Black Static #33 Horror Magazine

By TTA Press

Black Static is the 2011 and 2012 British Fantasy Award winning bimonthly horror and dark fantasy short story magazine from TTA Press, publisher of Interzone and Crimewave. Black Static contains groundbreaking dark fiction by some of the world's best writers and most talented newcomers, plus hard-hitting features and innovative artwork. Many recognised authors and artists started their careers in TTA publications and new ones like V.H. Leslie, and Ilan Lerman, continue this tradition. However their better recognised peers; Ramsey Campbell, Joel Lane, Nicholas Royle, Nina Allan continue to supply great stories.

Books reviewed in this issue are
Knock Knock and Delphine Dodd by S.P. Miskowski plus author interview
Zombies at Tiffany’s by Sam Stone
Coldbrook by Tim Lebbon
The Late Great Creature by Brock Brower
Ghoul Warning & Other Omens by Brian Lumley
The Nine Deaths of Dr. Valentine by John Llewellyn Probert
Trinity by Kristin Dearborn
The Hoard by Alan Ryker
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ANTHOLOGIES
The Best Horror of the Year Volume Four editor Ellen Datlow
A Feast of Frights From The Horror Zine editors by Jeani Rector and Dean H. Wild,
A Season in Carcosa Edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
Black Wings II Edited by S.T. Joshi

Movies reviewed in this issue are
FEAR ITSELF
HOLY MOTORS
RESIDENT EVIL: RETRIBUTION
CHAINED
ANTIVIRAL
SINISTER
LOST GIRL
RUST AND BONE
ROOM 237
THE TALL MAN
SILENT HILL: REVELATION
DRACULA
BLACK SUNDAY
LISA AND THE DEVIL
FROM BEYOND

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Apr 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301938452

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

#33

A magazine of horror and dark fantasy.

Cover:

by Richard Wagner

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Black Static

Issue 33 (MAR - APR 2013)

Print edition ISSN 1753-0709 © 2013 Black Static and its contributors

Published bimonthly by TTA Press

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

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Website: ttapress.com

Email: [e-mail]

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TTA Press on Smashwords ISBN: 9781301938452

First draft v2 RG

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Editor: Andy Cox

Contributing Editors: Peter Tennant, Tony Lee, Christopher Fowler, Stephen Volk, Mike O’Driscoll

Podcast: Pete Bullock, transmissionsfrombeyond.com

Twitter + Facebook: Marc-Anthony Taylor, facebook.com/TTAPress

Events/Publicity/E editions: Roy Gray

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Print issue retail distribution: Pineapple Media, pineapple-media.com; Central Books, centralbooks.com

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Smashwords Edition License Notes

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 are reading this magazine and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please go to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the contributors and editors

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To obtain the print edition of Black Static in Europe or North America where your retailer may not stock it please ask them to order it for you, or buy it from one of several online mail order distributors...or, better yet, subscribe direct with us!

Subscriptions: Print edition subscriptions available online at ttapress.com/shop

Note we have some illustrations in this edition and you can also see these at http://ttapress.com/1604/black-static-33/0/5/

Unsolicited submissions of short stories are always welcome. Please follow the contributors’ guidelines on the website.

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Text repeated in Editorial Notes

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EDITORIAL NOTES

COMMENT/COLUMNS

COFFINMAKER'S BLUES - by Stephen Volk

INTERFERENCE - by Christopher Fowler

FICTION

STRAY DOGS by James Cooper

novelette illustrated by Vincent Sammy

DUST STORMS by Tim Casson

story illustrated by Tara Bush

RAIN FROM A CLEAR BLUE SKY by Andrew Hook

story illustrated by David Gentry

SIGNS OF THE TIMES by Carole Johnstone

novelette illustrated by Richard Wagner

SOMETIMES EVERYTHING GETS SO STRANGE IT STARTS TO MAKE SENSE by Gary McMahon

story illustrated by Joachim Luetke

TURN THE PAGE story by Michael Kelly

REVIEWS

SILVER BULLETS - TV Reviews by Mike O'Driscoll

CASE NOTES - book reviews by Peter Tennant

BLOOD SPECTRUM - DVD/Blu-ray reviews by Tony Lee

NOTES TO THE READER – links etc.

BACKPAGE

EDITORIAL NOTES –

All is Flux, Nothing Stays Still

Flux is an occasional fiction supplement that we’ll be sending out FREE to subscribers of Black Static + Interzone in print. The first Flux will be ‘The Short, Glamorous Career of Aquaman & His Amazing Aquacide Machine’ by Tyler Keevil.

The second Flux will be ‘The Bigfoot House’ by Tim Lees. The cover illustrations/design for Flux are by David Gentry, who is also responsible for that fly you sometimes see hovering about here.

No decision on E book versions yet.

To add Interzone to your Black Static in print subscription simply select the Dual Subscription option on the online shop (ttapress.com/shop) or inserted order form. If you ever have any queries just send an email to [e-mail] or any of the individuals listed in Endnotes, or raise them on the Interaction forum (ttapress.com/forum)or TTA Press facebook/twitter.

By the time you receive this issue the second TTA Novella – Spin by Nina Allan – will be at press or complete, and should be ready to send out in the next Interzone/Black Static print mailing in May. If you’ve already subscribed to TTA Novellas you need do nothing more. The original subscription offer is still running – £25 for five novellas, post-free to anywhere in the world – but you can of course buy Spin and any other novella singly if you prefer. Again, just select the appropriate option on the online shop or on any order form. We hope readers enjoy Spin, Flux, and BS. Please let us know! Eyepennies, the first of the novellas is out as an e book now.

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We are delighted to welcome Lynda E. Rucker to the Black Static team. Many of you will know Lynda from her short stories published here and elsewhere, and from next issue (#34, May) she’ll also be contributing a column to the magazine’s Comment section.

Sadly, this issue sees the final Interference column from Chris Fowler, as he’s currently snowed under with work. Our sincere thanks to Chris for many great columns over many years, and we hope he’ll be able to return one day.

The print magazine often starts a story with a double page spread incorporating the illustration, titles and the first paragraph of the story text. As an experiment, and to give a flavour of the print edition, we are including some of these in this E book. As much of that 'incorporated text' will be unreadable on some devices we will repeat it 'outwith' the spread. So if you read this issue on a large screen don't be surprised if we seem to repeat a story's first paragraph. If you notice this please let me know your views.

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Internal hyperlinks I may have solved some of the problems I mentioned in earlier issues so I've continued to experiment. Again if you notice any changes please let me know your views.

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E-Edition (An Apology): This E edition of Black Static 33 has been uploaded later than I hoped but I had a good excuse and, at least, Black Static 34 (printed.) will not be published when this is uploaded. Please accept our apologies for delays. Keep checking Smashwords or Amazon for new issues. Thanks for your patience! This issue, #33, has been out in print since March 14.

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Another important development, as mentioned above, is TTA Novellas, works in the 20–40,000 word range, published as B Format paperbacks and available singly or on a cheaper subscription. The first of these Eyepennies by Mike O'Driscoll (of Silver Bullets) is now available as an e book, more here, and in print and Nina Allan's SPIN will be out in both formats in May.

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Our podcast site Transmissions from Beyond is likely to close soon so why not listen to a few stories when the opportunity presents. TFB has stories from Black Static, Interzone and Crimewave and they are all free to download.

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This issue's cover and backpage cover art is by Richard Wagner.

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The next print issue, Black Static 34, will be dated May/June

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Submissions of short stories are always welcome, but please follow the guidelines on the website.

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COFFINMAKER'S BLUES

by Stephen Volk

WHAT HAUNTS YOU

Nowadays, for me, it’s not enough to pitch and sell the familiar commercial genre fare I might have happily (and lucratively) done in the past. It feels like pressing my shoe into footprints I’ve already made. Even in a triple-dip recession, it’s time to dig deeper. To break out of the well-worn groove. To focus on the stories that matter. And part of that is scrolling back to the films that had a long lasting influence, trying to understand why that was so, doing work that acknowledges one’s debt to the great works and figures of the past. I wonder whether that journey, for writers in middle-age, is a need to find and examine what made us who we are.

Barry Forshaw, who’s writing a book about British Gothic Cinema, asked me to tell him my favourite film in the subgenre – The Devil Rides Out, as it happens, but if he was asking my favourite moment, I said, the answer would be entirely different.

That would have to be Peter Cushing’s fabulous Douglas Fairbanks run down the dining table and leap at the curtains in Dracula, the steely glare as he wields the crossed candlesticks, reducing Christopher Lee to ashes. Apparently Cushing himself came up with the candlestick idea to avoid his character looking like a travelling salesman of crucifixes when the script called for him to produce yet another from his pocket.

A model of that very pose sits facing me on my desk as I type – the crucifix aimed at my keyboard. It emblemises for me the heroic battler against the powers of darkness. Not just Hammer’s ubiquitous Victorian father fighting the unleashed sexual abandon of the sixties, but a celluloid incarnation of St Michael defeating Lucifer on the wall of Coventry Cathedral, an image I passed every day on my walk to college. Our Saint Peter.

When I saw Cushing interviewed on stage at the NFT in the eighties, I was proud to be part of the audience that gave him a standing ovation. He brought gravitas to a genre that often barely deserved it. He took his roles, however absurd, however silly, seriously – and for that we adored him.

I’d first seen him on screen, long before the Hammer classics, in BBC TV’s Sherlock Holmes (people forget that he was a television star before he was a movie star; his Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four shocked the nation, and in the fifties TV itself was called Peter Cushing with knobs on). As schoolboys we loved Doyle and we loved his Sherlock. Even in the age of Cumberbatch, some of us still consider it the one to beat, though for Peter it was a wholly negative experience, with little time for rehearsal, the intense burden of his wife Helen’s worsening health, plus the additional stress of being away from her, having to take the milk train from Kent to London.

They’d met in 1942 outside the stage door at Drury Lane when Peter, her beloved vagabond, was still struggling as an actor. She gave his father a piece of her mind when he called him a dead loss, and Peter, often crippled by self-doubt, was cuckoo about her. Far from the dry old stick of his film performances, he became utterly devoted to his soul mate. Helen was not only his true love and constant confidante but his most staunch supporter career-wise – at the expense of her own, a sacrifice for which Peter occasionally expressed a regret that was not reciprocated.

They bought a place in Whitstable from money earned on Hammer’s Hound of the Baskervilles. Later, at Helen’s request as she became ill – and on doctor’s orders for the beneficial sea air – moving to the white clapboard property on the seafront permanently.

She passed away in 1971 and it is no exaggeration to say Peter was devastated. For a period of time he shut himself off and became a recluse, turning down all offers of work. He even – as described in his candid autobiography – considered a muddled kind of suicide, only reconsidering the wisdom of such an act as he realised it might consign his soul to purgatory and thus prevent him from joining Helen in the hereafter. Nothing, for Peter, could have been more horrible.

A man who had faced so many monsters on screen, who had protected us from demons, who had kept his cool in the face of the forces of darkness – beheading the Gorgon, impaling the Mummy, staking the vampiric undead in their coffins, staring into the unfathomable eyes of Nigel Kneale’s Abominable Snowman – was now at his spiritual nadir.

This is the time, and the setting, of my novella ‘Whitstable’, published in May by Spectral Press to coincide with the 2013 centenary of the actor’s birth. One day I said to my wife: I’ve had an idea for a story. Peter Cushing is walking along the beach at Whitstable and a little boy comes up to him who thinks he really is Van Helsing, and says he thinks his stepfather is a vampire. My wife said: And of course, he isn’t. And I thought: You’re right. Of course he isn’t.

My Peter Cushing had to face true evil. But, as I might have predicted, the story in the end wasn’t about evil at all. It was about love. The perversion of love, firstly – selfish, predatory love. But also true love. The kind of love that Peter Cushing knew all too well.

Now, astonishingly, as I type these words, I am fifty-eight – the age that the great monster-hunter was in 1971, the date of my fictional story. Yet in my heart I am not the old man staring out to sea inwardly wrestling with a beleaguered mortality, but the little boy inexplicably frightened of monsters, imaginary and otherwise, and needing a hand to hold in the dark.

That’s what took me back to my hero. My past. And gave me the urge to make a story about it. A tale of the threat of corruption and of innocence protected. But why? Why did I choose to write this, when a much more financially rewarding scriptwriting job was being offered?

Because I had to.

Christopher Hitchens once mused on the advice given to novelists by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer to try to write posthumously: this he took to mean, write as if the usual constraints of fashion, commerce, self-censorship, public and intellectual opinion did not operate. Jeffrey Eugenides in The New Yorker added his acute observation that these constraints all amount to one thing: they all produce a deformation of the self. Of truth, in a way. They suppress the very things that got us writing in the first place. They are, in effect, Unholy Grails that replace the Holy one. Often without us noticing.

So I have no shame in admitting I wrote this novella for myself. I wasn’t selling, it wasn’t a commodity – it was just me falling prey to what Colm Tóibín calls the stuff that won’t go away. The source to which you must return again and again is not the brief, the deal or any sense of yourself as brand, but your messy, misunderstood originality. To allow what haunts you to have a voice, to chart what is deeply private and etched on the soul, and find a form and structure for it.

That’s as good a definition of writing I’ve found. And I love that the word haunts appears in it.

Haunted, too, is the word that springs to mind when you stare into the sky-blue eyes of Peter Cushing. Whether as Van Helsing, the dauntless pursuer of Dracula, or as Baron Frankenstein, stubborn seeker of the mysteries of death – emissary of God or usurper of God respectively – Cushing always conveyed an unspoken, almost Miltonian, burden.

It’s a face, to me, that contains melancholy beyond words and humanity beyond measure, in a genre that is often about inhumanity. Perhaps that is exactly why he is our bedrock.

And if ‘Whitstable’ honours that debt in some small way, I’ll be happy.

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Copyright © 2013 Stephen Volk

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For more information on Steve’s fiction, film and television work please visit his website at stephenvolk.net

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INTERFERENCE

by Christopher Fowler

HONEST SHOCK

To me, Black Static sometimes feels like a magazine from a bygone age, a reminder that I can still get excited when I hear the mailbox flap clatter. I get the sense that our editor hand-prints every issue in his musty arcana-filled bedroom. The beauty of writing for someone like this is that he’s hands-free. Interference is, in fact, the one thing I never get. Flying in the face of a conventional wisdom that suggests we should write what readers want to read, we cheery staffers fly about wherever our minds take us. This, surely, is the true definition of creative freedom, and a very rare and precious thing in 2013.

Last issue, Steve Volk argued that the most talented creative people in history have been introverts, the problem being that now, success is measured in extroversion and bombast. Films, TV shows and books survive on sensation and revelation instead of containing the small, quiet moments that hold universal truths. I think he’s right.

Looking at the latest batch of lurid crime novels coming in through my door, all promising grotesque deaths and the relentlessly grim cruelty of the torture-porn industry, one cover looks exactly the same as the next. They could probably all be rolled up into one fat book called The Evil Dark Savage Cemetery Killer Murders. Writing requires honesty – but traditional writing from experience is not considered worth bothering with any more. I wonder how many writers have actually seen a dead body? If they had, they might not write about them in such a lazy, flippant way.

When it comes to mainstream books and movies, many writers favour the eroticised torturing of women and blowing stuff up, because they can copy it from other films and TV shows. But real honesty is far more shocking than the most shock-laden horror movie. In the French film Rust and Bone, Marion Cotillard loses both her legs to a killer whale. In most Hollywood movies the event would appear as a bombastic shock involving teeth and gore. Here, it is shown as it would really happen; the whale swims too close to the trainers’ platform, damaging it, and it’s not until after that anyone realises there’s been a terrible accident.

But this isn’t to suggest that writing must only reflect reality. Tom Stoppard’s new version of Anna Karenina, directed by Joe Wright, is brimming