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    Black Static #60 (September-October 2017)
    Black Static #60 (September-October 2017)
    Black Static #60 (September-October 2017)
    Ebook228 pages3 hours

    Black Static #60 (September-October 2017)

    By TTA Press

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    About this ebook

    Black Static 60, the tenth anniversary issue, contains new dark novellas and novelettes by writers who published their very first stories here: Carole Johnstone, Tim Lees, Ray Cluley, and Stephen Hargadon, with a guest editorial by the legendary Mick Reeks. The cover art is by Ben Baldwin, who also began his career here, as did Lynda E. Rucker who's now in every issue with her Notes From the Borderland column. Other features include Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore; Case Notes by Peter Tennant (book reviews and an in-depth interview with Daniel Mills); Blood Spectrum by Gary Couzens (film reviews). Story illustrations are by Ben Baldwin, Jim Burns, Richard Wagner, and others.

    The cover art is 'The King in Yellow' by Ben Baldwin

    Guest Editorial by the legendary Mick Reeks

    Fiction:

    Skyshine (or Death by Scotland) by Carole Johnstone

    The Shuttered Child by Tim Lees
    illustrated by Jim Burns

    The Swans by Ray Cluley
    illustrated by Richard Wagner

    Langwell Sorrow by Stephen Hargadon
    illustrated by Ben Baldwin

    Columns:

    Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker

    Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore

    Reviews:

    Case Notes: Book Reviews by Peter Tennant

    Written on the Land Itself: Daniel Mills
    The Account of David Stonehouse, Exile
    Moriah
    plus author interview

    Four Books by Allison Littlewood
    A Cold Silence
    Zombie Apocalypse!: Acapulcalypse Now
    The Hidden People
    Five Feathered Tales
    (guest reviews by Stephen Theaker)

    Ancient & Modern: Jeffrey Thomas
    Ghosts of Punktown
    Haunted Worlds

    Short Story Collections
    The Dream Operator by Mike O’Driscoll
    Escape Plans by David Sakmyster

    Blood Spectrum: Film Reviews by Gary Couzens

    American Gods, The Kettering Incident, Valkyrien, The Sinbad Trilogy, The Orchard End Murder, Blood Diner, Waxwork, C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud, Return of the Living Dead III, Life, The Belko Experiment, Killing Ground, A Dark Song, The Ghoul, Capture Kill Release, Voice from the Stone, The Transfiguration, The Evil Within, Phoenix Forgotten, Temple, Within

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTTA Press
    Release dateSep 20, 2017
    ISBN9781370909032
    Black Static #60 (September-October 2017)
    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 #60 (September-October 2017) - TTA Press

      BLACK STATIC 60 (TENTH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE)

      SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2017

      © 2017 Black Static and its contributors

      PUBLISHER

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

      ttapress.com

      blackstatic@ttapress.com

      Books and films for review are always welcome and should be sent to the above address

      EDITOR

      Andy Cox

      andy@ttapress.com

      BOOKS

      Peter Tennant

      whitenoise@ttapress.com

      FILMS

      Gary Couzens

      gary@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 60 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2017

      TTA PRESS

      COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2017

      PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

      CONTENTS

      The King in Yellow bw.tif

      COVER ART

      THE KING IN YELLOW

      BEN BALDWIN

      charlottesville.tif

      INTO THE ABYSS

      NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

      LYNDA E. RUCKER

      halloween2.tif

      I’M SOMEONE ELSE

      INTO THE WOODS

      RALPH ROBERT MOORE

      reclaimation yard 1.tif

      ART BY BEN BALDWIN

      GUEST EDITORIAL

      MICK REEKS

      flag.tif

      NOVELLA

      SKYSHINE (OR DEATH BY SCOTLAND)

      CAROLE JOHNSTONE

      shuttered-child.tif

      STORY ILLUSTRATED BY JIM BURNS

      THE SHUTTERED CHILD

      TIM LEES

      the swans (2).tif

      STORY ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD WAGNER

      THE SWANS

      RAY CLULEY

      Langwell Sorrow.tif

      NOVELETTE ILLUSTRATED BY BEN BALDWIN

      LANGWELL SORROW

      STEPHEN HARGADON

      Mills-contents.tif

      BOOK REVIEWS + DANIEL MILLS INTERVIEW

      CASE NOTES

      PETER TENNANT

      Capture.Kill.Release.contents.tif

      FILM REVIEWS

      BLOOD SPECTRUM

      GARY COUZENS

      NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

      LYNDA E. RUCKER

      lyndarucker3supercropped.tif

      INTO THE ABYSS

      This is not the Black Static column you were meant to read this month. The intent of that original article had been to write about place, a topic I’ve tackled before, but I had more to say. In part, I wanted to write about the landscape of the American South where I grew up, and my fierce, visceral love for it.

      But right now, I cannot write about the American South in a morally neutral way. There is a real darkness spreading out from its history and infecting my entire country because of our refusal, as Southerners, to confront that darkness.

      We lovers of horror know all about confronting darkness. At its best, this is what horror does; it grapples with our worst fears – not just of the monster under the bed, but the monster within, or what the monster can take away from us: love, sanity. We will all confront some of these monsters in our lifetime, and some of us will confront all of them.

      But what does it mean, to say that horror confronts darkness?

      Once, many years ago, I saw a discussion online between some writers who agreed they didn’t like horror because they already knew that life was random and terrifying and didn’t need to read or watch horror to be informed of that. And sometimes I hear horror fans say things like "Watching the news – now that’s real horror or The worst monsters are the human ones. No horror story can compete with that".

      I feel all of these remarks are missing the point. If we only see horror as a genre that portrays horrific acts or ideas, we are missing the point, too. Unfortunately, this is what a lot of horror does, and I think it fails as a result.

      A successful narrative, in any genre, needs to do more than recount a bald series of events. It needs to illuminate. Not explain – but explore, raise possibilities, ask questions, engage with the story it is telling. Horror needs this perhaps even more than most genres because without this illumination, it simply becomes a kind of cruel recounting of atrocities, and of course it cannot compete with real life in this recounting because there is nothing we can imagine that is within the limits of human endurance that has not been done by one person to another.

      This is not to say that horror needs to be cerebral to succeed. Far from it: in fact, horror needs to engage the emotions and the unconscious. The feeling of being frightened or disturbed or unsettled by a horror story is not one that is reached through rational means. But a writer or filmmaker who gets there by describing or portraying events that would upset most people has only done half the job that a storyteller is supposed to do.

      Real world horror has everything and nothing to do with the horror genre. Accounts of real-world atrocities are simply a series of facts. They lack inherent meaning. They need a storyteller to give shape to them. A poor storyteller cannot muster much more meaning than People are sadists or The world is a frightening place that will destroy you. The skilful storyteller has more to say to you than this. They have things to tell you about sorrow, about resilience, about loss, about love, about human nature. But whether the story is one intended to instill what M.R. James called a pleasing terror in the reader or viewer or one meant to disturb on a more profound level, horror makes its metaphors literal, and however much horror we have seen in our own personal existences, we continue to grapple with questions that horror stories can explore:

      Is there a force in the universe that is benevolent toward us, or is the universe indifferent? Do we have souls, and if so, what happens to them after we die? And if not, what if anything remains? How do we survive loss? Who are the real monsters? What drives people who do not fit our template for evil to do terrible things to another?

      Recent events in my country have caused me to think a great deal about evil lately. It’s not actually a word I particularly like in most contexts because I think it has the effect of othering people who do terrible things. The trouble with this othering is that it means that we become unable to recognize those same acts, or seeds of them, or versions of them, in ourselves and others we are close to. It’s really easy to tell ourselves stories in which we are always the heroes.

      I should know.

      I come from a place where large swathes of people have built an entire cultural myth around a particularly ahistoric version of an era and a war and a vile practice, the abduction and enslavement of other human beings. They have found a way to make this glorious.

      It’s difficult to overstate the degree to which the idea of the Lost Cause has permeated white Southern culture. The thing is, many of the people who still have some sympathy for this myth also abhor the naked racism on display in Charlottesville, Virginia. But that’s because that’s not their version of the myth. Their version is a culture of benevolent slave owners – as if there could be such a thing – with a few bad apples who spoiled the bunch. Why, some of them treated their slaves practically like family. So much so that some of those slaves didn’t leave the families they worked for even after they were freed. (Never mind that they had nowhere else to go.) Never let anyone tell you that storytelling doesn’t matter. A real-life horror unfolded in Virginia in August because people spent generations telling a story that is not true.

      The truth of the matter is that there is no particular face of evil. There is just you, and me, and other people, and our thoughts and our deeds.

      Here is another question that horror fiction might grapple with: when does the balance of evil deeds overcome the balance of good deeds and make a person one we call evil, and how do we deal with that darkness?

      In the South, that darkness became a monster that people – not just Southerners – could rally around. But the South is not unique. William Burroughs once wrote that America was an old and dirty and evil land. It’s a great quote, it’s a great story, but it’s not something I really believe, in terms of America being particularly worse than any other place. Where humans set foot, it seems, atrocities are not far behind, and there are few places on the globe that are likely to be free of unnecessary suffering inflicted by one human being upon another. What makes the difference, I think, is what we do about that darkness, and how we treat people who dare to uncover it. Those people often treated more poorly than the actual perpetrators.

      These are all things that have been on my mind in recent days, and I don’t have a tidy conclusion prepared.

      I know there are plenty of people out there who would prefer their horror fiction to be apolitical, and they have no hesitation about saying so. But there is no such thing as apolitical. Whose stories are you choosing to tell, and how are you choosing to tell them? Who, if any, are your heroes, and who are your villains – and why? What are the assumptions upon which your story is based? (This can be a tough one, because by their very nature our assumptions run so deep we are often unaware of them.)

      The answers to all of these questions reveal political underpinnings about whose and what stories we think deserve to be told, and how we ought to tell them. Horror reminds us that even the monsters’ stories are worth telling – but we have to be careful that in telling them, we don’t become one with the monsters.

      INTO THE WOODS

      RALPH ROBERT MOORE

      RalphRobertMoore-woods2.tif

      I’M SOMEONE ELSE

      Here we are, near Halloween. Put on the masks.

      When I was a kid, there weren’t elaborate Halloween costumes. My parents would dress me up in old clothes, trousers rolled, burn a cork and smear it over my lower face so it looked like a beard, sort of, and tell me I was a hobo.

      Back in the late Seventies, Mary and I were living in an apartment over a garage in San Francisco. We decided one dark blue night to order pizza. I called in the pick-up order, and when they asked for my name, I said, on a lark, Brian Eno. We had been listening to Low, Are We Not Men?, and Fear of Music. Eno was everywhere, but no one really knew what he looked like.

      When we wandered into the small restaurant to pick up our pizza, long-haired and under some influences, the short-sleeved pizza guy behind the counter, using his big wooden paddle to slide our pizza out of the oven and into a square delivery box, looked me over. Shy. Do you work in the music industry?

      I pretended I had no idea what he was talking about, paying him with gay money. (This was back when San Francisco was becoming the gay mecca of the United States. Gays would frequently rubber stamp their paper currency with a purple-inked Gay, to try to keep it within the gay community. But like all money, like all sexual desire for that matter, it went wherever it wanted, of course, so that you soon saw it all over the San Francisco peninsula. Mary and I both worked as bank tellers at the time, and it was not unusual for a customer to look at the money we had just counted out to them, pushing it back across the counter. I don’t want gay money!)

      We laughed on the aromatic trip back to our apartment with our pizza. It’s so much fun pretending to be someone else.

      I wasn’t happy in high school.

      The first day of senior year, all the uniformed boys sitting on blue metal folding chairs at an assembly in the gymnasium, as if we were at an AA meeting, the principal announced long hair would no longer be tolerated. Pointing at me, sitting a few rows back. So we need you to get a haircut, Mr Moore.

      Dropped out, got a job in New York City. Going out into the sidewalk crowds each evening once I got off work, the intense smell of car exhaust. The best experience a boy could have. My advice to any child. Disrupt your life.

      One year later, I decided to try school again, enlisting at a college an hour’s drive from home.

      In the screams of the hallways I’d occasionally pass a short, overweight guy in old-fashioned clothes, carrying a black briefcase in his right hand like its hard black plastic handle was the long neck of an albatross. Feeling sorry for him, I set my lunch down at his table one day.

      And he was boring. But lonely.

      I knew about loneliness, so I spent some time talking to him, mostly listening to him, because when you’re in a conversation with someone boring, a lot of it is listening.

      Fred was trying to fit in, but did not have a clue how to do that.

      He had a habit of digging his hands into the glass ashtrays set out on the cafeteria tables, blackening his fingertips. At one point, he told me he was becoming an expert in hypnosis, but needed a volunteer to perfect his talent.

      I had of course seen hypnosis sessions growing up, in movies and on TV. The idea did intrigue me. I always wanted to experience what it was like.

      So Fred and I went to the campus library, which I figured would be quiet, and sat across from each other at a long wooden table near the back, stacks behind us. After clearing his throat several times, he bugged his eyes at me from behind his black-rimmed eyeglasses, attempting to put me under a hypnotic trance.

      You’re falling asleep, deep, deep asleep. I don’t have to do an entire paragraph of him trying to put me under, do I? You can imagine that yourself. The point is, although I was receptive to the idea, very much so, to see what it would be like to be hypnotized, it didn’t work.

      I felt sorry for him. Because I could tell he needed to believe he was an expert in hypnosis. In persuasion. That he had enough teenage confidence in him to convince a girl to go out on a date. Because being a teenager, having no one to date, talking to your mom every Friday night at the kitchen table? That’s not the way it’s supposed to be.

      So I pretended to be hypnotized.

      Head lolling to one side, lips barely vibrating.

      Tell me your deepest memory!

      Here’s where I got a little creative. My planet is dying. I must escape. I am one of the few who can. Heading outwards, towards this young planet, the one they call Earth.

      Well.

      Fred sat up in his library chair. Leaning forward. Where are you from? Can you give me the coordinates of your home planet?

      I expected him to realize after a few exchanges I was obviously kidding, it was such a ridiculous idea. But he didn’t.

      That’s how much he needed to believe he had some talent, in anything.

      We’d have hypnosis sessions twice a week. I’d go into a trance, slurred speech, reveal a little bit more about my home planet.

      But I started to feel bad.

      So one day, when we got together for yet another hypnosis session, and he asked, What is the most important thing you can tell me about your planet?, I told him, It doesn’t exist. I’m not from another planet, Fred. I made it all up. It’s a fiction. Sorry.

      Back in 2000, I created a website, Jump Down the Hole, which presented different works of fiction as if they were real.

      For example, I made a home page for the fictional Arnie Maddox and his daughter Cindy. Mimicking most home pages at that time, it had animated GIFs, a section for the family’s poetry, another for their family recipes, one for Arnie’s weekly musings, a guest book with fake entries, etc. I even dressed up as Arnie for a couple of photographs to put on the site, stuffing a pillow under my shirt to make me look heavier, and getting Mary to photoshop my head to make me look bald. People would write to Arnie, and I’d answer as Arnie. I loved it! I’m someone else. Isn’t that what we do, as writers?

      I’m a white man. I’m proud to be a white man. You should always be proud of who you are.

      But because I am white, I have absolutely no idea, and will never have any idea, what it’s like to be, for example, an African-American. Because I’m male, I will never have any idea what it’s like to be female.

      Just like an African-American will never have any idea what it’s like to be white, or a woman will never have any idea what it’s like to be a man.

      As writers, we can pretend to be whoever

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