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    Black Static #74 (March-April 2020)
    Black Static #74 (March-April 2020)
    Black Static #74 (March-April 2020)
    Ebook187 pages3 hours

    Black Static #74 (March-April 2020)

    By TTA Press

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    About this ebook

    The March-April 2020 issue contains new cutting edge horror fiction by Matt Thompson, Christopher Kenworthy, Ray Cluley, Seán Padraic Birnie, Ainslie Hogarth, and Andrew Reichard. The cover art is by Richard Wagner, and interior illustrations are by Richard Wagner, Joachim Luetke, and others. Regular features: Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore; Notes from the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker; Case Notes book reviews by Mike O'Driscoll, Laura Mauro, Daniel Carpenter, David Surface, Philip Fracassi, and Andy Hedgecock, who also interviews Tim Lebbon; Blood Spectrum film reviews by Gary Couzens.

    Fiction:

    Memories of the Occupation by Matt Thompson
    illustrated by Richard Wagner

    Shattering by Christopher Kenworthy

    The New You by Ainslie Hogarth

    In the Wake of My Father by Ray Cluley

    The Turn by Seán Padraic Birnie

    White Cedar, White Birch by Andrew Reichard
    illustrated by Joachim Luetke

    Columns:

    Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker

    Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore

    Reviews:

    Case Notes

    Books reviewed include Eden by Tim Lebbon (plus author interview), The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher, The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature by Christopher Slutsky, Police Dreams by Richard Bausch, The Child Cephalina by Rebecca Lloyd, Petals and Violins by D.P. Watt

    Blood Spectrum by Gary Couzens

    Films reviewed include Night Tide, Chained For Life, Relaxer, Holiday, Under the Shadow, Horse Girl, What Did Jack Do?, Little Monsters, Ready or Not, Zombieland: Double Tap, Bliss, One Missed Call Trilogy, Daniel Isn't Real, Deadly Manor, Edge of the Axe, Black Angel, Hôtel du Nord, A Serial Killer's Guide to Life, Sons of Denmark, Harpoon, 47 Meters Down: Uncaged, The Gallows: Act II

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTTA Press
    Release dateMar 19, 2020
    ISBN9780463981139
    Black Static #74 (March-April 2020)
    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 #74 (March-April 2020) - TTA Press

      BLACK STATIC 74

      MARCH–APRIL 2020

      © 2020 Black Static and its contributors

      PUBLISHER

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

      website: ttapress.com

      email: blackstatic@ttapress.com

      shop: shop.ttapress.com

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

      EDITOR

      Andy Cox

      andy@ttapress.com

      FILMS

      Gary Couzens

      gary@ttapress.com

      STORY PROOFREADER

      Peter Tennant

      SHOP

      New subscriptions, subscription renewals, back issues, special offers

      shop.ttapress.com

      SUBMISSIONS

      Unsolicited submissions of short stories are always very welcome

      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 74 MARCH-APRIL 2020

      TTA PRESS

      COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2020

      PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

      CONTENTS

      bs (cover art 3 blood) bw.tif

      COVER ART

      UNTITLED

      RICHARD WAGNER

      lyndarucker-contents.tif

      OUTSIDE OF SOCIETY

      NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

      LYNDA E. RUCKER

      RalphRobertMoore-contents.tif

      DISAPPOINTED!!!

      INTO THE WOODS

      RALPH ROBERT MOORE

      memories occupation (a).tif

      STORY ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD WAGNER

      MEMORIES OF THE OCCUPATION

      MATT THOMPSON

      shattering-bg.tif

      STORY

      SHATTERING

      CHRISTOPHER KENWORTHY

      new-you-4.tif

      STORY

      THE NEW YOU

      AINSLIE HOGARTH

      feathers3.tif

      STORY

      IN THE WAKE OF MY FATHER

      RAY CLULEY

      turn2.tif

      STORY

      THE TURN

      SEÁN PADRAIC BIRNIE

      White_Birch.tif

      STORY ILLUSTRATED BY JOACHIM LUETKE

      WHITE CEDAR, WHITE BIRCH

      ANDREW REICHARD

      tim-lebbon-contents.tif

      BOOK REVIEWS

      CASE NOTES

      TIM LEBBON INTERVIEWED

      bliss-contents-2.tif

      FILM REVIEWS

      BLOOD SPECTRUM

      GARY COUZENS

      NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

      LYNDA E. RUCKER

      lyndarucker3supercropped.tif

      OUTSIDE OF SOCIETY

      Stories should be dangerous. Or they’re useless.

      — Caitlin R. Kiernan

      Earlier this year, I took a social media break. I’m still on it. Mediums that had once made the world feel more open to me than ever before had instead begun to make it feel small, crabbed, claustrophobic. I know every argument that exists about staying online for writers because I’ve made them all myself.

      And then I quit and oh god, you know what? It’s so quiet. I can hear my own thoughts again. It’s bliss.

      ***

      At a 2017 appearance in New York, novelist Zadie Smith talked about eschewing social media, and how it was necessary for her writing. I want to have my feeling, even if it’s wrong, even if it’s inappropriate, express it to myself in the privacy of my heart and my mind.

      This was the opposite of how just skimming through social media had begun to feel to me – as though I were always browbeaten, like I was in an argument with someone who wouldn’t stop, who followed me from room to room, who wouldn’t give me a minute’s peace to just stop and think. Social media had started to feel like a really, really shitty relationship.

      Online, everything is an emergency.

      But I think the worst of it was the repetitiveness. That’s what made it relentless, the sense of being able to predict and recite every argument, every rebuttal, the point at which it would go bad, except that nearly every time, I underestimated the degree of bad faith with which so much is read online.

      ***

      The 1948 publication in The New Yorker of Shirley Jackson’s story ‘The Lottery’ was famously contentious. Readers were outraged, cancelling their subscriptions in droves, writing angry letters to the magazine and to Jackson herself. Like many of us, Jackson had imagined a very different sort of reception to her work. In a 1960 speech she delivered called ‘Biography of a Story’, posthumously reprinted in the 1968 collection Come Along With Me, she wrote: I had of course in my imagination dwelt lovingly upon the thought of the millions and millions of people who were going to be uplifted and enriched and delighted by the stories I wrote.

      The truth, as we all learn eventually, is somewhat different: It had simply never occurred to me that these millions and millions of people might be so far from being uplifted that they would sit down and write me letters I was downright scared to open; of the three-hundred-odd letters that I received that summer I can count only thirteen that spoke kindly to me, and they were mostly from friends. Even her own mother wrote to tell her how much she disliked the story. A friend reported that she heard a man on the bus talking about the story and was going to say she knew the author until after I heard what he was saying I decided I better not.

      Jackson went on: I will not try now to say what I think of people who write nasty letters to other people who just write stories. Instead, she said, she would simply share responses, which included an admonition to stay out of Canada and a demand for a personal apology from the author. Jackson’s biographer Ruth Franklin reports that one called her perverted. In all, Jackson described the responses she received as a mix of bewilderment, speculation and good old-fashioned abuse.

      There’s a deliberate disingenuousness and comedic exaggeration in her accounting of the incident. Most of her fiction was anything but uplifting, and in particular, her insistence that it was just a story belies the seriousness with which she went at work.

      Stories are everything, stories are nothing. Both of these things can be true at the same time.

      ***

      In 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic feminist horror tale of madness and oppression ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ appeared in New England Magazine 5. Some praised the story; others were not so sure. An anonymous letter to the daily afternoon paper the Boston Transcript thought it must be a story that could only bring the keenest pain to anyone whose life had been affected by mental illness, and could even be the source of deadly peril. It questioned whether stories like ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ should be allowed to pass without the severest censure.

      Harm reduction, the importance of reducing the possibility of causing pain or upset, particularly to the vulnerable, and a deference to the greater good, has always been a factor in suppressing art seen as dangerous for any reason. The librarian at my small-town, rural high school was famous for drawing clothes onto naked people in anatomy books, or so the rumor went, and generally disapproving of anything that might be considered not improving to young minds. One day, my favorite teacher, one whose approach to education was very much in the Socratic mode – and with an approach to vulnerable young minds about as far from the librarian’s as it could be, as the assigned reading list that year included A Clockwork Orange and Crime and Punishment – had her come and chat to our class about censorship, or, as she preferred to put it, selection. Because let’s face it, nobody wants to be a censor.

      Honestly, she acquitted herself very well. It was one of the first times I can remember finding myself exposed to a bad argument that nonetheless was delivered in a way that sounded so reasonable on the face of it that it was difficult to know where to begin with a rebuttal. This wasn’t some unhinged religious loony telling me that if I listened to heavy metal music or played video games then the devil would take my soul. Of course she didn’t believe in censorship. What reasonable person does? But a careful and responsibly curated selection of reading material that would both entertain and illuminate? Who could find fault with such an approach? I found I came away thinking, Huh, I mean I guess maybe she has a point? There was something wrong still that I couldn’t put my finger on, but the way she’d explained it, it all made sense, and I didn’t know what to do with that. Except that I still felt in my gut that there was something fishy about this selection business.

      ***

      There’s a thing most writers have to overcome at some point, although it’s so far in my past I had forgotten it until very recently, and it’s the fear of what will people think. Not strangers, but the people you know: what will your friends, your family think when you put pen to paper – or fingers to keyboard – and all the weird transgressive shit you don’t dare share with anyone comes spilling out. Making art that matters requires you to be both extraordinarily vulnerable and extraordinarily impervious.

      You couldn’t do it if you listened to other people all the time. You especially couldn’t do it if you were expected to answer to them day and night, on command.

      So much of good storytelling is about trying to find your way in the dark, and existing in a constant state of, at best, half-certainty. If you could say it in 280 characters, you wouldn’t need to write 6,000 or 60,000 or 600,000 words to do so instead.

      So don’t: publish, and be damned.

      With thanks to Simon Bestwick for pointing me toward the Charlotte Perkins Gilman material.

      INTO THE WOODS

      RALPH ROBERT MOORE

      RalphRobertMoore-woods2.tif

      DISAPPOINTED!!!

      In the second episode of The Sopranos, ‘46 Long’, there’s a scene where Christopher Moltisanti, cousin to Tony Soprano, is in the noisy sidewalk crowd at a movie premiere in NYC. A black limousine pulls up to the curb, and out steps Martin Scorsese (or at least an actor playing Scorsese in the episode), with a tall brunette. As Scorsese gives a head-down wave to the crowd, Chris shouts out, "Marty! Kundun! I liked it!"

      It’s a brilliant moment in an often brilliant show. Chris, who’s a mobster but has dreams of becoming a screenwriter, is trying to get Scorsese’s attention. Maybe shake his hand, perhaps even get his phone number. So he doesn’t mention Taxi Driver, or Raging Bull, but instead a movie that is generally considered to be one of Scorsese’s lesser films. As if the fact Chris ‘liked’ (and note he didn’t say he ‘loved’) Kundun might ingratiate him with the director. (Much like Norman Mailer later found out that the reason John F. Kennedy, who he met at a party, mentioned how much he enjoyed reading Mailer’s Deer Park, was because Kennedy’s advisors told him that novel’s poor critical reception was a sore spot with Mailer, and Kennedy’s praise of it was an easy way to get Mailer’s support.)

      I was driving through the dark back roads of southern Connecticut, moon high in the sky’s blackness, yellow headlights from the front of my green VW illuminating, sliding across, tree trunks, when a song came on my car’s radio. ‘Space Oddity’ by David Bowie. I had read about Bowie before, in Rolling Stone, but I had never heard any of his music. That’s the way it was back then. I just knew him, as most people did, as a man who wore a dress while he sang onstage. So it was a real treat to finally hear one of his songs, negotiating with my steering wheel different curves in the asphalt road twisting through the woods.

      I loved the song. It was different. And different means a lot. Especially when you’re young. I started buying his albums. You grow up with singers as your guardian angels, we have for generations, and like a lot of you, I grew up with Bowie. And he kept getting better. It was an extraordinary trajectory. Station to Station. The Berlin trilogy (Low, Heroes, Lodger). Scary Monsters. Then he left RCA and started recording for EMI. His first release was Let’s Dance, which really propelled him onto the world stage as a superstar.

      His follow-up album for EMI? After the stunning success of Let’s Dance? Tonight. Which…was not that good. His next album for EMI was what turned out to be the ironically-named Never Let Me Down.

      In the 1988 film A Fish Called Wanda, Kevin Kline’s character, Otto, who refers to dogs as ‘insects’, crouches on the floor in front of a safe, stethoscope flowing from his ears to the safe’s front door, twirls the numbers of the safe’s circular combination lock left, right; after each click he hears in his ears in order to swing that door open getting more excited, and when he is finally able to push the safe’s lever down, and look inside, he sees the steel interior of the safe is, in fact, empty. Rears his head back. Forcefully exhales twice. Okay. Okay. DISAPPOINTED!!!

      That’s the thing about creativity. We write a great story, one we’re really proud of, this is me at the top of my form, my knuckles are lifting and lowering over the keyboard, smiling starlets dancing in silvery mermaid costumes, but then the next story we write? Not quite so good.

      And that’s what creativity is all about. It’s not like every story you write is going to be better than your prior stories. Often, it isn’t. Creativity isn’t a rightwards line on a graph climbing higher and higher story by story. Our creative output is a city we build over the course of our lifetimes, and like every city, it has a skyline whose building heights rise and fall against the sky. Creativity is a moody, unpredictable beast, where sometimes everything comes together and you produce great work, and sometimes you produce…acceptable work.

      But that’s okay.

      There are stories that are going to get you talked about, and then there are stories that you want to write, even though you know they aren’t going to excite readers as much. Write them anyway. Accept that writing is not always about tapping out that perfect story. Often, it’s about creating a story only you can tell.

      When you start writing a new story, it’s like a first date. You and your fingers sitting across from each other at a small, square table amidst the elbows and candlelit faces of other diners, the waiter lowering two white porcelain plates of orange-banded shrimp to your

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