Black Static #68 (March-April 2019)

By TTA Press

This March-April issue contains new cutting edge horror fiction by Stephen Volk, Tim Lees, Kay Chronister, David Martin, Amanda J. Bermudez, and Tom Johnstone. The cover art is 'Memento' by Joachim Luetke, and interior illustrations are by Joachim Luetke, Dave Senecal, Ben Baldwin, and Richard Wagner. Regular features: Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore; Notes from the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker; Case Notes book reviews by Georgina Bruce, Mike O'Driscoll, Laura Mauro, Daniel Carpenter, Andrew Hook, Philip Fracassi, and David Surface; Blood Spectrum film reviews by Gary Couzens.

The cover art is 'Memento' by Joachim Luetke

Fiction:

Unchain the Beast by Stephen Volk
illustrated by Ben Baldwin

In a Dry Season by David Martin
illustrated by Dave Senecal

Totenhaus by Amanda J. Bermudez

Roiling and Without Form by Kay Chronister
illustrated by Joachim Luetke

The Stop-Tap by Tim Lees

The Beast in the Palace by Tom Johnstone
illustrated by Richard Wagner

Columns:

Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker
WHY HORROR?

Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore
BOTH EYES BLINKING BACK

Reviews:

Case Notes: Book Reviews

Mike O'Driscoll: The Worst is Yet to Come by S.P. Miskowski • Andrew Hook: The Suicide Machine by Douglas Thompson • Daniel Carpenter: The Devil Aspect by Craig Russell • Philip Fracassi: The Pale Ones by Bartholomew Bennett • Georgina Bruce: The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh • David Surface, One Good Story: How Can I Get in Touch With Persia? by Janet Frame • Laura Mauro: The Monsters are Due in Madison Square Garden by Tom Johnstone

Blood Spectrum: Film Reviews by Gary Couzens

Russian Doll • Possum • Horror Express • William Castle at Columbia, Volume Two • Berserk • Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte • Halloween • Parents • Class of 1999 • The Unholy • Laura • Human Desire • Boar • Videoman • The Possessed • The Fifth Cord • Before We Vanish • Climax • Dave Made a Maze • Venom • The Predator

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Mar 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463489260

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 68

MARCH–APRIL 2019

© 2019 Black Static and its contributors

PUBLISHER

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

website: ttapress.com

email: [e-mail]

shop: shop.ttapress.com

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

EDITOR

Andy Cox

[e-mail]

STORY PROOFREADER

Peter Tennant

FILMS

Gary Couzens

[e-mail]

EVENTS (CONVENTIONS ETC)

Roy Gray

[e-mail]

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 68 MARCH-APRIL 2019

TTA PRESS

COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2019

PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

CONTENTS

Memento-bw.tif

COVER ART

MEMENTO

JOACHIM LUETKE

lyndarucker-contents.tif

WHY HORROR?

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

RalphRobertMoore-contents.tif

BOTH EYES BLINKING BACK

INTO THE WOODS

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

Unchain the Beast.tif

NOVELETTE ILLUSTRATED BY BEN BALDWIN

UNCHAIN THE BEAST

STEPHEN VOLK

dryseason_FINAL.tif

STORY ILLUSTRATED BY DAVE SENECAL

IN A DRY SEASON

DAVID MARTIN

totenhaus-auto.tif

STORY

TOTENHAUS

AMANDA J. BERMUDEZ

Roiling_and_Without_Form.tif

STORY ILLUSTRATED BY JOACHIM LUETKE

ROILING AND WITHOUT FORM

KAY CHRONISTER

stoptap-bg-notext.tif

STORY

THE STOP-TAP

TIM LEES

the beast (2).tif

NOVELETTE ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD WAGNER

THE BEAST IN THE PALACE

TOM JOHNSTONE

The-Worst-is-Yet-to-Come-contents.tif

BOOK REVIEWS

CASE NOTES

LAURA MAURO, GEORGINA BRUCE, PHILIP FRACASSI, DANIEL CARPENTER & OTHERS

FILM REVIEWS

possum-contents.tif

BLOOD SPECTRUM

GARY COUZENS

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

lyndarucker3supercropped.tif

WHY HORROR?

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a horror movie in my life. What attracts you to horror? someone asked me recently. I did what I always did when someone asks me a question like that and panicked. And I kind of staggered through an answer that included phrases like well horror’s not just a guy in the woods with a machete (but sometimes it is! and it’s awesome!) and words like psychological (why am I trying so hard to make myself respectable here?) and, really, I just failed all around. Later on I thought, We horror people need an elevator pitch for when that question comes up.

I hate the phrase elevator pitch. Nothing good comes from thinking of your art as something you can package and make as slick as possible to maximize consumption. On the other hand, sometimes people might actually enjoy what you’re hiding down there in that dodgy-looking basement, if only you could get them to drop their guard and lure them into the dark. So what’s a horror writer to do?

It isn’t the first time I’ve pondered the question of what do we call what we do and how do we explain it to outsiders here, but I keep circling back to it because it keeps coming up and I don’t seem to get any closer to an answer.

"The Shining isn’t really about a haunted hotel. It’s about addiction." That’s a paraphrase of something I read online the other day. This is one of the things we sometimes do to avoid calling something horror. It’s really about family dysfunction. It’s really about relationships. The way people say these things, I half expect them to next stand there, incredulous, hand on hip going, "Wait, there were ghosts/monsters/demons in my book/movie? Really? I—I didn’t even notice! I swear I was just making a thoughtful coming-of-age story, I have no idea how those pesky zombies got into this sensitive tale of first love."

You put that stuff in there because you love it or because you cynically thought an audience would love it. And the audience is definitely there for that stuff, whatever they might say otherwise. If you want to watch a film or read a book about coming of age, or family dysfunction, or addiction, there’s plenty out there that does not include ghosts, monsters or cosmic beings from another dimension.

I’m being deliberately polemical here. I am exaggerating, sort of, to make a point. Of course horror stories are better when they are about something other than and they were scared and they ran and the monster ate them, the end. The Shining is certainly about addiction, among other things.

But the fact remains: if I say that’s what makes those stories great I’m being a little coy and disingenuous, because there are plenty of films and books – great ones – that tell stories about those things without a hint of monsters.

If I say Horror metaphors can produce insights in a way that other types of stories can’t, I’m getting closer.

But the truth is that I just like the ghosts. I like being disturbed. If you can actually scare me – and that almost never happens – even better.

"But why would you want to be scared?"

That’s a really good question. Why, indeed?

Sometimes the call is coming from inside the horror house. Does reading a book or watching a movie about a serial killer mean we are participating in the glorification of serial killers? Is there a right way and a wrong way to tell these stories? This gets tricky. As a woman who often (but not always) identifies with female victims in horror stories and films and real-life crime stories, there’s a point at which violence on screen or on the page can feel very personal. I used to read a lot of books about serial killers and simultaneously, as a young woman – the perfect serial killer victim – I actually developed a fairly irrational anxiety about them. I imagine that dying at the hands of a serial killer or even a run-of-the-mill murderer is probably statistically not very likely; all the same, even to this day, I sometimes feel nervous sleeping in houses (so easy to climb through a window!) and I don’t know that I’d ever rent a ground-floor apartment.

But I also think about that shadow: how do you cross that line? How do you take a life? How do you then try to return to some kind of normalcy? Those are the people who fascinate me the most – the ones who maintain some semblance of a normal life. It’s the most extreme expression of the little justifications we all employ when we do things we know we shouldn’t. How far would any of us push that justification?

Comments like Well they are evil or This is ordinary, this is awful run-of-the-mill violence and we should look away, we shouldn’t feed it don’t satisfy me. I don’t believe in a free-floating entity called evil. I can’t help it. I want to scrape beneath the rot and see what’s underneath, even if it really is just an abyss. It’s fine if you don’t want to follow me there, can’t fathom why I’d want to go there, or even think I’m some terribly misguided, morally deficient person.

In the end, maybe you’re right, because I really couldn’t tell you why I want to go there either.

Why horror? Why do you want to be scared?

Back in the 1980s and 1990s in particular, Clive Barker was a really terrific ambassador for horror. He spoke about it so eloquently and so passionately, and I always think of him when someone asks me why and wish I could summon that same eloquence and passion instead of panicking when I’m asked these questions.

All of these things are true: the metaphors are powerful; the space it gives us to explore death and loss and grief is profound; and there’s that twist I associate with writers like Shirley Jakcson and Robert Aickman, where mundane landscapes are injected with the smallest hint of wrongness, sending everything askew, that captures the way the world feels to me all the time.

It’s all of that, and when I first had the idea to write this column, I thought that in the course of writing it I would find my way to that elevator speech and I’d finally, finally, have a fast and breezy and persuasive reply to that why.

But the truth is that I like horror stories because I like horror stories. What lots of people find heartwarming or romantic I find genuinely awful and grim and – horrifying, in all the wrong ways. So much of it feels like lies. Give me the witches of Suspiria – both versions, thanks very much – the streets and buildings of San Francisco turned occult temples in Fritz Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness, Caitlin R. Kiernan’s monstrous The Red Tree, the thing in the church basement in John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness and the pagan atrocities of The Wicker Man, Max Schrek or Klaus Kinski skulking about as Nosferatu, Isabel Adjani going mad in the subway in Possession and Robert Blake, the Mystery Man, laughing endlessly at a party that just might be taking place in hell.

How on earth do you say all that in an elevator pitch? How do you articulate the power of decades – centuries – of stories that give us free reign to explore and embrace that darkness inside ourselves and others? Maybe we horror fans all have a little bit of Eleanor Vance in us, and we don’t really want to leave the halls of Hill House, ever. Maybe next time I’ll paraphrase what the Pablo Neruda poem says to a lover: I love it as certain dark things are to be loved. Because it really is the old dilemma of dancing about architecture. We tell stories in the first place – about everything – because they convey something uniquely, in a way no other approach can.

Maybe, next time, I’ll just say, Do you want to read a story?

INTO THE WOODS

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

RalphRobertMoore-woods2.tif

BOTH EYES BLINKING BACK

I always tense up when someone makes a telephone call on a TV show or in a movie. Don’t you? Because I know they’re going to disappoint me. I’m thinking, Please don’t say the telephone number. Please don’t say the telephone number. But they always do. Yes, and the number is [area code]-555— And they’ve lost me.

It’s as bad as when some actor lifts a pair of binoculars up to her or his eyes, and in the point of view of the magnification we see double circles, a figure eight lying on its side.

Because that’s not the view you get through binoculars. If you look through binoculars, you see a single circle. Not two circles side by side. So that tells me the movie maker doesn’t care about details. They’re just going through the motions. I lose interest.

The three digits after the area code are known as the ‘central office prefix’ in the United States. There is no central office prefix for 555 followed by the final four digits of 0100 through 0199, and so movies and TV shows use it all the time (so no one calls a real number), which immediately tells you what you’re watching is fake. And lazy.

I read somewhere once that cats respond to you blinking at them with both your eyes. Apparently, according to this long-ago article, it means, I love you.

Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t.

But I started doing it with all our cats. The only cat who responded to my blinkings was Sheba. He was a loner, hiding in our backyard, at the base of a stand of green canna, but he’d come out each evening when we got home from work in the city to be petted and cooed at by us. Ignoring the food we set out for him until we went back inside, leaving him out there on his lonesome as the wide sky overhead darkened.

Once Summer ended, and the nights got colder, we decided to take him inside. Because otherwise he would freeze to death in the lowering temperatures. By then we had a lot of other cats, and none of them liked him. He’d try to pal up to them, and they’d reject him.

I saw him go up to them one day, all those different-colored paws on the carpet, different sets of whiskers, and it must have taken a great deal of courage to make that padding approach, I guess it worried him that they weren’t accepting him, and he blinked both his eyes at them, just like I taught him to do.

And they didn’t blink back.

Poor, lonely Sheba.

He got a little bit neurotic after that.

Who could blame him?

One morning, I raised my head off my white pillow in response to a loud cracking sound outside our bedroom window. In the heavy winds, a tree had fallen across the paths in our backyard. Little vulnerable Sheba, on the white carpet in our bedroom, swung his orange head up towards me in bed, blinking his worried blue eyes. Is it okay, Daddy?

I blinked back with both my eyes. It’s okay, Sheba.

Details are important, and they need to be authentic. Know what turns me off when I’m watching a horror movie? Someone has to escape in their car, twist their key in the ignition, and the engine keeps turning over, without starting. Or a woman is fleeing in the woods, suddenly falls, sprawling across the path, has trouble getting up again from the dirt and the leaves as her pursuer gets closer.

How many times has that been done already? The movie maker is lazy. He or she is just going through the motions. Thinking about lunch.

Life is details. That’s what we remember. That’s what makes an account real. Not the big events, marriages, births, deaths, but the small details. Who touches this, touches a man.

One time while Mary and I were living in the San Francisco area, in San Mateo, we met midday for lunch, bought a pair of delicious white-wrapped roast beef sandwiches at a local deli, and slid into a slot at a nearby park, one with oversized goldfish in the central pond, listening to our car radio, telling each other about our day so far, crunching our teeth through our rolls, down through the crust into the moistness and the meat, when a gray pickup maneuvered into the slot ahead of us, the driver hopped out, lowered the gate at the rear of his pickup, pulled down a long plywood board, slanting it to the tar of the road, then helped an enthusiastic three-legged dog tap down that plywood slant, steady itself on the tar roadway, then go frisking lopsidedly across the green grass of the park. That’s an authentic detail. Just saying in your story two lovers ‘loved each other’ is not an authentic detail.

After Sheba died, we gradually lost a lot of our other cats. They died on a towel between us on our bed, or in our arms, or in one case in my armpit. Doesn’t matter. They all died.

Thor was the only male cat from Lady’s litter.

He was ‘my’ cat, just like other cats were Mary’s. I think it was a male bonding thing. He was the only male cat in the household; I was the only male human in the household. But I may be wrong.

I tried the both eyes blinking thing with him, for years, and he just ignored it. Ignoring what humans want you to do is a cat thing, right?

Then one time years and years later, when he was no longer a kitten, but now an older cat who wasn’t quite as spry as he once had been, with more than a touch of gray about him, we were lying in bed together, an ordinary day, watching the weather report on TV, and he raised his head, looked up at me, as he never had before, and very deliberately