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    Black Static #73 (January-February 2020)
    Black Static #73 (January-February 2020)
    Black Static #73 (January-February 2020)
    Ebook180 pages2 hours

    Black Static #73 (January-February 2020)

    By TTA Press

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    About this ebook

    The January-February 2020 issue contains new cutting edge horror fiction by Stephen Volk, Keith Rosson, Maria Haskins, Jack Westlake, and Gregory Norman Bossert. The cover art is by Ben Baldwin (for Stephen Volk's 'Sicko'), and interior illustrations are by Richard Wagner, Ben Baldwin, Vincent Sammy, and others. Regular features: Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore; Notes from the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker; Case Notes book reviews by Laura Mauro, Andy Hedgecock, Daniel Carpenter, David Surface, Andrew Hook, and Georgina Bruce, who also interviews Priya Sharma; Blood Spectrum film reviews by Gary Couzens.

    The cover art is by Ben Baldwin, for Stephen Volk's 'Sicko'.

    Fiction:

    Sicko by Stephen Volk
    illustrated by Ben Baldwin

    You Are My Sunshine by Keith Rosson
    illustrated by Richard Wagner

    Cleaver, Meat, and Block by Maria Haskins
    illustrated by Vincent Sammy

    We Didn't Always Live in the Woods by Jack Westlake

    The Hearts of All by Gregory Norman Bossert

    Features:

    Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker
    THE FICTION OF RIGHT NOW

    Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore
    UNFAIR APOCALYPSE

    Reviews:

    Case Notes: Book Reviews

    Andrew Hook: And Cannot Come Again by Simon Bestwick • David Surface, One Good Story: The Judas Tree by Denton Welch • Laura Mauro: Doe Lea by M. John Harrison, so this is it by Paul Griffiths, Halloween by Nicolas Freeman, Le Détective by H.P. Tinker • Daniel Carpenter: Nowhereville edited by Scott Gable & C. Dombrowski • Andy Hedgecock: Ghostland by Edward Parnell • Georgina Bruce: Ormeshadow by Priya Sharma, plus author interview

    Blood Spectrum: Film Reviews by Gary Couzens

    Hammer Volume Four: Faces of Fear • Secret Ceremony • The Dead Don't Die • Der Golem • I Lost My Body • The Nightingale • The Fall • Hitch Hike to Hell • Cut • Annabelle Comes Home • Werewolf (Wilkolak) • The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil • Prey

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTTA Press
    Release dateJan 13, 2020
    ISBN9780463469446
    Black Static #73 (January-February 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 #73 (January-February 2020) - TTA Press

      BLACK STATIC 73

      JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2020

      © 2020 Black Static and its contributors

      PUBLISHER

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

      website: ttapress.com

      shop: shop.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

      FILMS

      Gary Couzens

      gary@ttapress.com

      STORY PROOFREADER

      Peter Tennant

      SUBMISSIONS

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

      logo cmyk.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 73 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2020

      TTA PRESS

      COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2020

      PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

      CONTENTS

      Sicko cover contents.tif

      COVER ART

      SICKO

      BEN BALDWIN

      lyndarucker-contents.tif

      THE FICTION OF RIGHT NOW

      NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

      LYNDA E. RUCKER

      RalphRobertMoore-contents.tif

      UNFAIR APOCALYPSE

      INTO THE WOODS

      RALPH ROBERT MOORE

      Sicko internal illo.tif

      NOVELETTE ILLUSTRATED BY BEN BALDWIN

      SICKO

      STEPHEN VOLK

      my only sunshine (dps2).tif

      STORY ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD WAGNER

      YOU ARE MY SUNSHINE

      KEITH ROSSON

      Cleaver, Meat, and Block.tif

      STORY ILLUSTRATED BY VINCENT SAMMY

      CLEAVER, MEAT, AND BLOCK

      MARIA HASKINS

      woods-bg.tif

      STORY

      WE DIDN’T ALWAYS LIVE IN THE WOODS

      JACK WESTLAKE

      hearts of all.tif

      STORY

      THE HEARTS OF ALL

      GREGORY NORMAN BOSSERT

      nightjar-index.tif

      BOOK REVIEWS

      CASE NOTES

      GEORGINA BRUCE, LAURA MAURO, DANIEL CARPENTER & OTHERS

      gallows-contents.tif

      FILM REVIEWS

      BLOOD SPECTRUM

      GARY COUZENS

      NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

      LYNDA E. RUCKER

      lyndarucker3supercropped.tif

      THE FICTION OF RIGHT NOW

      In 1971, writer J.G. Ballard penned a polemic in which he argued that science fiction was the only relevant contemporary literature, and that as we hurtle into an increasingly technological future, it would just become more so. I found myself thinking of this essay the other day – specifically, what I thought is that if science fiction is the genre that tells us where we’re going, horror is the genre that will tell us what it feels like on the way.

      I think the world feels dark now, for many people. I don’t know if it has always been this way. When I consider, say, the first forty-five years of the previous century, in which two world wars sandwiched the Great Depression, I can’t help but think that it must have been terrifying in even greater magnitudes. I wonder how it must have felt, to finally have the war to end all wars come to an end only to be fighting a new one two decades later. I am starting to feel I understand, for the first time, the era of the post-war boom in America, the middle-class conformist complacency of the 1950s that always seemed so hateful to me. Of course, as all horror fans know, such bland facades always conceal something rotten underneath, and it would all explode as the civil rights movement and everything that followed began forcing America to start confronting just what, as William Burroughs said in his introduction to Naked Lunch, was on the end of all their forks.

      Sometimes it strikes me as such a strange thing, that we inhabit these individual human bodies and we can’t really know, ever, what anyone else is experiencing – we can only think we know relative to our own experience, but how accurate is that? I think other people are always unknowable, to some degree, even those we are most intimately connected to. And so it becomes even harder to accurately say what those in our past must have experienced. So I can only say that for me, the world feels more frightening than it has within my lifetime. Nationalism is on the rise not just in the US and the UK but in India and Brazil and other places as well. The time we have left to stop a future devastated by climate change is shrinking.

      In stories, these things usually have resolutions. Unfortunately, I’m starting to think that the monsters that won’t die, that Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger and all the others that keep shambling through sequel after sequel, are born as much from some unconscious primal knowledge as from greedy executives determined to milk horror franchises for every penny. That knowledge is: the monsters don’t die. They never do. Because it’s starting to feel as though every monster from the twentieth century, including the ones we were sure had been drowned and burned and stabbed enough to finally lay down and die, are shambling back to life.

      ***

      Of course, it doesn’t feel that way to everyone. There are some people out there reading these words and thinking this is nonsense, that the best possible governments are in place, that the spectre of climate change is no different from that of overpopulation or running out of food and water and land and air or other potential disasters that we were warned about in the 1970s that have not yet come to pass.

      I don’t know what to say to you; I guess this column won’t make much sense to you. I’m the one in the story who tries to tell you there’s something wrong, but you won’t believe me until it’s too late.

      ***

      I do think the stories we embrace are so revealing – some of them, anyway, the ones that really matter, as Samwise Gamgee said to Frodo. Ballard, whose science fiction quite often reads like horror (and I would argue for the inclusion of The Crystal World in any survey of the novel-length weird), wrote that the compassion, imagination, lucidity and vision of H.G. Wells and his successors … dwarf the alienated and introverted fantasies of James Joyce, Eliot, and the writers of the so-called Modern Movement. I find this a little rich given that alienated and introverted are both words I would use to describe the fiction of Ballard himself, but as I said above, it is a polemical piece, and he is being deliberately provocative.

      I do think Ballard has a point, but in the almost fifty years since he wrote his essay, the future has collapsed into the present and you can find all kinds of fiction that addresses the effects of technology on our lives. We are, in fact, acutely aware that we are living in the future – uniquely so, perhaps. And there is an awful lot of anxiety around that fact. In addition to the dawning realization that we might have irreparably damaged the natural world, there’s a growing sense that we are enthralled with technology without quite knowing what it might be doing to us, how it might be changing everything from our attention spans to the way we interact with one another and the way we govern ourselves, and are governed.

      ***

      I don’t know if horror will ever boom commercially again, at least within most of our lifetimes, but I’ve been thinking about the 1980s, the time of its last commercial boom. In America, it was akin to the 1950s, a time in which conformity and conspicuous consumption was celebrated. I loathed it, and I hate the 80s nostalgia and its celebration of so much that was mediocre about the decade.

      I came of age in the 1980s and it felt awful and phony to me then. For me, it isn’t the loud and brightly-colored movies made for children and teenagers that evoke the 1980s for me. It’s Blue Velvet, the bugs under the carefully manicured lawn on which a man is dying. Or, if you will, the family-friendlier version of the unspeakable horrors under sunny suburban kitchens and pools, Poltergeist. I think under all the frantic devotion to money-making and status, the greed is good mantra, there was an enormous amount of disquiet. It even crept into mainstream cinema, in movies like Baby Boom where Diane Keaton discovered that being a mom in the Vermont countryside was so much better than the corporate life. (It all sounds like sheer horror to me.) But horror fiction was full of nice young yuppie couples who moved into houses or apartments that seemed like dream homes until they discovered something was wrong. The fact that these novels kept coming out can be chalked up to publishers figuring more of the same, let’s stick with what works, but why were people devouring them in the first place? Even as a kid, reading them, it was clear to me that so many of them were just not very good. Those types of stories have been criticized for an inherent conservatism, a subtext that feared changed, feared the other, but I wonder if there wasn’t something else going on. I wonder if instead of saying this is how you stay safe, the monsters may come but you can prevail they were instead saying what everyone suspected: you can never be safe. It seems fitting that the decade was bookended by Bret Easton Ellis’s vicious, horrific satire of all that was worshipped in the 1980s, American Psycho.

      Following the 2016 election in America, musician Amanda Palmer was much criticized for a suggestion that music might thrive in resistance to the government we had just elected. Artistically speaking, horror has never been healthier than in the past decade. I don’t want to make a similar tone-deaf claim about horror, but it will be interesting to see how we respond as writers and how readers respond to us in the years to come.

      INTO THE WOODS

      RALPH ROBERT MOORE

      RalphRobertMoore-woods2.tif

      UNFAIR APOCALYPSE

      John Updike reviewed Walter Abish’s 1974 novel, Alphabetical Africa, in The New Yorker. The book is an example of what is usually referred to as ‘constrained writing’, which is writing that has to follow certain self-imposed rules (much of classic poetry is constrained writing, in that it has to conform, for example, to meter and rhyme). In Abish’s case, he decided he would write a novel of 52 chapters. In the first chapter, all the words had to begin with the letter A. In chapter 2, A or B. And so on. After the 26th chapter, where words beginning with all the letters of the alphabet may be used, each subsequent chapter removes words beginning first with Z, then Y, etc.

      In his review, Updike writes, By the time [Abish’s] verbal safari reaches G, Abish can make, at length and almost fluently, observations worthy of Moravia’s. But under the constraints imposed by the author, once the novel passes that mid-point of the 26th chapter, and letters are one by one taken away, we are eventually whittled down until we return, and end, with a final chapter where once again all words are limited to those starting with A. Like life, where you gradually gain it all, taller, stronger, braver, grinning at a dinner table surrounded by friends, then slowly lose all that straightness of spine, all those possibilities, bit by bit, to poor health and obituaries.

      Every once in a while, for the length of a sentence, we write a great line. All the right words tumbling into place like cherries in a slot machine. Bob Dylan said once he wrote the song stanzas he had to write to get to the stanzas he wanted to write. Just like sometimes you have to have a conversation with a secretary about this crazy weather before you’re able to pass through the door of the office behind his desk to talk to the person you came here to meet.

      Of all the serendipities that happen on the page, probably the most famous is Shirley Jackson’s opening paragraph to her 1959 novel, The Haunting of Hill House. The paragraph’s been quoted and analyzed for over half a century. No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality… But if that paragraph is arguably one of the finest paragraphs ever to open a novel, which of its words are the best? The key sequence? I say it’s the final ones: …and whatever walked there, walked alone.

      We don’t always know when something new has started.

      Mary and I were going about our usual lives, having fun, cooking delicious meals, watching great movies, going upstairs in the late afternoons with a drink to pursue our individual interests, culminating around seven when we’d watch some videos together then go downstairs for dinner, when I noticed Mary started to get more tired each day. Like I said, it was next to nothing at first. A little longer for her to get out of bed, then a decision to stay in bed while I made our breakfast, but then it became more pronounced, to where I had to help her up the stairs each afternoon.

      One night after midnight I heard a disturbance in the dark, turned

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