Black Static #47 (July-August 2015)

By TTA Press

The July-August issue contains new stories by internationally bestselling author John Connolly, James Van Pelt, Kate Jonez, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, Ray Cluley, and Eric J. Guignard. The front and back cover art is by Richard Wagner, and interior illustrations are by Wayne Haag, Dave Senecal, Jim Burns, and Richard Wagner. Features: Coffinmaker's Blues by Stephen Volk (comment); Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker (comment); Case Notes by Peter Tennant (book reviews and an interview with Ray Cluley); Blood Spectrum by Tony Lee (DVD/Blu-ray reviews).

Stories:
On the Road with the American Dead by James Van Pelt
All the Day You'll Have Good Luck by Kate Jonez
Razorshins by John Connolly
The Devil's Hands by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam
When the Devil's Driving by Ray Cluley
A Case Study in Natural Selection and How it Applies to Love by Eric J. Guignard

Art:
Richard Wagner
Wayne Haag
Jim Burns
Dave Senecal
Comment:
Coffinmaker's Blues by Stephen Volk
Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker

Reviews:
Case Notes: Book Reviews by Peter Tennant, including an extensive interview with Ray Cluley, an appreciation of Tanith Lee, reviews of many novels and anthologies
Blood Spectrum: DVD/Blu-ray Reviews by Tony Lee, covering The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Miss Osbourne, Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead, Dream Home, Whiplash, Stonehearst Asylum, It Follows, The Voices, The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death, The Human Centipede 3: Final Sequence, Tusk, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and many more

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Jul 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311333957

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.

Book preview

BLACK STATIC ISSUE 47

JULY–AUGUST 2015

© 2015 Black Static and its contributors

PUBLISHER

TTA Press

5 Martins Lane

Witcham

Ely

Cambs CB6 2LB

UK

ttapress.com

EDITOR

Andy Cox

[e-mail]

BOOKS

Peter Tennant

[e-mail]

FILMS

Tony Lee

[e-mail]

SUBMISSIONS

Unsolicited submissions of short stories are always very welcome via our online system, but please follow the guidelines

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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 47 JULY–AUGUST 2015 

TTA PRESS

COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2015

PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS. ISBN:9781311333957

CONTENTS

COVER ART

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UNTITLED

RICHARD WAGNER

COMMENT

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COFFINMAKER’S BLUES

STEPHEN VOLK

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NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

FICTION

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ON THE ROAD WITH THE AMERICAN DEAD

JAMES VAN PELT

illustrated by Richard Wagner

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ALL THE DAY YOU’LL HAVE GOOD LUCK

KATE JONEZ

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RAZORSHINS

JOHN CONNOLLY

illustrated by Wayne Haag

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THE DEVIL’S HANDS

BONNIE JO STUFFLEBEAM

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WHEN THE DEVIL’S DRIVING

RAY CLULEY

illustrated by Dave Senecal

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A CASE STUDY IN NATURAL SELECTION AND HOW IT APPLIES TO LOVE

ERIC J. GUIGNARD

illustrated by Jim Burns

REVIEWS

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CASE NOTES

PETER TENNANT

books, plus interview with Ray Cluley

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BLOOD SPECTRUM

TONY LEE

DVDs/Blu-rays

COMING SOON

‘DISTINGUISHED MOLE’

JEFFREY THOMAS

illustrated by Joachim Luetke

‘DIRT LAND’

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

illustrated by Ben Baldwin

and much, much more

Black Static 48 is out in September

ttapress.com/blackstatic/

COFFINMAKER’S BLUES

STEPHEN VOLK

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ALFRED AND JACK: RIPPING YARNS

I re-watched Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972) recently. Apart from rediscovering what a truly macabre delight it is, I was struck that, though based on a book (Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square by Arthur La Bern) this story of London in the grip of a serial killer, with its newspaper headlines, salacious gossip and heady mix of dread and titillation, reflects another more infamous killing spree perhaps closer to home, as far as the director was concerned. Tourists expect London to be full of ripped whores two city gents in a pub comment sardonically while waiting for their meat pies to arrive from the buxom barmaid, and He’s a regular Jack the Ripper! proclaims someone early in the movie, while Jon Finch’s character is known for beating his wife and becomes a suspect when she is murdered: exactly reminiscent of Joseph Barnett, common-law husband of Ripper victim Mary Kelly.

Barnett was a Billingsgate fish porter and Frenzy is stuffed with tradesmen and porters, set as it is in and around old Covent Garden Market before it relocated to Nine Elms. In fact the whole film is so incredibly Ripperesque in tone it made me wonder the extent to which the myth was a formative influence on Hitchcock’s work as a whole. Young Alfred was born in 1899 and grew up the son of a greengrocer in Leytonstone (his knowledge of Covent Garden market in Frenzy was first hand: it was where his father did business). Clearly, in the early 1900s, the season of blood in Whitechapel was within recent memory, and its most famous denizen still held a grip. According to Hitchcock, mothers used to scare their children into obedience with the threat Jack the Ripper will get you.

One such child was Fred, a chubby lad who memorised ferry timetables and collected tram numbers (a real trolley-dolley). Would it be too much to conjecture that he also collected details of the notorious crimes that so shocked his parents’ generation? Crimes that conflated violence and sex in the Catholic schoolboy’s all-too-fertile imagination?

Evidence for the effect of Jack comes in the production deemed by the director himself as the first true Hitchcock film: The Lodger (1927), based on Marie Belloc Lowndes’ play Who is He? – a fictionalised account of the Jack the Ripper story, whose plot focuses on a serial killer who (like Hitchcock, on the evidence of future casting) had a thing about blondes.

Matinee idol Ivor Novello turns out to be innocent, but not before a lynch mob chases him through the streets. (This now-obligatory Ripper mob scene, however, is in fact based on truth. A man called Squibby, wanted on a misdemeanour in Whitechapel, was run to ground when seen to be pursued by a police constable. Commercial Street Station was laid to siege as an angry crowd bayed for his blood.)

Dr Frances Tumblety was the very real lodger who was considered a strong suspect at the time of the original investigation, however. The German landlady of a boarding house near Russell Square reported finding blood on the shirt cuffs of her American guest. Alarm bells rang for the Ripper detectives since the coroner in the Annie Chapman murder had mentioned an American who had reputedly asked a sub-curator of the British Museum how he could come by female anatomical parts. They added two plus two, but Tumblety, a quack doctor and snake-oil salesman with a documented hatred of women, jumped bail to the USA and the CID, embarrassingly, had let their prime suspect slip through their fingers.

The Tumblety factor aside, Donald Spoto has written (in his incendiary The Dark Side of Genius) that The Lodger was the first time Hitchcock revealed his psychological attraction to the association between sex and murder, between ecstasy and death. Certainly it contains major themes common in the director’s later work: the innocent on the run (as in Frenzy), suspicion, fear, and fetishistic sexuality. Remember, with the coming of sound it was Hitchcock in the ascendant who helmed Britain’s first talking picture, Blackmail (1929). And what did he do? Gave us the unforgettable scene where repetition of the word knife jumps out of the dialogue, jarring into the brain of the killer – and ours. Then, later, there was the most famous cinematic knife of all time: the one used in the shower in Psycho (1960). Surely no scene can more embody Jack the Ripper in action. But, like Norman Bates, Hitchcock’s Ripper wasn’t a monster on the outside. He was a man like you or me or Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt, or Bruno in Strangers on a Train. If Hitch’s women were glamorous because he wondered what they wore under their furs, perhaps he equally wondered what debonair men got up to on the quiet: a reflection of the concern in 1888 that the Ripper might be a respectable gentleman or doctor with a secret life.

Chirpy Cockney Bob Rusk in Frenzy has a secret too: his name eerily echoes that of George Lusk, the head of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee and the man who received the famous FROM HELL note with the human kidney, possibly of Catherine Eddowes. And is it me or is the real Inspector Abberline much more believably mirrored in the plodding, po-faced Alec McCowen than in Johnny Depp’s quirky, freebasing incarnation in From Hell? Fascinatingly, the real Abberline (another Fred), far from dying in an opium den, didn’t pop off until 1929, which meant he could easily have sat in a cinema and watched The Lodger, thirty years after the Whitechapel murders had ceased.

Sin and innocence course through the veins of Frenzy. Hitchcock’s Covent Garden is a Garden of Eden where Rusk is the snake. He’s even seen chomping an apple for good measure. What was Jack after all but the Devil in disguise? Is this what Alfred Hitchcock kept revisiting in symbolic form as Master of Suspense? Was the one thing he couldn’t master his childhood sense of fear? Traumatic terror, shock and the ‘gross out’ are feelings with which writers from Edgar Allan Poe to Stephen King have titillated their audiences, says Dr Lenore Terr in Too Scared to Cry, And why must such writers do this? Because, at least in certain instances, they must release their own childhood horrors back into the external world from whence they originally came. Of Hitchcock, she says his intensely terrifying stint in a police cell at age six was most likely traumatic. However, I wonder if the legacy of the Ripper murders might have contributed substantially to his early sense of anxiety and fear, and terrorising his fans was a reaction to (Terr might say an urge to re-enact) being terrorised himself by the very idea of Jack. We now know even stars and stars’ daughters didn’t escape that terrorisation. He once sent Melanie Griffith, daughter of Tippi Hedren, a small doll of her mother in a coffin. The practical joker perhaps showed a stunted development, a part of him that was still the powerless little boy. Call me Hitch, he would joke, I have no cock. (But is that because his cock means sin, and sin means murder?)

At the end of his life, in going back to his roots to make Frenzy, was he returning to the setting of the central nightmare of his childhood? Did he take time to walk those streets of Whitechapel, I wonder, to see if he was still afraid? Whether his storytelling helped him exorcise or merely exercise his own terrors, we can never know. But, indisputably, Hitchcock helped Jack enter our culture, and now he’s ubiquitous. From Channel 5 documentaries to graphic novels to Penny Dreadful. From pub signs to walking tours. From lyrics by Nick Cave to Spike Milligan’s Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town. Perhaps Mr H, inspired by his childhood bogeyman, more than anybody made the lodger become real for millions of cinemagoers. Elusive Ripper to ubiquitous slasher in one easy lesson. Or one lifetime of terror.

Stephen Volk’s novella about Hitchcock’s childhood is available now from Spectral Press.

www.stephenvolk.net

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

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IT KNOWS WHAT SCARES YOU

Lately, I’ve been thinking about fear.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. Or this one: I recognise terror as the finest emotion…and so I will try to terrorise the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify, and if I find I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m willing to bet that few horror aficionados will fail to recognise the oft-repeated words of Mr Lovecraft and Mr King. But how is fear achieved in horror fiction, and what purpose does it serve?

When it comes to scares, horror fans fall into two categories. There are those who expect horror to scare them and who consider a work of horror a failure if it does not do so and those who consider fear as an optional side dish to the main entrée that might be better described as unsettling, disturbing, unnerving, creepy, reality-bending, weird. Stories may produce a chill or frisson that is not quite fear – but that effect might well be more profound and longer-lasting.

Anyone who’s read this column for a while can probably guess that I fall into the second category. Both sides are passionate on this point because those of us who consider fear a secondary and not always necessary aspect of horror fiction think the other position is reductionist. Those who fall into the first category think the rest of us are ruining it by watering down the genre with kindlier, gentler, tamer stories, but I would argue that the destabilising sense that great horror can produce without necessarily invoking scares per se is even more challenging to the status quo.

All the same, nearly everyone who loves horror also loves being scared. For me, and this is purely a matter of personal taste, it’s the supernatural scares that I love best. There is something irresistible in being returned temporarily to that credible childhood state in which ghosts and monsters could be real.

Even non-supernatural horror films often derive their power from a killer who at least figuratively seems to be the bogeyman, as John Carpenter understood in Halloween. It’s also why The Silence of the Lambs crosses the line into horror from crime; Hannibal Lecter is so monstrous, so much larger than life, that he becomes in effect a supernatural monster.

But how do you scare an audience?

Writing with the intent to scare can be a lot like writing to titillate a reader or to make a reader laugh: these states all tend to be triggered by idiosyncratic and intensely personal words and imagery. And since 99.9% of me is a relentless sceptic with absolutely no belief at all in the supernatural, it’s difficult to scare me in this way, as much as I enjoy it. That brilliant wave of horror from Japan and Korea that included Ringu, Ju-on and A Tale of Two Sisters all did it for me, before the creepy ghouls of Asian cinema began to seem as tired as much of the worn-out imagery in English-language horror films. I still find David Lynch’s forays into horror to be straight-up nightmare material: the imagery and disorientation of Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive and Twin Peaks. Mike Flanagan’s Absentia, with its quiet spots and see-almost-nothing approach to a cosmic horror, had me turning and looking back over my shoulder several times the first time I watched it.

Then there’s fiction: a passage in the Ramsey Campbell story ‘The Sentinels’ in which one character amid a circle of standing stones says to another, I keep seeing something running round the edge of the circle…it’s never there when I look at it directly that always leaves me cold. There is a moment in a Jonathan Aycliffe novel – I cannot remember which one – when a character reaches a hand out from their bed at night and touches someone’s hair, and I still have nights when I am trying to fall asleep when I suddenly think how horrible that would be. I also found parts of Adam Nevill’s The Ritual despairingly dreadful and chilling, particularly some of the hikers’ earliest discoveries of the remnants of the worship of something terrible and ancient.

Far too many makers of horror films seem to think the answer to the question of how to evoke fear is jump scares. In fact, the common denominator in most of these is the unexpected, and a sense of something that cannot be known, and only understood in parts at best – and I have argued, in these pages and elsewhere, that familiarity is anathema to horror. Clive Barker once stated, crediting Wes Craven for the original idea, that a horror film should make the viewer feel they are in the hands of a madman; I think Barker and Craven meant something more along the lines of there are no limits but for me, this means I want to feel as though my sense of reality is no longer something I can trust. When I look away from a film or the pages of a book, I want the world to look different as well, skewed. Above all, there is a sense of wrongness, of something violating the natural order of things. I have always thought this passage from Arthur Machen’s ‘The White People’ does an excellent job of describing terror:

‘Then, on the other hand, we underrate evil…we have quite forgotten the awfulness of real sin.’

‘And what is sin?’ said Cotgrave.

‘I think I must reply to your question by another. What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning? Well, these examples may give you some notion of what sin really is.’

Then there are the personal fears that horror makes into powerful metaphor. For me, there are two, both very common: the idea that my loved ones will change in awful ways, and the loss of self. That’s possession, one of horror’s stalwart tropes, in a nutshell, with a side dash of my beloved Invasion of the Body Snatchers and some vampires and zombies to round it out.

I suppose, then, the function of fear in horror is at least fourfold.

In its finest form, fear evokes a sense of transcendence: the sin described by Arthur Machen. This is not always linked with the natural world and not always climactic; the opening paragraph of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, for example, gives me this same sense. At another level entirely, it is, perversely, fun to be afraid in what is ultimately a safe environment. A third purpose, related to this, is one of catharsis. I don’t entirely hold with catharsis as an explanation for the appeal of horror because I think it is too simplistic, but it has its place, and a relative of mine has told me of falling back in love in horror again when she was undergoing chemotherapy because no matter how horrific her own experiences were, she was still better off than the people in the novels she was