Black Static #37 Horror Magazine

By TTA Press

The November–December 2013 issue contains new horror and dark fantasy fiction by the 2013 British Fantasy Award short story winner Ray Cluley plus stories from Laura Mauro, Ralph Robert Moore, DeAnna Knippling, Priya Sharma, and Steven J. Dines. The cover art is by George Cotronis, and interior illustrations are by Richard Sampson, George Cotronis, Richard Wagner, David Gentry, and Joachim Luetke. The usual features are present: Coffinmaker's Blues by Stephen Volk and Blood Pudding by Lynda E. Rucker (comment); Blood Spectrum by Tony Lee with some tasty DVD/Blu-ray reviews; Case Notes by Peter Tennant (book reviews).includes novels from Hammer Horror and two by Sarah Pinborough

Fiction this issue
When Charlie Sleeps by Laura Mauro
Bones of Crow by Ray Cluley
All Your Faces Drown in My Syringe by Ralph Robert Moore
The Strongest Thing About Me is Hate by DeAnna Knippling
The Sunflower Seed Man by Priya Sharma
The Sound of Constant Thunder by Steven J. Dines

The issue's artists are; George Cotronis (cover & interior), Richard Sampson, David Gentry , Richard Wagner, Joachim Luetke

Peter Tennant's Case Notes book reviews include
GETTING OUT OF THERE by M. John Harrison
M by Hilary Scudder.
CHALK by Pat Cadigan
SOUL MASQUE by Terry Grimwood
THE REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN by Shaun Hutson
COUNTESS DRACULA by Guy Adams
HUNGER by Melvin Burgess
STOKER’S MANUSCRIPT by Royce
THE SEA CHANGE & OTHER STORIES by Helen Grant.
WRITTEN BY DAYLIGHT by John Howard
REVENANT ROAD by Michael Boatman
THE NEW FLESH Keith Deininger (
HELL GATE by Elizabeth Massie
CORROSION by Jon Bassoff
CHARM by Sarah Pinborough
MAYHEM by Sarah Pinborough
MISCELLANEOUS NOVELS
AS DEAD AS ME by Ralph Robert Moore,
DON’T STAND SO CLOSE by Eric Red
AXE by Terry Grimwood
MECHAGNOSIS by Douglas Thompson

Tony Lee's DVD reviews this issue:
THE BODY
BYZANTIUM
NO ONE LIVES
THE WALKING DEAD
ONLY GOD FORGIVES
SQUIRM
THE MUMMY
THE WICKER MAN
HALLOWEEN
THE WITCHES
CREEPSHOW
THE FURY
THE HEADLESS GHOST
THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS
THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE PART 2
THE LAST EXORCISM PART II
ALL SUPERHEROES MUST DIE
I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE 2
THE DISCO EXORCIST
THANATOMORPHOSE

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Feb 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310755941

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 #37

NOV–DEC 2013

© 2013 Black Static and its contributors

Publisher

ttalogosmash

TTA Press

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

w: ttapress.com

e: [e-mail]

f: facebook.com/TTAPress

t: @TTApress

Editor

Andy Cox

[e-mail]

Books

Peter Tennant

[e-mail]

Films

Tony Lee

[e-mail]

Events

Roy Gray

[e-mail]

Technical Assistance

Marc-Anthony Taylor

Unsolicited submissions of short stories are always very welcome, but please follow the basic guidelines on our website

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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Smashwords ISBN: 9781310755941

Contents

cover art

George Cotronis

The-Tunnel-Stephen-Clemence-16x9-1.tif

comment

Coffinmaker’s Blues

Stephen Volk

Misery.tif

comment

Blood Pudding

Lynda E. Rucker

when charlie sleeps.tif

story illustrated by Richard Sampson

When Charlie Sleeps

Laura Mauro

bones-of-crow-bw.tif

story illustrated by George Cotronis

Bones of Crow

Ray Cluley

All your faces.tif

story illustrated by David Gentry

All Your Faces Drown In My Syringe

Ralph Robert Moore

hate.tif

story

The Strongest Thing About Me Is Hate

Deanna Knippling

sunflower seed man.tif

story illustrated by Richard Wagner

The Sunflower Seed Man

Priya Sharma

The_Sound.tif

novelette illustrated by Joachim Luetke

The Sound of Constant Thunder

Steven J. Dines

ogf7-hr.tif

dvd/blu-ray reviews

Blood Spectrum

Tony Lee

Hilary Scudder covers-conts.tif

book reviews

Case Notes

Peter Tennant

Coffinmaker’s Blues

Stephen Volk

RUN, WRITER, RUN! EXTINCTION IS FOREVER!

Two recent meetings made me think seriously about the future of the writer at this point in history.

Firstly, I was seeing a Channel 4 exec about a horror series. They didn’t know The Evil Dead when I mentioned it, nor had they seen Rosemary’s Baby, clearly didn’t know the tonal difference between the two, and blank looks greeted my mention of Fringe, Supernatural and Buffy. Then I listened to their notes…

But that wasn’t what upset me.

What did was someone saying, apropos of The Returned – the brilliant (subtitled) French supernatural series of exceptional beauty and eeriness that had recently been shown on the channel – "Oh yes. We would never have commissioned that here."

My heart sank. Not only did it admit a complete paucity of imagination, but a total betrayal of British culture and British writing in particular. Worse, they had no concept of how depressing that was to hear for a British writer who has striven to get British genre drama made for the over twenty years.

My second meeting was at a production company in Covent Garden, where I was told it was hopeless taking an original script or idea to a broadcaster, even if it’s great. It’s not even worth taking a proven, successful novel ripe for adaptation – even that is seen as a risky prospect. What you now have to do it take them something that’s already been made. The new way to pitch is to dust off an old DVD jacket from twenty or even ten years ago – The Three Musketeers, Poldark – or unfurl a poster (even a foreign language one), hold it up and say: Look, this is it, somebody did it! It doesn’t even matter, I was told, if it was good or not.

Frightening, but true. We know this, because what do we have? Sky’s The Tunnel, based on The Bridge. So unadventurous it hurts.

These two incidents back-to-back hit home to me just how we are living in the age of the triumph of the terminally safe. Clearly, the notion of the writer as someone who – surely not? – comes up with new, exciting and original ideas has somehow gone out the window while I wasn’t looking.

Of course, selling an idea has never been easy. What’s easy is for execs is to say no – they’re only in trouble if they say yes. And the easiest and commonest thing these days to say is to say that you already have something like it in development. (Rumour is that one person at BBC Drama trots this out with such regularity that she even said it when pitched a story about 17th century explorers going to the Arctic and discovering aliens.)

It might be quite funny when Steven Berkoff has a rant criticising the BBC’s garbage output for being slobbering, clichéd, mindless and moronic, but worrying when Jennifer Saunders says the BBC used to be a fun place to work. Now you get executives going on training weekends on how to make decisions, she despairs, but if you can’t make a decision, why the hell are you the head of a BBC department?

On top of this – adding insult to injury – while paying these training consultants a mint, nobody pays writers anything. Nobody.

One company had just had a $50 million investment from an American network: I still didn’t get paid a penny to write a treatment for a TV series for them. If you don’t value the person who comes up with the ideas upon which your whole business is based, who do you value? The lawyers? The typists? The copier technician? But nobody shells out now until they get a thumbs up from a broadcaster, and it’s like two hundred starving people fighting over a mackerel.

You could say the industry can no longer support so many writers – but it seems happy to support the salaries of obese production companies and the largely untalented fat cats who preside other them. How can this be morally possible, let alone desirable?

The painful fact is – nobody pays because nobody values creativity any more.

People are happy to take what we do. And I mean take. Thanks to the internet we’ve got a smash and grab generation that sees stories online, photos, music, all ripe for thieving and duplicating – if it’s out there, I’ll have some. Pay for it? Why the fuck should I? (Because somebody created it, asshole. And they have bills to pay, twat head.)

But is it any wonder the public have this attitude when our leaders are even worse? Look at culture secretary Maria Miller’s disastrous speech given at the British Museum in April, positing that arts funding should be regarded as (wait for it) venture capital expecting to reap future economic dividends.

Appalling statement. Beyond even Thatcher’s wet dream where everything has a price label, and art and literature have to justify their existence on the balance sheet. Why should we fund things like theatre and libraries, spouts the archetypal Daily Mail reader, when we can put that money into repairing holes in the road? But these are holes in the road that will never be repaired.

Even so, not even the people we conduct our trade with give us much sense of importance, either.

Once upon a time you used to get sandwiches at a script meeting (in the prehistoric era, even lunch). Nowadays it’s: You don’t mind if I slurp my miso soup while we discuss your series, do you? – a way of transmitting: "I’m far too busy to have a proper meeting with you, lesser mortal."

Tempting to deduce they don’t want good, experienced writers anyway, just eager beavers who will do what they’re told, and there is always someone out there sycophantic and ambitious enough to work for less – if not nothing. The irony here being that there’s a book just come out about the terrific showrunners responsible for the renaissance of television in America, and it’s called Difficult Men. The complete opposite.

The disdain in which we are held by these people – who wouldn’t give you their piss, to paraphrase Harlan Ellison, without charging you interest – is definitely because deep down (just like in Altman’s The Player), they really do think they could do it themselves, if they only had the time.

Like Richard Nixon, they are beyond all understanding that any crime has occurred, simply because if they did it, surely, it cannot be a crime. They are the birds that pick the insects off the back of the rhino. The parasites. Yet they invariably have a nice pay cheque and financial security at the end of every month, and we don’t.

Question is, how long can this go on before something gives?

As Western economies collapse, we are told that the Creative Industries are one of the few growth areas. If so, why are creative people at the bottom of the heap, and still treated like dirt? It’s an absurdist nightmare now reaching Kafkaesque proportions.

Every agent and producer says every project is a hard sell – but nobody volunteers what an easy sell is. The answer of course is self-evident – the easy sell is something that’s already been sold. And so now we move smoothly from Kafka into something much more like the Marx Brothers’ Sanity Clause. Everybody trying to out-guess everybody else and nobody committing to anything because nobody has any actual passion – though passion is, naturally, the most overused word in the vacuous realm of reality TV.

Hollywood in turn is monumentally different from what it was even ten years ago: Honey who shrunk the film industry? Studios pay nothing. Producers speculate. Writers write for a promise and not even a kiss.

Use it or lose it is the phrase used about your local book shop – you’ll be sorry when it’s gone. But won’t you be sorry when you favourite genre writer can no longer sustain a living? Does anyone think Use it or lose it applies to authors?

Which brings me to publishing…

continued next issue

Return to Contents

Blood Pudding

Lynda E. Rucker

BEHIND THE WALLPAPER: ON THE MADNESS OF WOMEN

I recently caught up on the second season of the anthology series American Horror Story, set in a hospital for the (purportedly) criminally insane, so madness has been on my mind, and in particular madness among women. Madness and horror have always been intertwined. But when women exhibit symptoms of madness, the implications are different.

Claims of madness have long been an acceptable way of keeping women confined literally or figuratively, and thus when women in horror do go mad, it’s worth asking what else, exactly, is going on here. In 1966, Jean Rhys did just that in her novel The Wide Sargasso Sea with a different view of poor Bertha Mason, the terrifying thing in the attic that was actually the wife of Jane Eyre’s Rochester, and in 1979 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar followed up in their classic of feminist criticism The Madwoman in the Attic, examining the treatment of women as either angels or monsters by Victorian women writers.

Later on, women writers subverted that angel-or-monster dichotomy with some of the great madwomen of horror fiction, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s nameless narrator creeping along the yellow wallpaper and Shirley Jackson’s Merricat inWe Have Always Lived in the Castle. But male writers have broached the subject with sensitivity and insight as well. In the 1960s and 70s writer Ira Levin penned sympathetic portraits of women who were not at all mad but found themselves trapped in paternalistic plots in which the madness narrative is evoked as a way to control them. Rosemary Woodhouse of Rosemary’s Baby is relentlessly infantilised by both her husband and a terrifying (Satanists or not) gang of elderly neighbours, while The Stepford Wives’s Joanna Eberhardt’s tentative steps down the path of feminist consciousness-raising outrage her husband to the point of obliterating her – or at least, those parts of her that don’t fit with the image of the perfect (read: inhuman) wife he longs for. Meanwhile, the women are doomed because they sound like madwomen to almost everyone else: Satanists are after me and my baby; the men in my town are turning women into robots. In film and fiction, madness keeps women in their place in part by forcing those around her to question her assessment of reality.

This uncertainty is used to heartbreaking effect in the underrated 1971 horror film Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, in which a mentally unstable young woman is the first to notice just how wrong things are at the old farmhouse she and her partner have bought and moved into with their best friend and a mysterious young woman they found squatting there: Now he thinks I’m getting sick again, but I’m not her internal monologue tells us as she tries to warn them of something she’s seen, or did she? Later, she’s foreseeing the loss of her lover and her own mind with something close to wistfulness. She cannot even bring herself to speak these terrors aloud, so tentative is her own sense of self and sanity and so inevitable her descent back into the darkness. We only hear thoughts expressed as voiceover while she sits in the farmhouse kitchen, the four of them ostensibly enjoying drink and food and music, a smile fixed to her face: You think I’m crazy. Admit it, and moments later, watching the girl and her partner talk and laugh, and remembering a terrible thing that she alone saw, and about which she was disbelieved: He wants her. He’ll never believe me again. No one will. Did it happen? This is the real abyss – not death, not the eventual revelations that come later in the movie, but the moment at which Jessica realises neither she nor anyone else trusts her perceptions.

Men in horror stories rarely experience the same terrifying loss of self and horrific claustrophobia of being disbelieved, betrayed by those closest to them, and labelled insane. In fact, if we set aside the faceless serial killer masquerading as a force of evil itself, there’s another gender aspect to madness and horror. Men tend to be mad for a reason. It’s due to either their unusual sensitivity to supernatural forces or exposure to forbidden knowledge – as the decline of the House of Usher is mirrored in Roderick, and Lovecraft’s protagonists descend into the now-clichéd gibbering madness – or they have tragic backstories that turned them into monsters, from Red Dragon’s ex-abused-child-turned-serial-killer Francis Dolarhyde to Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake, where even Michael Myers got a heartstrings-tugging past; as it turns out, The Shape just wanted to be loved. There’s almost something, well, logical about the madness of men.

Madwomen in horror, on the other hand, come in three basic flavours. They are monsters, mad without reason like the terrifying Annie Wilkes who holds writer Paul Sheldon hostage in Misery, or Rochester’s wife until she was rehabilitated by Jean Rhys. Or, they are driven mad by the circumstances of being women in an oppressive society like the narrator of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. Finally, they are, like Rosemary Woodhouse, believed to be mad because the circumstances they are caught up in are so outlandish – and not insignificantly, the women who find themselves in this particular position tend to be relatively powerless in the first place.

This brings us back to American Horror Story. For those of you who haven’t seen it, the show, created by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, is populated by an awful lot of demented characters. Its primary sympathies, however (with the exception of roles played by Evan Peters across both seasons), lie with its women characters. Season two’s insane asylum setting was foreshadowed in season one either by happenstance or on purpose when Vivien Harmon (Connie Britton) is confined for a time against her will by her husband after (wait for it) describing a supernatural encounter that no one believes. The following year the creators fleshed this out across an entire season, and despite a demonic possession and alien abductions, the real monsters here are human – men, in particular, and though women may collude with them, it’s in the service of a patriarchal system in which they are trying to locate themselves, and all of them pay the price.

It’s this unusual aligning with and sympathy for its women characters that particularly struck me about this show; it’s also campy, and loud, and outrageous, but there’s a quiet thread hinted at in season one and made explicit in season two that’s examining the systematic abuse of women and the ways in which they are silenced, disbelieved or turned into pawns of the real power brokers – in the mistaken belief that some of that power will be theirs. (Interestingly, Kit as played by Evan Peters is one man who is disbelieved and thought insane – but never by intimates, and the experience doesn’t isolate him as it tends to do with women; instead, it strengthens his resolve.) Shelley’s (Chloë Sevigny) plight, before it turns flat-out grindhouse horrific, is a particularly poignant one. Shelley’s got some issues that go beyond just being a girl who likes to have a