The Devil does his worst, and a miracle happens? And what if the miracle destroys the family it was meant to restore to life? Such reversals, because they confuse our ideas of right and wrong, are the lifeblood of effective horror. Deep horror. The horror of a bedridden, peeling, woman-hating Michael Gambon imagining himself as the most romantic, action-packed of fabrications, The Singing Detective. Or, even more of a tragic reversal: Bob Hoskins in Pennies From Heaven, the adulterous seller of cheap, sentimental songs sent to the gallows to the music of Al Bowlly for a crime he didn’t commit.

      Brimstone and Treacle was written at a time when Potter’s anger at life (and wrestling with unresolved, almost unacknowledged spiritual questions) couldn’t have been more bile-ridden. He’d been struggling with acute psoriatic arthropathy for years, which had taken its toll not only on his body but on his view of the world the people in it. He wrote that the only meaningful sacrament left to human beings was to splash vomit on the streets as the final and most eloquent plea to an apparently deaf, dumb and blind God.

      Not surprisingly, under these circumstances, he turned to the wrong to express what he felt. And seeking the wrong is also what we should do in horror. In fact, if we don’t do it, something’s often missing. Wrong is good. Dangerous, tricky, frightening to deal with – but as a horror writer you have to go there, unfalteringly. Otherwise what is the point? The Wrong is where we see the Real in our hearts.

      The scandal of Potter’s future work, Blackeyes, was that it was not only about misogyny but that he made himself complicit by featuring himself as a character. As victimiser, no less. The familiar accusations flew that he was the lipstick-on-nipples sex-obsessed lecher of old. The truth, however, was that Potter himself was a victim of childhood sexual abuse. He wasn’t the predatory men savouring and exploiting Blackeyes. He was Blackeyes herself.

      Brimstone, in whatever incarnation, with its disruptive stranger, with its fairy tale nature, with its allegorical theme, with its vicious moral debate, and its reversals, has what horror should almost always have – shock value – but its genius is that it does what genre does at its best. It takes traditional forms, be it Grimm fairy tale or well-made play, and injects them with a life experience that is new, honest and deeply personal.

      Crime and horror writer Alexandra Sokoloff recently quoted Denise Mina who gave sharp, sage advice to aspiring authors: Write about what makes you angry.

      This is what Dennis Potter did in spades.

      He dared to go with the Wrong – because he had to.

      * * * * *

      Copyright © 2013 Stephen Volk

      * * * * *

      A section from Richard Wagner's illustration for Russ Colson's story The Frog King’s Daughter from Interzone 247.

      BLOOD PUDDING

      by Lynda E. Rucker

      PUTTING AWAY CHILDISH THINGS (PART 1)

      The idea for this issue’s topic (and, as it turns out, next issue’s as well) has been on my mind for some time, since long before I was ever asked to begin writing a regular column for Black Static. And yet I couldn’t puzzle out just how to approach it. The extreme was mean-spirited and polemical; softening my point too much, however, seemed mealy-mouthed and pointless.

      The kernel of the idea that I had was that I wanted to write about the type of genre fiction and film and their audiences that seem to welcome the unchallenging, the wish-fulfillment in science fiction and fantasy, the predictable gorefest or same old supernatural claptrap in horror, in a sort of childishness – the type, in short, that simply refuses to grow up, and why that results in a poorer genre for all of us.

      But while I was still pondering how I might go about this and indeed what it was that I really wanted to say about it, the great stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen died, and I was reminded in several different places online of this quote from Bradbury about the two of them as boyhood friends: We said, ‘We’re going to grow old but never grow up. We’re going to stay 18 years old and we’re going to love dinosaurs forever.’

      Oh boy, did I feel like an asshole after reading that quote. Of course we all ought to grow old without growing up. Of course we ought to love dinosaurs forever. Who among us doesn’t adore that feeling of being transported back to childhood, the much-vaunted sense of wonder? Was this really what I had become, a crabby realist, someone who finds childlike expressions of joy in others unbearable? And had I really been prepared to say such things in public?

      We come to the imaginative genres as children, even those of us who don’t delve specifically into the books marketed as fantasy and horror till the teen years or later, even those who never pick up a genre book at all. We all cut our teeth on fairy tales or ghost stories or their equivalent in urban legends, or even the very stuff of our minds – such rich, fecund places, children’s minds, capable of dreaming up associations almost no adult could fathom beforehand. This is why the question on so many parents’ lips Is it too scary for him/her? is such an unanswerable one – children are scared by everything and nothing: frightened of too-garish face paint at a festival or an elderly relative’s funny breath and not enough by the placid surface of a lake or a busy street. (And right there – without even consciously meaning to – I’ve conjured up the real horrors at the heart of Don’t Look Now and Pet Sematary, respectively.) So our genres – horror, at least, for Black Static readers and extending out to science fiction and fantasy for some of us as well – all these stories that posit the impossible as plausible (or at least what is presently impossible, if any pedants of the science fiction persuasion out there are reading this) are rooted in childhood in some way.

      From a literary standpoint as well, horror’s pedigree is a mixed one: if we see the genre as a broad church (and I do), we can look back to such ancient nightmarish figures as the filicidal Medea as envisioned by Euripides – she murdered her own children as revenge against the husband who left her for another woman – as well as a more recent respectable tradition of horror, ghost, and supernatural stories from nineteenth century writers ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Elizabeth Gaskell (women wrote quite prolifically in the genre then) to such celebrated practitioners of the art as M.R. James (whose

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