Black Static #76 (September-October 2020)

By TTA Press

The September-October 2020 issue contains new cutting edge horror stories and novelettes by Rhonda Pressley Veit, Lucie McKnight Hardy, Abi Hynes, Tim Cooke, and Stephen Hargadon. The cover art is by Richard Wagner, and interior illustrations are by Ben Baldwin, Richard Wagner, 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 David Surface, Georgina Bruce, Daniel Carpenter, Philip Fracassi, and Laura Mauro who also interviews Chris Kelso; Blood Spectrum film reviews by Gary Couzens.

The cover art is 'Pestilence' by Richard Wagner

Fiction:

Fatal Memory by Rhonda Pressley Veit
illustrated by Ben Baldwin

Resting Bitch Face by Lucie McKnight Hardy
illustrated by Richard Wagner

Phantasmagoria by Abi Hynes

Nights at the Factory by Tim Cooke
illustrated by Vincent Sammy

The Stationery Cupboard by Stephen Hargadon

Columns:

Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker

Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore

Reviews:

Case Notes: Books

Philip Fracassi: Survivor Song by Paul Tremblay • Laura Mauro: The Dregs Trilogy by Chris Kelso + Chris Kelso interviewed • Daniel Carpenter: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia • David Surface: One Good Story: Reassurance by Allan Gurganus • Georgina Bruce: Regret by Robert Stone + The Wash by Daniel Gothard + Trick of the Light by Andrew Humphrey + Hide by Roberta Dewa + The Illiterate Ghost by Alan Price

Blood Spectrum: Film Reviews by Gary Couzens

Snowpiercer • The Vast of Night • The Lighthouse • Little Joe • Hagazussa • Revenge • The Woman • The Vanishing (Spoorloos) • Black Rainbow • After Midnight • The Beast Must Die • Mr. Vampire • Throwdown • The Grudge • Inferno of Torture • Blood Tide

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Sep 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005296209

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 76

SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2020

© 2020 Black Static and its contributors

PUBLISHER

TTA Press

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]

FILMS

Gary Couzens

[e-mail]

STORY PROOFREADER

Peter Tennant

SHOP

New subscriptions and 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

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 76 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2020

TTA PRESS

COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2020

PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

CONTENTS

bs (cover art 4b) BW.tif

COVER ART

PESTILENCE

RICHARD WAGNER

the-fly3-contents.tif

THE DAYS THE EARTH STOOD STILL

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

bob2contents.tif

A MAN SLIPS ON A BANANA PEEL

INTO THE WOODS

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

Fatal Memory.tif

NOVELETTE ILLUSTRATED BY BEN BALDWIN

FATAL MEMORY

RHONDA PRESSLEY VEIT

bitch face.tif

STORY ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD WAGNER

RESTING BITCH FACE

LUCIE McKNIGHT HARDY

dance-dark.tif

STORY

PHANTASMAGORIA

ABI HYNES

nights at the factory-artwork - FINAL.tif

STORY ILLUSTRATED BY VINCENT SAMMY

NIGHTS AT THE FACTORY

TIM COOKE

stationery-cupboard-2.tif

NOVELETTE

THE STATIONERY CUPBOARD

STEPHEN HARGADON

the-vast-of-night-contents.tif

FILM REVIEWS

BLOOD SPECTRUM

GARY COUZENS

dregs contents.tif

BOOK REVIEWS

CASE NOTES

CHRIS KELSO INTERVIEWED

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

lyndarucker3supercropped.tif

THE DAYS THE EARTH STOOD STILL

Horror is the fiction of trauma. I’ve always felt that the real fear at its heart comes less from the specifics in the story than that cracking open of reality, the sudden understanding of how illusory any sense of stability is. In that regard, it reflects the human condition: that no matter how comfortable and charmed your life may have been, if you live long enough, you, too, will live through that event, get that devastating phone call, that delivers the same appalling knowledge.

Fifteen years ago, after the death of my father, I said to someone how strange it is that the most profound and wrenching experiences of our lives are shared by all of us, and yet we go about as though we aren’t the walking wounded. It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, my first experience of having the world ripped asunder, but it was one of the first times that something so universal caused it, something that reverberates across time and cultures. It had been a different shock when my grandfather died when I was ten. Even though he’d had cancer for a while, I still remember the unbelievable moment my father told me he had died: until that moment, I had been certain, without articulating it exactly, that me and mine would live forever. And yet it does nothing to help us understand one another any better, these primal wounds. We paper over them and we go out into the world and live as though we don’t know it could all be taken away from us in under a second. What choice do we have?

Much rarer are the events we live through collectively, as a planet. We’re still in the thick of strange days – stranger than when I wrote my last column, in fact, as the fact of the semi-permanence (or permanence?) of our new world settles into our bones. I’ve been trying to think how long it’s been since something happened that affected the whole world, for such a sustained period of time. Blinkered, it’s not uncommon for we Americans to mistake ourselves for the world; and of course while many events have ripple effects, surely not since World War II has the entire globe been consumed in this way in the same disaster. That war was the other bookend to the First, the War to End All Wars, and in between them were the global disasters of the Spanish flu pandemic (relegated to a footnote in history till now, amid all the other cataclysms of the first half of the 20th century) and the Depression. Across roughly four decades, virtually the whole world quaked with shock after shock before countries and allegiances retreated to their various corners to nurse colder, subtler rivalries.

Now, as I write this in the strangest June I have ever known, I wonder how long it will be before we emerge on the other side. Of course, there is no other side; there is no portal, no door in the wall, no walk out of the world, alas. There is just life, continuing on. There are just days and nights and days and nights and another change of season. We feel the passage of time keenly now, like a sore or broken tooth we can’t stop tonguing; keenly but not accurately. When every day is so much like the previous one, and the future is so uncertain, time does its own thing, expanding and contracting as it pleases.

It’s only our calendars and clocks, that impose a structure on it all: a before and an after, and no way to really know whether what is significant today will still be when we look back on it later. The time when the world stopped: I guess that will always loom large, for those of us who lived through it, because it was the thing we were always told could never be done, especially the engines of capital grinding to a halt. But time does move inexorably on, and what will be strange for all of us is how quickly that will happen: how soon your memories of this time will be subsumed by people growing up behind us who have no memory, who were not even born yet. How quickly this thing that was so big, so significant, so all-encompassing, the whole world, will fall away, will be that thing that happened once, to them. And it’s corollary: it happened to them, but it could never happen to us. Their own stories will start to unfold and with them at the centre, while our tragedy will retreat. How our Depression-era grandparents or great-grandparents or great-great grandparents must have felt, looking at us, our bafflement and amusement that they saved everything, pieces of foil and newspaper and bits of metal, just in case. Their distrust of institutions. My grandmother used to spend sweltering Georgia summers in the 1970s canning fruit and vegetables like she was preparing to feed an army; my grandfather hid $20 notes in old books. The Depression mentality, we’d call it, laughing, rolling our eyes. I find the notion of generations, as a way of understanding people, almost entirely without value, but any group of people of any age who live through a collective trauma are marked by it. We will perhaps be the generations who internalized a constant fear of disease we’d have associated – however inaccurately – with medieval times. Will we ever take off our masks, travel without distress, gather in any kind of significant numbers in public again?

Of course, gay men who lived through the worst of the HIV/AIDS crisis have been here before – and it’s little wonder that some critics found fertile soil for arguing that horror films such as David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly were disease fables. But a pandemic is not just about body horror, although there’s plenty of that to be found in COVID-19, if you can stand reading it. It’s a cosmic horror, a scouring away of what we thought we knew – that the world could not just stop.

And yet, here we are.

***

Eco-horror? We’ve got that too. The earth is healing itself, headlines intoned somewhat piously – how distant we were then, just weeks ago, from current news reports of literal tons of rubbish hauled off of UK beaches. I wonder how many people remember the John Skipp and Craig Spector splattery eco-horror extravaganza The Bridge – it had a 1991 publication date but all the hallmarks of a full-on 1980s horror novel, for better and worse. If I recall the plot correctly, toxic waste basically becomes sentient and sets out to eliminate mankind once and for all. Early indications in the US and the UK at least are that not only will the planet’s convalescence be dangerously short, but that humans have every intention of roaring back into normal activity with a vengeance. We are not by any stretch of the imagination the only species that wrecks our ecosystem when left unchecked, but we are the only one that knows better and does it anyway.

It is a heartbreakingly human thing to do. I listened to a podcast recently about midsummer rituals that linked American spring break bacchanals and Ibizian debauchery to ancient frenzied celebrations of the seasonal change – and these happen in normal times. When the whole world – not our internal world, not our locale or our country but the entire world – seems on the brink of shattering around us, when it seems inevitable that despite everything, the monsters will come for us after all – it’s little wonder people give way to excess.

Horror, at its best, reminds us we can’t return, ever, to the status quo. Even if we right the world, we can’t escape what we’ve learned about our unspeakable frailty. That’s where horror stories end. We don’t know what the characters go on to do with their terrible newfound knowledge, but we’re about to find out.

INTO THE WOODS

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

RalphRobertMoore-woods2.tif

A MAN SLIPS ON A BANANA PEEL

Twenty years ago, when Mary and I were still working in ceiling-lit offices in Dallas, we were driving home one night on 75 Central, an eight-lane highway running north and south through the city, when hands on the steering wheel I realized there was something other than a car on the road up ahead. I was expecting to only see traffic, so it took me a moment to realize what was rolling and bouncing from lane to lane up ahead was a huge bundle of cellophane.

As we got closer to its bouncings I slowed down, trying to anticipate if it was going to roll across our lane again, to avoid it. Which is when I realized there was a motorcycle caught up in the cellophane, both tumbling over and around each other, but now a motorcycle helmet also appeared, and what was left of the cellophane turned into a human body, tumbling head over boots over and over again down the highway, sometimes above, sometimes below, his motorcycle, until both landed for the last time on the lane.

I pulled up behind the body, braking to keep the cars behind me from running him over, my right thumb punching on our car’s hazard lights. The motorcyclist rose to his feet, looking confused. A young Latino, fortunately with his helmet still on. His only apparent physical wound a long, ruby abrasion on his left forearm. He must have thrown his forearm out in front of his terrified face as he hit the pavement and started bouncing at fifty miles an hour down the road. I asked him if he was all right. He stared through me, going into shock. Brown irises widening. A woman raced over from where she had parked in the breakdown lane. Said she was a nurse. Looked him over quickly, then walked him over to the shoulder, watching where his feet stepped.

I don’t know what caused his accident. I don’t know if a car hit him, or if he looked in the passing lane, saw nothing, and started passing, colliding with, for example, a straight-backed chair that fell off the bed of a pick-up truck, landing in the middle of the lane, where a straight-backed chair isn’t supposed to be, and so was, therefore, unexpected.

Sometimes we can’t see what is right in front of us, because we don’t expect to see it. If a giraffe walked its tallness past the windshield of your car at a red light, I guarantee you, you wouldn’t realize it was a giraffe at first, even though you know exactly what a giraffe looks like. Because no one expects to see a giraffe walking past their front windshield.

A psychotherapist who’s just had a book published is looking forward to a family vacation. During that vacation, he’s going to be interviewed on live TV by Good Morning America, one of the most popular morning news shows. Just before he leaves on vacation, he agrees to accept a new patient, a particularly needy individual. The patient finds out where the doctor is vacationing, and shows up at his home on the eve of the all-important live TV interview. Charms his way inside. Ingratiates himself with the psychotherapist’s family, to the point where, after a heavy rainfall starts just as the patient is about to leave, the psychotherapist’s wife invites the patient to spend the night in their home. Sleeping in their young son’s room. That night, the patient teaches the young boy a number of new swear words.

The next day, the patient is asked by the TV show’s producer to sit in, on camera, during the psychotherapist’s live TV interview. He easily dominates the interview, becoming its star, the doctor in the shadows. Gradually takes over the family. The psychotherapist ends up in an institute, and the patient? He starts dating, eventually marries, the psychotherapist’s beloved sister, the one person the psychotherapist holds most dear. At their wedding, the psychotherapist loses it, babbling.

So, an effective horror movie, right? Except it wasn’t marketed as that. It was marketed as a comedy. What About Bob?, starring Bill Murray as the