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    Black Static #49 (Nov-Dec 2015)
    Black Static #49 (Nov-Dec 2015)
    Black Static #49 (Nov-Dec 2015)
    Ebook222 pages2 hours

    Black Static #49 (Nov-Dec 2015)

    By TTA Press

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    About this ebook

    The November-December issue contains new novelettes and short stories by Ralph Robert Moore, Thana Niveau, Simon Bestwick, Stephen Hargadon, Erinn L. Kemper, and Tim Lees. The cover art is by Martin Hanford, and interior illustrations are by Ben Baldwin, Martin Hanford, and Vincent Sammy. Features: Coffinmaker's Blues by Stephen Volk (comment); Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker (comment); Case Notes by Peter Tennant (book reviews and an interview with Nicole Cushing); Blood Spectrum by Tony Lee (DVD/Blu-ray reviews).

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTTA Press
    Release dateNov 19, 2015
    ISBN9781311348302
    Black Static #49 (Nov-Dec 2015)
    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 #49 (Nov-Dec 2015) - TTA Press

      BLACK STATIC

      ISSUE 49

      NOV–DEC 2015

      © 2015 Black Static and its contributors

      Publisher

      TTA Press

      5 Martins Lane

      Witcham

      Ely

      Cambs CB6 2LB

      UK

      w: ttapress.com

      Editor

      Andy Cox

      andy@ttapress.com

      Books

      Peter Tennant

      whitenoise@ttapress.com

      Films

      Tony Lee

      tony@ttapress.com

      Submissions

      Unsolicited submissions of short stories are always very welcome, but please follow the guidelines: tta.submittable.com/submit

      SMASHWORDS REQUESTS THAT WE ADD THE FOLLOWING:

      LICENSE NOTE: 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 POSSESS THIS MAGAZINE AND DID NOT PURCHASE IT, OR IT WAS NOT PURCHASED FOR YOUR USE ONLY, THEN PLEASE GO TO SMASHWORDS.COM AND OBTAIN YOUR OWN COPY. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE HARD WORK OF THE CONTRIBUTORS AND EDITORS.

      BLACK STATIC 49 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2015

      TTA PRESS

      COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2015

      PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS. ISBN: 9781311348302

      CONTENTS

      Do Not Feed The Animal-bw.tif

      COVER ART

      DO NOT FEED THE ANIMAL

      MARTIN HANFORD

      stephen-volk.tif

      COMMENT

      COFFINMAKER’S BLUES

      STEPHEN VOLK

      lyndarucker3supercropped.tif

      COMMENT

      NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

      LYNDA E. RUCKER

      Dirt Land.tif

      NOVELETTE ILLUSTRATED BY BEN BALDWIN

      DIRT LAND

      RALPH ROBERT MOORE

      GOING TO THE SUN MOUNTAIN.tif

      STORY ILLUSTRATED BY VINCENT SAMMY

      GOING TO THE SUN MOUNTAIN

      THANA NIVEAU

      STORY

      THE TOILET

      STEPHEN HARGADON

      gtastory.tif

      STORY ILLUSTRATED BY MARTIN HANFORD

      GRAMMA TELLS A STORY

      ERINN L. KEMPER

      STORY

      THE ICE PLAGUE

      TIM LEES

      STORY

      THE CLIMB

      SIMON BESTWICK

      we_are_still_here-contents.tif

      DVD/BLU-RAY REVIEWS

      BLOOD SPECTRUM

      TONY LEE

      N Cushing -contents.tif

      BOOK REVIEWS + NICOLE CUSHING INTERVIEW

      CASE NOTES

      PETER TENNANT

      COFFINMAKER’S BLUES

      STEPHEN VOLK

      stephen-volk.tif

      MIRRORS FOR EYES (PART 2/2)

      Thinking about Humans and the dead unfathomability of the robot gaze (which I explored last issue) makes me consider another hit series which has not just pushed but torn to shreds the envelope for television horror – and that is Hannibal.

      Like everyone, I was highly sceptical that an NBC police procedural could match the scene-munching joy that was Anthony Hopkins’ big-screen serial killer, let alone the sublimely creepy (and perhaps definitive) performance of Brian Cox in Manhunter. I was wrong. Not only does Bryan Fuller’s baroque re-imagining in terms of an exquisite aesthetic experience fulfil and expand on our ghoulish expectations, the entire world he creates seems to reflect Hannibal’s ludicrously elaborate dishes – the disgustingly elaborate murder scenes seeming merely, almost casually, a further outlet for the serial killer’s creativity, as cool as his dapper suits, while the imagery of such tableaux (reminiscent of the art photographs of Joel-Peter Witkin) buries itself in the guts of our revulsion in a way that is, as Eric Thurn says, hard to scrub from your unconscious.

      From the get-go Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) is dancing on the edge of madness, his only hope a shrink even more insane than he is. Stuck in the psychotherapeutic swamp of patient and doctor, we find no delineation between dream and reality, objectivity and subjectivity. We are fully immersed, courtesy partly of an astonishing soundscape by Brian Reitzell, in a Jungian jungle of violent fantasies (Peter, is your social worker inside that horse?) and slick horned beasts, a mind trap that imprisons not only Will, but us, even as it seduces us. And who better to do that than the ludicrously cool Mads Mikkelsen, the only man who could be a heartthrob whilst holding a throbbing heart? But it is his performance that makes Hannibal truly remarkable, beyond the surrealistic pyrotechnics and Fuller’s avowed pretentious art film ethic – because, knowing that the films and novels (and Hopkins) have told us everything about the character, Mikkelsen does precisely nothing. No nods, no winks. No flickers of emotion, or evil intent. And that is a decision of absolute genius. He is cultured, intellectual and precise while the cops are inept, plodding and dull. Yet we can see nothing behind his eyes. Nothing.

      This almost-absence reminds me of the Sebastian character in Joseph Mankiewicz’s Suddenly Last Summer (1959), the startling horror film of gothic abandon and psychosexual angst, based on the play by Tennessee Williams and co-scripted by Gore Vidal. As film critic Hannah McGill describes it: Sebastian observes black birds devouring newly hatched sea turtles, turning them over, as Violet (Elizabeth Taylor) relates ‘to expose their soft undersides, tearing the undersides open and rending and eating the flesh.’ The spectacle of turtle mothers abandoning their offspring to near certain death is an epiphany for Sebastian: it convinces him that God’s creation is malign and conventional morality an irrelevance, and so confirms his commitment to a sex life that is not only non-procreative, but predatory and exploitative. One can only imagine the blank-eyed Hannibal to be the perfect therapist for the traumatised and neurotic Liz Taylor of the movie.

      The central, subversive idea behind Hannibal is, of course, murder as a work of art, as the highest act of a civilised man. But there’s a parallel theme, a secondary joke, if you will – and that is the predator as hero. (And not even the brilliant stage play An Audience With Jimmy Savile dared to do that.)

      Hannibal is also, to me – like Westworld – a chilling picture of America. Even though a foreigner (and who in the USA isn’t an immigrant?) Lecter can be read as America itself. Where everything is enmeshed in psychiatry and neurosis. Where you can be anything you want to be – even insane. Listen to Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize speech, which includes a list of world dictatorships for which the United States is directly responsible. He says: You wouldn’t know it. It never happened. The acts (like those of the Chesapeake Ripper) were abominable, secret, unstoppable and serving a monstrous ego. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite criminal manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis. And who uses hypnosis but a psychiatrist? A brilliant, witty, elegantly attired but completely lethal psychiatrist? The very emblem (again like Westworld) of civilisation gone bad. Look in the eyes of the killer responsible for the Charleston church shooting and what do you see looking back? Devilish evil, or an even more disturbing blankness? As one nineteen-year-old said of the perpetrator: You can’t tell by looking at him. Which is to say that psychopaths don’t come with neat little labels or flashing red lights to tell them apart from normal human beings – and neither do robots. Sociopaths and androids are both creatures we are fascinated by in fiction because of the flaws that make them apart. The absence of the very feelings we hold so dear. Or any feelings at all. Which is the most scary thing of all.

      A recent Tumblr post condensed the entire output of Pixar, nailing the reason they succeed so often in melting our hearts with movies driven by laughably obvious subtexts: 1995: What if toys had feelings? 1998: What if bugs had feelings? 2003: What if fish had feelings? But there are other templates equal and you could say opposite in storytelling. And that is: "What if people DON’T have feelings? What then? A monster is an unnatural, dangerous creature says Dr Mathias Clasen, assistant professor of literature and media at Aarhus University, Denmark. [They] play a huge role in our dreamscapes – stories, myths and so on – so that means monsters say something about [our] psychology. I would argue [that] to understand that strange phenomenon we have to look at human evolution and biology. He continues: Humans are paradoxically probably the most successful large animal on the planet. We have colonised all climate zones on the planet but we are also fragile and unspecialised and we are possibly the most fearful organism on the planet. So, given our species’ relative weakness and our relative inability to defend ourselves against predators, for example, what we do to cope is we anticipate, and we imagine danger. That’s one of the things we use our marvellously developed brains for. And we tend to exaggerate and embellish."

      So, in evolutionary terms, our monsters are invented as having attributes and features that tell us what to run way from. But it is easy to recognise a soulless eating machine if it’s shaped like the shark in Jaws, and easy to spot Ridley Scott’s Alien with its intrinsic threat of bodily violation, and even a dream-infiltrating Freddy Krueger with his meatball face and stripy top – but how do you deal with a physical and spiritual danger that looks on the outside just like you? This is surely the greatest fear of all. Often monsters wear skins not their own, pod people, werewolves, Norman Bates, all the better to fool you. And perhaps fool themselves. But lifelike robots and human psychopaths, by their very definition, are undetectable as other – yet psychologically and morally outside the grasp of our understanding. Which makes their aberrant biologies both terrifying and tantalising.

      Just as Yul Brynner’s mirror eyes reflect us back at ourselves, and prevent us seeing his lack of soul, so Mads Mikkelsen’s eyes as Hannibal give us nothing except what we want to see there. Again in his Nobel speech, Harold Pinter said: When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate, but move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror, for it is on the other side of that mirror the truth stares at us.

      www.stephenvolk.net

      NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

      LYNDA E. RUCKER

      lyndarucker3supercropped.tif

      YOU THINK I’M A CLOWN?

      Humour and horror. They go together like – well, like pancakes and syrup or pancakes and prawns, depending on your point of view. It’s a somewhat facile observation that setting up a scare and setting up a joke can be remarkably similar if only because this suggests that both are little more than the rough equivalent of jump scares, with the same mechanism of tension and relief. It’s one way of scaring someone or telling a joke, but it is by no means the only way, and it ignores the rich palette that both humour and fear have to offer. When either goes wrong, though, it can segue into the other: a bad joke can horrify, a scare that falls flat can provoke laughter.

      But where do these two really intersect? Do humour and horror well up from the same dark vein? And what of comedy-horror, or is it horror-comedy?

      Too often, efforts to mix comedy and horror in film result in a movie that feels as though it was made by people who have contempt for the horror part of the equation. Moreover, the humour part of these hybrids often works better than the horror, even in films that feel like good-faith efforts, in part because it’s very difficult to keep the humour from diluting the horror.

      However, I’ve recently seen two films that achieve that balance effectively and epitomise two different approaches that do work.

      Both films are examples of what I privately think of as mumblecore horror, a juxtaposition I thought didn’t exist outside of my own head until I saw it written down somewhere in relation to one of the films, followed by finding out that mumblegore is A Thing. I’m not particularly fond of the first construction and I kind of hate the second, but they do both make the effort to describe the aesthetic terrain somewhere between indie naturalistic filmmaking and horror that these movies inhabit.

      The first film, They Look Like People, is still making the festival rounds, and examines a man’s descent into apparent madness (or is it?). TLLP is not a comedy, but it is an achingly humanistic film, and what humour it has is used in a beautifully effective manner that I wish more horror would adopt: the humour in it arises naturally from the characters, being themselves, being human, doing silly things together as friends do. While I’m no proponent of the they must be likeable/identifiable school of character development, some characters for some types of stories do need to be likeable, and most of the time, characters need to be engaging. Humour is one of the best ways to make characters engaging – and it also encourages us, the audience, to let our guard down. Horror can sometimes suffer from an overseriousness, a relentless po-facedness that actually ends up distancing us and making the viewing or reading of it a safer experience, because the horror is starting from a place that is already so relentlessly bleak that we feel removed from it. That’s not to say I want characters in a Thomas Ligotti story to suddenly start cracking wise or that there are not writers or directors who effectively mine that pitch-black territory. And the humour doesn’t have to be the kind that TLLP deploys either; characters who are bastards deploying savage black humour can lull and engage the audience as well. But humour that arises naturally from characters and circumstances, and characters with wit: this is one type of humour I think horror could use more of.

      The second film is the found-footage Creep, which you’ve probably seen by now if you tend to haunt horror film festivals or the Horror New Releases section of Netflix streaming. Co-written with director Patrick Brice by Mark Duplass, who also stars in it, Creep, the story of a young videographer who takes an unusual assignment which, naturally, goes horribly wrong, manages to sustain hilarity and horror for the entirety of its 78-minute run time. The film is almost unbearably tense from the very beginning, and much of that hilarity and horror is onscreen simultaneously. We, the audience, are laughing because what is happening is genuinely funny but it is also genuinely unsettling. In fact, Creep is a film of almost unbearable tension throughout, unfolding as it does with a kind of nightmarish inevitability. And yet the humour is integral to maintaining that tension. The situations are simultaneously very funny and absolutely horrifying. Creep locates itself firmly at that humour/horror intersection, at the very moment when screams of laughter just turn into screams.

      I think of David Lynch as the master of this sort of discomfiting horror/humour blend, and I say the master in part because Lynch’s approach so thoroughly disorients. In Creep, it’s pretty clear that the intent of the filmmakers is for us to laugh and be scared at the same time. Lynch doesn’t help us out much. It’s hard to know what to make of characters like Blue Velvet’s Frank Booth, or of the scene in Wild at Heart where Marietta is smearing lipstick on her face prior to phoning Johnnie Farragut to try and save him from the death she’s plotted for him. When Leland Palmer, mourning his murdered daughter, disrupts Ben Horne’s guests with a dance in Twin Peaks, is this comedy, horror, bathos or all three?

      Scenes like these remind us that there is an amorality to both horror and comedy, a resistance to social mores, an undercurrent of sadism. It’s no accident perhaps that so many comedians are said to have dark sides, and maybe it’s why the belief persists as well that women aren’t scary or funny; it would contradict their roles as compassionate nurturers of the species. I suspect it’s also why both genres are resistant to exhortations that artists check their language, check their potential for offence, check their likelihood of causing inadvertent pain. That’s not to say artists of any stripe should dismiss subtext – subtext, after all, is one of the great strengths of both horror and comedy, the ability to discuss taboos that would be unacceptable if met head-on – but both genres must retain the freedom to shock and offend, and to make mistakes. Developing comedy in particular can be an improvisational process of trial and error. It’s true that some will use this freedom as an excuse to fall back on the reactionary elements of comedy and horror, but ignoring context and intent in art and flattening nuance is no solution to old-as-humankind struggles with racism and sexism and how we treat our fellow humans. Horror and comedy can never and should never be made safe spaces.

      There is nothing quite so deflating as being laughed at, and it is the reason satire can be such a powerful tool. For all their similarities, horror and comedy make strange bedfellows because laughter can defeat horror, yet sometimes horror wins. In 2000, I saw the The Exorcist in the cinema on its re-release, and two teenage boys walked in after it had begun and started mocking the movie, laughing and talking back to the screen, determined to demonstrate to everyone the film’s powerlessness over them. But something happened as the film progressed. They fell completely silent. The jokes stopped. The laughing stopped. The darkness of it stole over them and shattered their bravado.

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