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    Black Static #75 (May-June 2020)
    Black Static #75 (May-June 2020)
    Black Static #75 (May-June 2020)
    Ebook184 pages2 hours

    Black Static #75 (May-June 2020)

    By TTA Press

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    About this ebook

    The May-June 2020 issue contains new cutting edge horror fiction by Simon Avery, Danny Rhodes, Kristina Ten, Cody Goodfellow, and Daniel Carpenter. The cover art is by Ben Baldwin, and interior illustrations are by Ben Baldwin, Richard Wagner, Vincent Sammy, Kai Martin, 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, Andy Hedgecock, David Surface, Georgina Bruce, and Daniel Carpenter, who also interviews Kay Chronister; Blood Spectrum film reviews by Gary Couzens.

    The cover art is 'Rendezvous' by Ben Baldwin

    Fiction:

    The Black Paintings by Simon Avery
    illustrated by Richard Wagner

    The Stonemason by Danny Rhodes
    illustrated by Ben Baldwin

    Asleep in the Deep End by Cody Goodfellow
    illustrated by Kai Martin

    Roots by Daniel Carpenter

    Except for the Down Below by Kristina Ten
    illustrated by Richard Wagner

    Columns:

    Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker

    Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore
    Reviews:

    Case Notes: Books

    Daniel Carpenter: Thin Places by Kay Chronister, plus author interview • Laura Mauro: These Foolish and Harmful Delights by Cate Gardner • David Surface: One Good Story: A Beginner's Guide to Survival Before, During, and After the Apocalypse by Christopher Barzak • Georgina Bruce: You Let Me In by Camilla Bruce • Mike O'Driscoll: Engines Beneath Us by Malcolm Devlin, Honeybones by Georgina Bruce • Andy Hedgecock: Night Train by David Quantick

    Blood Spectrum: Film Reviews by Gary Couzens

    The Year of the Sex Olympics • Doctor Sleep • Magic • The Mad Magician • The Man with the X-Ray Eyes • Endless Night • Phase IV • Colour Out of Space • Kwaidan • Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain • Beyond the Door • Hammer Volume Five: Death & Deceit • Why Don't You Just Die! • Extra Ordinary • The Perished • The Platform • Best of COI: Fifty Years of Public Information Films

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTTA Press
    Release dateMay 30, 2020
    ISBN9780463874042
    Black Static #75 (May-June 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 #75 (May-June 2020) - TTA Press

      BLACK STATIC 75

      MAY–JUNE 2020

      © 2020 Black Static and its contributors

      PUBLISHER

      TTA Press

      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, 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 75 MAY-JUNE 2020

      TTA PRESS

      COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2020

      PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

      CONTENTS

      Rendezvous-bw.tif

      COVER ART

      RENDEZVOUS

      BEN BALDWIN

      thestand-contents.tif

      DON’T DREAM IT’S OVER

      NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

      LYNDA E. RUCKER

      shaun1contents.tif

      GREAT CATCH!

      INTO THE WOODS

      RALPH ROBERT MOORE

      black paintings.tif

      STORY ILLUSTRATED BY VINCENT SAMMY

      THE BLACK PAINTINGS

      SIMON AVERY

      The Stonemason.tif

      STORY ILLUSTRATED BY BEN BALDWIN

      THE STONEMASON

      DANNY RHODES

      sinking-man.tif

      NOVELETTE ILLUSTRATED BY KAI MARTIN

      ASLEEP IN THE DEEP END

      CODY GOODFELLOW

      STORY

      ROOTS

      DANIEL CARPENTER

      except down below.tif

      STORY ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD WAGNER

      EXCEPT FOR THE DOWN BELOW

      KRISTINA TEN

      chronister.contents.tif

      BOOK REVIEWS

      CASE NOTES

      KAY CHRONISTER INTERVIEWED

      kwaidan-contents-2.tif

      FILM REVIEWS

      BLOOD SPECTRUM

      GARY COUZENS

      NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

      LYNDA E. RUCKER

      lyndarucker3supercropped.tif

      DON’T DREAM IT’S OVER

      So, how’s everyone doing?

      Life may be full of surprises, but even that banal-but-true observation never prepared me for writing a column about horror for a horror magazine while living through an actual horror story. Although we’ve been here before, in plenty of stories, there are still a lot of surprises: the scarcity of toilet paper, of course, but also, who’d have guessed that apocalyptic times would include so much tedium?

      And the cruellest consequence of all: who knew that it would mean everyone would have to die alone? Even victims of zombie apocalypses get last harrowing moments with loved ones, even if a shotgun has to be trained on them the entire time.

      As I write this, we’re a few weeks or months into these strange new times depending on where you live, and the initial shock has dissipated although the future seems terribly uncertain. You might think the last thing anyone would want to read or think about at a time like this is horror stories, but one of the first things I did as the full import of Covid-19 dawned on me was pick up The Stand.

      Once upon a time, this was one of my favorite books. I still remember the first time I read it, devouring it almost in its entirety in a single day when I was sixteen. Sometime in my twenties I reread the extended version, so this is the third reread. (Back to the original version this time around.) The first three chapters remain some of Stephen King’s best writing. Each of them could stand alone as a single, compelling short story, yet each also drives the narrative forward relentlessly.

      It’s funny to think that for those of us who began reading Stephen King as children his work functions as a kind of secular Bible: his stories have been with us for nearly as long as we have been reading stories, and we’ve always suspected, deep down, that somewhere out there Greg Stillson, Captain Trips, and Randall Flagg were waiting for their chance.

      ***

      Donald DeFreeze is a dark man. If you were a kid who loved King and wanted to be a writer, you probably knew this too, that the antagonist who eventually became Randall Flagg was born of King’s observation about a photo of Donald DeFreeze, robbing a bank on behalf of the Symbonese Liberation Army who were in turn famous by association with the heiress they kidnapped, Patty Hearst. Noticing that DeFreeze’s hat hid his features, King wrote that line about him, followed by A dark man with no face. According to his account in his nonfiction survey of horror, Danse Macabre, his eye then lit upon the words Once in every generation the plague will fall among them. With that, the pandemic horror story to end them all was born.

      Someone said to me that they had no interest in horror stories right now. I can’t work out whether I’m implacable or jaded or something else, but I’m certainly not alone – there’s been a massive surge in people like me rewatching Steven Soderburgh’s 2010 pandemic drama Contagion. Contagion is pretty solidly a medical thriller, though – it doesn’t really stray into the territory of horror, unlike Chernobyl, which I’m working my way through for the first time. There’s a scene near the end of the first episode (no spoilers) that shows the melting core of the reactor, and it’s something straight out of Lovecraftian cosmic horror. In David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, he theorized that an evil crept into the world when we split the atom – not that there wasn’t evil before, but this was something new.

      Perhaps he was right, although it wasn’t intellectual hubris in this particular instance that got us in this situation, but another kind of Lovecraftian horror: the cosmic indifference of the natural world to the fate of humans, the absurdity of chance. We anthropomorphize it as Mother Nature, or just the Earth, fighting back, giving us, its smartest (we think) and most destructive children one final firm warning about our poor stewardship. But it is, of course, something much simpler. It’s cause and effect. The natural world has a way of bringing things back into balance even when restoring that balance is terribly destructive to one or more species.

      This is, for me, the very essence of horror: not something is trying to kill you but something is indifferent to your existence; this is the truth at the core of horror I love best that I find simultaneously frightening and exhilarating, sad and beautiful, and it’s why my so much of my favorite horror taps into an awe that is indistinguishable from terror: the ecstasy of Arthur Machen, the mysticism of Algernon Blackwood.

      ***

      But back to King: I started my reread slowly, The Stand one of several books I’ve got going, and I was unsure how it would hold up. King can be hit or miss for adult me – although I think 11/22/63 is the finest thing he’s ever written, and Revival holds its own with his classic early work, both putting paid to any notion that a writer inevitably diminishes with age. Still, it can be dangerous to go back to things you used to love. But I’ve just reached Larry Underwood in the Lincoln Tunnel and now I’m hooked – I want to sit and read it till I’m finished, like I did when I was sixteen; alas, I have other responsibilities now.

      King does not, it must be said, usually evoke that sense of horror and awe in me, but at his best he does something that is just about equally important and that I sometimes suspect shaped me as a writer in ways I’m not even aware of: he has an incredible sense of character. It was always this that set him apart from dozens of King wannabes, his deft portraits of what feels like real people with lives far outside the scope of his stories, drawn from his devotion not to genre fiction but to American realist literature. As much as I loathe the idea that characters must be likeable – and some of my favorite books and movies involve characters that couldn’t remotely be described as such – I love that I love Stu Redman, and Glen Bateman, and Nick Andros. Far from finding The Stand a troubling read in times such as these, I’m finding it a comfort: I’m back with my friends again; the world is painted in garish shades of good and evil. The Stand is Lord of the Rings for the horror crowd: an epic journey, the temptation toward evil, but the reassurance that good will assert itself in the end.

      Of course, the plague story for the new millennium is really the zombie tale: decades after George Romero gave us our first glimpse of the zombie apocalypse, we are as overrun by them as by the characters in the many comics, TV shows, books and films that feature them. The world belongs to the dead, characters in the bleak, nihilistic The Walking Dead tell one another.

      Beside it, The Stand looks quaint in its optimism. In the world of The Stand, humans do matter; they’re the centre of the universe once again. It’s not what I believe, but it’s a comforting world view in which to take a vacation from my relentless brain. It does reinforce a few things I do believe: humans are both unspeakably awful and breathtakingly good and noble and smart and courageous (and the same person may be all of these things at different times). The world is heaven and hell, paradisical and fallen, beautiful and terrible.

      And we can be felled – even made extinct – by something invisible and unknown, that is indifferent to our suffering. No wonder so many of us find horror so compelling: it really is the story of our fears, of our frailties, of being human.

      INTO THE WOODS

      RALPH ROBERT MOORE

      RalphRobertMoore-woods2.tif

      GREAT CATCH!

      One day I was wandering around the internet, as we all do, clicking a link on a page, then clicking a link on that new page, a link on the next page that loaded, like walking through a funhouse maze of mirrors, and came across a video of a dog running backwards in a yard, jaws pointed up towards the sky, mouth open. It was obvious he was tracking a thrown ball’s trajectory in the air, getting ready to catch it in his mouth, to make his master proud of him. After a few moments, the ball fell into view, bounced off the grass. About fifteen feet away from him. I have to admit, I cracked up. Poor doggy. The rest of the video showed him trying to find the landed ball, running five feet past it, sniffing the ground, reversing, missing it again, striking out in a new direction, finally proudly snatching it up, in his yellow fangs, off the lawn.

      So it wasn’t a great catch after all.

      It was a funny video.

      In the American remake of The Ring, Naomi Watts finally rescues the little girl with the black hair hanging in front of her face from the well. Tells her son, I saved the little girl! Her son’s horror. You WHAT?

      Misunderstanding is a powerful theme in horror. And life. We think we know the situation, but we don’t. Not really. Our assumptions are based on a misperception of what is actually occurring. Often because we want to believe things are okay, even when they’re not. Because if things are okay, that’s easier to deal with. Sometimes we’re too involved in ourselves to really notice the outside world.

      In Shaun of the Dead, in a brilliant scene paralleling an earlier scene, Simon Pegg walks out of his home, stumbles across the street, head down, hand scratching the back of his neck, not noticing the zombie activity shuffling farther down the street, even not noticing the bloody handprints on a cooler door as he selects a canned drink.

      Soon after Mary and I decided one night, after three months traveling the highways of America, sitting down at the typical round table almost always found in a motel room, to get off the road, settle down again, this time in Texas, first in San Antonio, great city, but no jobs, then in Dallas, Mary and I, renting an apartment in north Dallas, planted crops on our balcony. Maybe it was our way of literally putting down roots.

      Our apartment complex had a contest. Whoever had the best display of produce growing on their balcony would receive one month’s free rent. The woman across the white lines of the parking lot from us hauled out, cigarette dangling from her lips, shoulders hunched, all kinds of heavy pots, plopping them down, going back behind the reflections of her sliding glass doors to come back out with the wavy tops of tomato plants, bell peppers, jalapenos. Bad hair, short-shorts, really struggling. We were impressed with the effort she was making. It was a real commitment towards getting that one month’s free rent.

      Driving to the local nursery, we bought all kinds of paper seed packets ourselves, fronts of the packets optimistic with delicious-looking colors. A number of tall, orange-brown plastic pots. Sagging bags of potting soil. We’re farmers! But kind of inept farmers. For example, we bought corn seeds. Once we got home, tilting the cold glass rims of beer bottles up to our lips, reading the back of the seed packet for corn, we realized corn rows should be planted 30–36 inches apart. Well, we’re planting them in pots. Which means the first seed we plant is in the dark brown soil within the pot, but the next seed would be suspended in mid-air

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