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    Black Static #64 (July-August 2018)
    Black Static #64 (July-August 2018)
    Black Static #64 (July-August 2018)
    Ebook223 pages1 hour

    Black Static #64 (July-August 2018)

    By TTA Press

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    About this ebook

    The July-August issue contains new horror fiction by Simon Avery, Phoenix Alexander, Seán Padraic Birnie, Tim Cooke, Sam Thompson, and Jack Westlake. The cover art is by Martin Hanford, and interior illustrations are by Richard Wagner. Regular features include Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore, Notes from the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker, Case Notes by Peter Tennant (book reviews), Blood Spectrum by Gary Couzens (film reviews).

    Cover Art: Another Ghost by Martin Hanford

    Fiction:

    Something to Burn by Phoenix Alexander

    Out of the Blue by Seán Padraic Birnie
    illustrated by Richard Wagner

    The Asylum by Tim Cooke

    The Monstrosity in Love by Sam Thompson

    The Blockage by Jack Westlake

    Why We Don't Go Back by Simon Avery
    illustrated by Richard Wagner

    Columns:

    Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker

    Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore

    Reviews:

    Case Notes: Book Reviews by Peter Tennant

    THREE FROM TELOS
    Small Ghosts by Paul Lewis, Terror Tales of Cornwall edited by Paul Finch, Kat of Green Tentacles by Sam Stone

    TWO FROM CEMETERY DANCE
    Walking Alone: Short Stories by Bentley Little, The Ones Who Are Waving by Glen Hirshberg

    NEW WINE IN OLD SKIN
    New Fears edited by Mark Morris

    NICK AND THE NIGHTJARS
    Ornithology by Nicholas Royle, Bremen + The Unwish by Claire Dean, The Hook by Florence Sunnen, Living Together by Matt Thomas

    DOUBLE ACTS
    The Girl With the Peacock Harp + Tree Spirit & Other Strange Tales by Michael Eisele, Fragile Dreams + Behold the Void by Philip Fracassi, I Wish I Was Like You + Strange is the Night by S.P. Miskowski

    THREE NOVELLAS
    Little Ghosts by Mary Borsellino, Never Now Always by Desirina Boskovich, Perfect Darkness, Perfect Silence by Richard Farren Barber
    Blood Spectrum: Film Reviews by Gary Couzens

    The Old Dark House, Frankenstein the First, The Addiction, Filmworker, You Were Never Really Here, The Quiet Earth, Cargo, The rain, Mayhem, The Cured, The Lodgers, Xtro, The Endless, Rawhead Rex, Insidious: The Last Key, It Came From the Desert, Habit

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTTA Press
    Release dateJul 16, 2018
    ISBN9780463232996
    Black Static #64 (July-August 2018)
    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 #64 (July-August 2018) - TTA Press

      BLACK STATIC 64

      JULY–AUGUST 2018

      © 2018 Black Static and its contributors

      PUBLISHER

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

      website: ttapress.com

      email: 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

      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

      You-Were-Never-Really-Here-page1.tif

      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 64 JULY-AUGUST 2018

      TTA PRESS

      COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2018

      PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

      CONTENTS

      Another Ghost bw.tif

      COVER ART

      ANOTHER GHOST

      MARTIN HANFORD

      rust.tif

      THAT BLACK DOG

      NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

      LYNDA E. RUCKER

      normanbates.tif

      ALL REASSURANCES CAN BE PEELED AWAY

      INTO THE WOODS

      RALPH ROBERT MOORE

      something-to-burn-bw.tif

      STORY

      SOMETHING TO BURN

      PHOENIX ALEXANDER

      out of blue (2).tif

      NOVELETTE ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD WAGNER

      OUT OF THE BLUE

      SEÁN PADRAIC BIRNIE

      asylum.tif

      STORY

      ASYLUM

      TIM COOKE

      monstrosity-in-love-ink.tif

      STORY

      THE MONSTROSITY IN LOVE

      SAM THOMPSON

      Shadow-Man.tif

      STORY

      THE BLOCKAGE

      JACK WESTLAKE

      why we don't (2).tif

      NOVELETTE ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD WAGNER

      WHY WE DON’T GO BACK

      SIMON AVERY

      ones-who-are-waving-contents.tif

      BOOK REVIEWS

      CASE NOTES

      PETER TENNANT

      lodgers-contents.tif

      FILM REVIEWS

      BLOOD SPECTRUM

      GARY COUZENS

      NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

      LYNDA E. RUCKER

      rust.tif

      THAT BLACK DOG

      Shirley Jackson had it right when she wrote, No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.

      It’s what stories do for us, after all: take us out of our heads and away from absolute reality, far from the grinding unspeakable of the right now and into the what if – even if the what if is about making us look at what happens when others are faced with absolute reality. There’s actually something sort of comforting about watching the protagonists of, say, H.P. Lovecraft confronting absolute reality, represented in his stories by the Old Ones and the knowledge of human insignificance against the backdrop of an absurd universe.

      Remember Rust Cohle? Of course you do; one of two investigators on the enigmatic Dora Lange case in True Detective and everyone’s favorite antinatalist, prone to dropping gems like this into what you probably thought was a casual conversation about something else entirely: I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law.

      I think life, in all its awful, despairing, wonderful, enigmatic scope, is worth living. But I also think Rust is kind of onto something.

      I was in the United States when news of two celebrity suicides broke in the same week. I don’t know what it was like anywhere else, but there, the media was full of stories and statistics, admonishments and help lines, urging people to reach out if they’re feeling this or that, and it was all well-meaning, but there’s something about the way we talk about despair – as though it is something that can be eradicated; as though it is not a part of the human condition, as old as human thought itself.

      Without quibbling over what, precisely, the definition of absolute reality might be, I think it’s fair to say that reality can be pretty awful. Or rather, the world is remarkable, and has an endless array of wonders to offer us if we only look. It is also a horror show. It can be, and is, both of those things at the same time.

      Every moment of every day, unspeakable atrocities are being committed by living beings against other living beings; anyone who’s spent significant time in nature knows it’s not a soft-focus antidote to the violence of human existence but is very much red in tooth and claw as Tennyson once wrote. Although nothing in nature is so atrocious as acts committed by humans because we are, so far as we know, the only living beings capable of comprehending what we are doing when we commit those atrocities.

      That brings us back to Rust. Or is Rust just mentally ill? Does he simply require a panoply of doctors and the right combination of drugs to cure him of his bleak insight?

      Each time the media passes through this cycle, I can’t help thinking We’re talking about this like it’s a solvable problem. We call it mental illness, but honestly a disease model of despair has always felt too pat to me. I think we might have been closer to the truth with its nineteenth century label of melancholia.

      For some people, the world is just too there, all the time.

      At a glance, you might think that horror, with its panoply of serial killers and figures like Bram Stoker’s Renfield has not treated those beset by mental illness kindly. You wouldn’t be wrong, but in fact the annals of horror literature is also filled with sensitive examinations of mental illness. In ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, Charlotte Perkins Gilman explores a madness that descends when a woman who is supposed to have everything a woman wants loses her mind. Sound familiar? We say the same thing today when celebrities die by their own hand. It’s almost enough to make you think that maybe we really don’t want the things we’re supposed to want.

      In fact, horror has been a place where many of women’s anxieties are not just freely explored but taken seriously: from Gilman’s exploration of the fear of confinement to fear of pregnancy (Rosemary’s Baby, It’s Alive, Prevenge, to name just a few) to anxiety about how to be a good mother in the midst of crisis (The Babadook). The film Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is a particularly insightful portrait of a woman struggling with a mental illness and the paternalistic constrictions she suffers as a result. Many of Shirley Jackson’s characters teeter on the cusp of sane and insane, but the questions, of course, remain: what is sane and insane, what is absolute reality anyway?

      I’m not sure that writers, or artists in general, are more prone to depression and suicide than any other group of people. I don’t have statistics to hand to support or dispute this point; it’s more an instinctive flinching away from the idea as just a little too precious for my liking. I don’t think writers are any more sensitive, as a group, than anyone else. Just because a person is unable to eloquently articulate despair does not mean it does not exist or is any less painful, and despair does not discriminate. It freely visits people of all social classes and occupations.

      I suppose the treatment, whatever it is, that speaks to us, is inextricably tied up with our own mental and emotional and intellectual landscape. There are people for whom a religious model to explain this despair works. Medication is the answer for some though by no means all. I have found the difficult, nuanced terrain of art can sustain me when nothing else seems to. For me, there is something oddly comforting about dark stories in bleak times; the characters in them start to feel like companions in a hard and unmappable, unknowable, hostile landscape.

      As I was writing this column, news of the death of the writer Harlan Ellison has begun filtering out to the world, and I’m thinking of his book Angry Candy, which I first read when I was too young to be able to recite lists of people I loved (even if only from afar) who had died. I remember the book, and its introduction, left me in a weird dark place; immersed, I suppose, in thoughts about my own mortality and that of everyone I knew.

      I’ve struggled to write this column over the last few weeks partly because I knew I wanted to talk about depression and suicide and tie it into the horror genre somehow, but my thoughts were so scattered and I felt like I had potentially thousands of words of material. I also didn’t want to write the wrong thing on such a sensitive topic that would send someone careening into a fresh bout of despair, or sound like I was telling people they need only read books to get better. And I was going to talk more about writers like Thomas Ligotti, and about Dennis Etchison’s underrated, forgotten 1986 novel about, in part, teen suicide, Darkside (which you should seek out and read).

      But I think what I really wanted to write was an Ellison-esque rant like he did for Angry Candy, a futile rage against the dying of the light. More than a lot of other genres, horror fiction takes on that one unassailable horrific truth: someday you and everyone you love will die – it’s why I believe horror fiction is primarily about loss. And who knows what happens then – maybe it is the undiscovered country after all – but I’d rather you and I all found out later rather than sooner. So what I wanted to say is keep breathing from one moment to the next. Keep reading to the next sentence. Stick around for the next meal or the next piece of music or the next bird you can see alight on a branch from your window or the next release from Stephen King. It’s a moment by moment thing. I get it.

      Maybe Rust Cohle is right, maybe we aren’t supposed to be here, but here we are. I hope you’ll stay with me as long as you can.

      INTO THE WOODS

      RALPH ROBERT MOORE

      normanbates.tif

      ALL REASSURANCES CAN BE PEELED AWAY

      I saw Psycho with my parents when it first came out. I was nine years old. You might think it odd that parents would take a young boy to see that movie, but the truth was, at that time, during its initial release, no one knew anything about the film. Hitchcock had mostly made thrillers up to that point. And Psycho seemed like it would be another thriller. A woman embezzles $40,000, runs away to start a new life with her lover. Familiar Hitchcock territory. So much so that when Marion takes a shower, and through the translucent shower curtain we see the bathroom door silently swing open and a shadow enter, most people in that audience from almost sixty years ago chuckled in their comfortable seats, assuming it was that shy motel clerk about to make an amorous move, but then, as that flimsy curtain was yanked sideways, and a long knife raised above the wetness of that bare, unprotected body, people screamed, stood up out of their seats, gathered out in the aisles, holding onto each other. It was like they had witnessed a train derailment. Never before had the protagonist in a movie been killed in the first third of a film. And that was Hitchcock’s brilliance. (Wes Craven paid homage to that scene thirty-six years later, when the seeming protagonist of Scream is murdered early in the movie.) We all thought we knew what was going to happen. Because that’s the way it always happened before.

      The company I worked for was bought and sold a number of times over the years. Each transfer of ownership, more and more of the people I saw every day sipping coffee in a break room, relaxing, were shoved out the airplane’s slid-open side door. White clouds, blue sky. No parachutes. Hundreds tumbled in the air down towards the indistinct green land masses of worker’s comp.

      The most recent time the company was acquired, I was told I needed to catch a morning flight from Dallas up to Columbus, Ohio, about a thousand miles away, to deliver a speech in front of a large crowd of the acquiring company’s salespeople and executives, in a hotel ballroom a ten-minute taxi drive from the airport. If my speech was a success, I’d continue working for the new company, and in fact would gain a more influential position. If my speech was a dud, I’d be shoved out the airplane’s side door like all the others.

      Arriving in Columbus on a Wednesday morning in my dark suit, catching a cab, talking nervously to the driver, passing by all the uninteresting buildings in Columbus, block after block, arriving at the hotel just before lunch.

      The moderator on the stage at the front of the hall, announcing me, beckoned with his raised right hand for me to come down the aisle, step up on stage, walk across the stage to the speaker’s podium.

      The worse part, of course, is when you face forward in the bright lights, seeing the large crowd seated in front of you. I had absolutely no idea how my speech was going to go. If it would be spectacular, or a disaster. I leaned into the microphone. Opened my mouth.

      After Mary and I explored Alaska for a couple of weeks in our 1989 three-month road trip across North America, me staring from the steering wheel out at the open road in front of us for eight hours a day, coming up with more scenes to use in my next novel, Father Figure, we headed back down through Canada towards the United States. Our first night returning, we stopped in Destruction Bay, a small community of about sixty inhabitants on Kluane Lake in the Yukon. Secured a room for the night. A small TV in our room, the one channel showing an old black and white movie in French. Once we got in bed, turned off the light, and there was that deep country silence that exists outside of cities, we heard drums start up in the hills surrounding Destruction Bay. Drums rhythmically smacked not with sticks, but wrinkled palms. I heard Mary’s lovely voice in the darkness next to me in bed. So…kinda creepy?

      The drums went on for about half an hour, up and down the dark hills. And then stopped.

      A few breaths after the drums finished, howls started up, from all over the hills. The howls of wolves. And as frightening as those howls were, from wild animals that could never be petted, they were also beautiful in their individual voices. The howls lasted for hours. No one knew where we were. A thousand miles away from anyone who cared about us. We watched the one dark window in our hotel room throughout the night, and didn’t sleep.

      Some people find the ending of Psycho disappointing. Marion’s lover, her sister, and the local sheriff sit in a room in the county court house while a psychiatrist who has examined Norman Bates gives a detailed explanation as to why the shy motel clerk assumed the identity of his mother, and committed Marion’s murder. The explanation is heavy on exposition, and neatly ties up all loose ends of the story. It’s the ‘scientific’ explanation for what happened. But what makes Hitchcock’s film so perfect, and truly frightening, is that the next scene undermines the pat conclusions reached by the psychiatrist. We see Norman in a strait-jacket, sitting in a chair, his mind dominated by his mother, insisting she’s innocent, that she wouldn’t even harm the fly buzzing around his/her face. And as Norman raises his face, we see a smirk, first in his lips, then in his eyes, and we realize whoever Norman is can never be explained by science. Norman is a work of Art. Unknowable.

      Mary and I survived our night on Destruction Bay. Were we in fact in danger? Or was this just a routine night in Destruction Bay? We don’t know. Nothing is known.

      I thought poor Marion would survive until the end of Psycho, because the protagonist always had before. I thought I would survive any cut-backs at work, because I always had before. I thought our stay at Destruction Bay would be fun, because our stay everywhere else had been before.

      My speech in Ohio went really well. The Senior Vice President of my division made a point of standing up out of his chair after I finished, clapping loudly, looking at me from the back of the hall, raising a right thumb up into the air. So I kept my job. In fact, got promoted. More power, more money.

      A month after I flew back down to Dallas, telling Mary about my promotion, and we celebrated with really big lobsters, red from the steaming pot, my company moved into a new building. Most of the remaining workers were assigned cubicles. A few of us got offices. Each office had tall glass panels

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