Black Static #34 Horror Magazine

By TTA Press

Black Static is essentially a fiction magazine containing short stories in the horror and dark fantasy genres. But it covers other aspects of the genre via reviews of books, movies, DVDs and TV.

The issue's artists are Ben Baldwin (cover & interior), Martin Hanford, Tara Bush, Richard Wagner and Joachim Luetke.

Peter Tennant's Case Notes reviews 3 books from Mark Morris; 'Long Shadows, Nightmare Light', 'Vampire Circus' and 'It Sustains' before Pete interviews Mark.
After that come reviews of Stephen Volk's Whitstable, wherein Peter Cushing is the hero, 2 graphic novels; 'Interview with the Vampire:Claudia’s Story and 'Adamtine', John Llewellyn Probert's latest ('Ward 19' and 'The House That Death Built'). Then 2 tributes to Stephen King get a once over from Pete. (The Illustrated Stephen King Trivia Book and The Illustrated Stephen King Movie Trivia Book)
Pete also reviews 2 chapbooks; 'Creakers' by Paul Kane & 'The Fox' by Conrad Williams and 7 of Darkfuse Novellas' most recent 'Snowblind' & 'F9' by Michael McBride, 'Clockwork Dolls' by William Meikle , 'Children of No One' by Nicole Cushing, 'The Mourning House' by Ronald Malfi, 'House of Rain' by Greg F. Gigune and 'Stalking You Now' by Jeff Strand.

Mike O'Driscoll's TV column finds fault with 'The Following' but likes Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott's view of the relationship between television and horror in their book 'TV Horror'.

Tony Lee's DVD reviews this issue:
SLEEP TIGHT, THE ECHO, BAIT, THE COLLECTION, SPARTACUS: WAR OF THE DAMNED, WHITE TIGER, SLICE & DICE: THE SLASHER, FILM FOREVER, TRUE BLOOD SEASON FIVE, THE HIDDEN FACE, SCANNERS, SCANNERS II: THE NEW ORDER, SCANNERS III: THE TAKEOVER, BLOOD SIMPLE, EVIL DEAD 2, KNIGHTRIDERS, BARON BLOOD and THE FACILITY

SF Revu at www.sfrevu.com/php/Review-id.php?id=14631

More about Black Static at www.thisishorror.co.uk/features/black-static-horror-magazine/

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Jun 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301594467

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

#34

A magazine of horror and dark fantasy.

Cover:

by Ben Baldwin

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Black Static

Issue 34 (MAY - JUN 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: 9781301594467

First draft v3 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/1656/black-static-34/0/5/

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

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

EDITORIAL NOTES

COMMENT/COLUMNS

COFFINMAKER'S BLUES - by Stephen Volk

BLOOD PUDDING - by Lynda E. Rucker

FICTION

THE NIGHTINGALE by Nina Allan

novelette illustrated by Ben Baldwin

IN THIS BLUE SHADE by Joel Lane

story illustrated by Martin Hanford

THE KING OF LOVE MY SHEPHERD IS by Ilan Lerman

novelette illustrated by Tara Bush

BULLET by Andrew Hook

story illustrated by Richard Wagner

THE TOWER OF BABEL by Sean Logan

novelette illustrated by Joachim Luetke

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

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EDITORIAL NOTES –

OVERSEAS DELIVERY (Only affects print issue subscribers)

Some overseas subscribers, particularly those in the States, might’ve had to wait much longer than normal for their copy of issue #33 to arrive. It’s always worth repeating, especially for the benefit of newer readers, that we send magazines abroad on a premium service which claims a delivery time of within 5 days to all of Europe and within 7 days to the rest of the world. That’s what we pay for anyway. The last mailing actually took up to 6 weeks to arrive, during which time we sent replacement copies for those assumed lost, and had credit card payments refunded to people who assumed we’d not sent the magazine(s) at all.

At the time of writing we’re still undecided but this issue might be mailed on a standard service, which on paper takes longer but which doesn’t use an agent so should go straight into a country’s internal postal system, thereby arriving quicker than the premium service has been, about 10 days if we’re lucky.

Either way, please let us know when your copy arrives, and apologies for any delays that you’re experiencing.

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TTA NOVELLAS

TTA Novella 1, Eyepennies by Mike O’Driscoll, is picking up a lot of rave reviews. The second novella, Spin by Nina Allan, is out now. If you pre-ordered a print copy it should have arrived by June 7.

We ought to be selling a lot more copies than we are, so don’t forget that you can buy Spin (and Eyepennies) for just £6 in the UK (£7 Europe, £8 RoW) or as part of a much cheaper subscription (just £25 for five, free postage to anywhere in the world), which relatively speaking is incredibly cheap for such high quality, good looking, limited editions as these.

Both Eyepennies and SPIN are out now as E books with links in the endnotes.

Hopefully many, if not all, of you will be pleased to hear that we’ve just added Novella #6 to the list, a new Quay-Endula story from Paul Meloy called Reclamation Yard.

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The print magazine often starts a story with a double page spread incorporating the illustration, titles and the first paragraph of the story text. So once again, 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 34 has been uploaded later than I hoped but at least, Black Static 35 (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, #34, has been out in print since May 15.

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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 back page cover art is by Ben Baldwin.

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The next print issue, Black Static 35, will be dated July/Aug.

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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

PUTTING IT ON ITS FEET

It was perhaps an unexpected, but not unnatural, development for the new incarnation of Hammer to venture into theatrical production with tried-and-tested classic The Turn of the Screw at the Almeida, impressed no doubt by the phenomenal success of Ghost Stories at the Lyric Hammersmith and in the West End, and the indefatigable longevity of the stage production of The Woman in Black.

But this new gleam in the eye of entrepreneurs and angels isn’t the reason I’d tell horror screenwriters, novelists and short story writers to consider writing for the stage. Far from it. In fact, I’ve been wrestling lately with the question of whether Horror as we understand it really works on stage at all.

This probably stems from seeing The Woman in Black several years ago, and being sat next to one of the speakers. I remember nothing of the play other than the ear-piercing scream which engendered more anger than fear in yours truly, irritated as I was by the cheap, ghost train effect on my metabolism – but then, the genre we love has always been prone to cheap effects at the best of times. It’s also undeniable that most of our horror classics have been reinvented and reborn in the public eye as stage concoctions.

Bela Lugosi had played Dracula in the Hamilton Deane adaptation on Broadway in the mid-1920s long before he starred in the Todd Browning film in 1931. By 1823, only five years after Frankenstein had been published, at least five versions were being staged in London, including the first parody, Frank in Steam, and the most successful, Presumption, or The Fate of Frankenstein. Apparently Shelley herself attended a performance of the latter, and enjoyed it – however, not for the last time did adapters see fit to change the storyline for their needs, junking the creature’s slow education and philosophising for more audience-friendly terror moments, adding a lab assistant for comic effect.

More recently, we have Danny Boyle’s National Theatre hit, which generally returned to character rather than spectacle (reinstating the slow philosophising, and ditching the lab assistant). Tellingly, though, the most horrifying moment in Nick Dear’s adaptation, the monster’s rape of Victor’s bride, has nothing like the power of a similar scene rendered on the cinema screen – perhaps because the artifice of the stage is ever-present.

Perhaps that’s it. Our disbelief – so essential to suspend in horror – always has something to cling to in the Theatre Royal that it doesn’t in the dark of a multiplex. So here’s the rub: Is it possible to be truly shocked in theatre? Or does it always amount to just being embarrassed?

I remember seeing Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and F***ing and thought the nice RADA-trained actors felt as though they were saying the swear words for the first time in their lives: I just wanted to tell them to F*** off. In complete contrast, Laura Wade (who wrote Posh for the Royal Court) has said Sarah Kane’s Blasted, one of the more notorious plays of the last century, was like throwing a TV out of a hotel window. Kane’s apocalyptic fantasy of rape and civil war left critics reeling when it opened in 1995. Jack Tinker of the Daily Mail branded it utterly disgusting with no bounds of decency, The Spectator a sordid little travesty and the Sunday Telegraph a gratuitous welter of carnage – though most of them couldn’t wait to bleat that they’d underestimated its importance after the playwright’s suicide in 1999 at the age of 28.

Simon Stephens, no stranger to controversy with his own play Pornography about the 7/7 bombings, called Blasted a deeply moral play that creates horror in order to shake its audience out of complacency: something I continually urge is the very purpose of our genre, often derided in the exact same language as the splenetic outpourings above.

At this point I should really declare my own forays into the medium. Years ago, frustrated by having a screenplay that was getting good reactions out there but not even getting optioned, I decided to write it as a stage play, Answering Spirits, and formed a production company with a director friend of mine (Antidote Theatre, as was) to put it on.

There’s no doubt that the process of theatre – open, grasping, tenuous – is intoxicating. But what was amazing about the experience was not only seeing it come alive in the hands of skilled actors, but the way the new discipline allowed me to discover new things about my story.

Cinematic scenes had to be done with storytelling, eyeball to eyeball with the audience. Most excitingly of all, daring new concepts were born – like the idea of a medium asking for the lights to be turned down, but we turn them up: so that the audience can see all the fakery that the participants in the séance can’t. A theatrical conceit you could never do in a film.

Don’t be precious about what you write, Liz Meriwether, creator of New Girl and writer of several hit plays before moving to full-time TV writing, said in an interview with novelist Emma Straub in Rookie. Also try to put stuff on its feet – if it’s a play, grab your friends and put it up. Do a reading or full production of it. When you see how actors work, and how directors work, and what dramatic writing looks and sounds like when it’s performed, you’ll start to become a better writer. Not playwright, you note – writer.

I agree. But maybe I’m biased. Or maybe feeling spoiled right now. You see, last year I was asked to write a two-hander ghost story for Hallowe’en as a fundraising event for The Bush Theatre, to raise money for their Young Writers Programme. Jim Broadbent had volunteered to play one of the parts, so it took me roughly a millisecond to say yes. But Hallowe’en came and went, the idea of a pre-Christmas Ghost Story came and went, and quite frankly, I was beginning to think it was one of those gigs that might never happen.

Suddenly in March I heard they had a date in the diary. Would I like to come along? Would I like to discuss my script with the director? Would I like to know who they’d got to play the other role: an actor called Reece Shearsmith (League of Gentlemen, Psychoville)? Hellfire. I thought Reece was one of the best actors in the country. I had a smile from ear to ear, and I hadn’t even met him yet. When I did, before I could blurt anything, he was telling me what a fan he was of my work. How unbelievable is that?

Cut to ten days later and they’re rehearsing The Chapel of Unrest for what’s advertised as a script-in-hand performance, which I thought would mean two guys in jeans sitting on chairs. Not a bit of it. They rehearsed all day. They had props, lighting, music cues, blocking – and by the time the house lights went down at 8pm, it was fully staged. Jaw-droppingly so. The actors, imbuing the text with nuance and subtlety I hadn’t thought possible, had a ball, and it went down a storm. Feeling the rapt attention of the audience, hanging on every syllable, I felt, passingly, You know what? I can actually do this shit. It was possibly the best day of my professional life.

As for horror – a woman came up to me afterwards and said that at one particularly gruesome moment she’d literally felt near to fainting. But as I said to her, they were only words on paper, spoken by actors, on a virtually empty stage. That’s the remarkable thing.

Honestly, if every day could be like that Friday at The Bush, I would give up television and film writing in an instant.

If TV commissioners are too lily-livered (by their own admission, to me personally) or obsessed with middle-brow blandness, and film financiers only want single-location found footage fare, maybe theatre is the only place to do truly exciting work now.

Or, to be blunt, the only place left to have fun.

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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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Below a section from Richard Wagner's illustration for Georgina Bruce's story Cat World from Interzone 246.

BLOOD PUDDING

by Lynda E. Rucker

Horror is Dead, Long Live Horror

I feel as though some sort of introduction is in order.

Over decades of watching horror and horror writers consistently try to rebrand themselves with more genteel-sounding descriptions of their genre from dark fantasy to supernatural thriller and beyond, I always admired the straightforwardness of Ramsey Campbell’s no-nonsense introduction: I’m Ramsey Campbell. I write horror.

So. I write horror, too. I write it, and I read it, and I watch it, and I have a troubled relationship with it, and that’s one of the things I’ll be writing about in this space.

I’m delighted to appear in Black Static as a regular columnist. In Christopher Fowler’s final column last issue, he mentioned that Black Static feels a bit like a magazine from a bygone era. Indeed it does, from the 1980s and 1990s when dozens of obscure small press horror zines, most of dubious quality but labors of love nonetheless, were printed and stapled and passed out at cons or sent away for by mail. A few survived and rose to the top, fighting for space in bookstores and specialty shops and launching more than a few careers. I welcome this burgeoning age of online fiction, but Black Static as a print magazine and indeed all the publications in the TTA Press stable hold a special place in my heart, not least of which is because of the highly unusual, one might even say slipstream way in which I first learned of their existence.

I found my first-ever copies of The Third Alternative stuck in the back rack of a comic book store in Eugene, Oregon in the late 1990s. Actually, my then-partner spotted it and told me about it. It’s got you written all over it, he said. All those British guys that you really like are in it. Nicholas Royle. Joel Lane. I’d mostly only encountered occasional stories by those British guys I really liked in year’s best anthologies, because it was the early days of the web and books and magazines published exclusively in the UK were much harder to come by then, so needless to say, I was pretty excited.

I went back to the comic book store myself to pick them up. They were hidden in the back on a shelf behind some other magazines, looking more than a bit the worse for wear, issues #13 and #15 if I recall correctly. I brought them up to the till. The owner of the shop looked at them with no recognition. He wanted to know where I’d gotten them, as though I might surreptitiously enter the store with magazines from another source and then attempt to pay for them. He stared at the price in pounds as though it were some obscure riddle and threw up his hands, naming a random dollar amount. I don’t know where these came from, he said in genuine befuddlement.

Well, they were mine now. I took them home with me and tore through both issues and wanted more. I remember feeling that if somebody had specially designed a magazine with me in mind, they couldn’t have done a better job. I was head over heels in love. As soon as I had something I