Black Static #38 Horror Magazine

By TTA Press

The January–February 2014 issue is dedicated to the memory of TTA Press magazine supporter and contributor of twenty years Joel Lane, who passed away in November 2013. Nicholas Royle pays tribute to his dear friend in 'The Conscience of the Circuit'.
Black Static 38 contains new horror and dark fantasy fiction by John Grant, Tim Waggoner, Andrew Hook, Maura McHugh, Danny Rhodes and, this issue’s debut author, Malcolm Devlin. The front and back cover art is by Joachim Luetke, and interior illustrations are by George Cotronis, Richard Wagner, David Gentry, Vincent Sammy, and Geoffrey Grisso. The usual features are present: Coffinmaker's Blues by Stephen Volk and Blood Pudding by Lynda E. Rucker (comment); Blood Spectrum by Tony Lee (DVD/Blu-ray reviews); Case Notes by Peter Tennant (book reviews: includes an interview with author Gary Fry and a review of Paul Meloy's 'Dogs with their Eyes Shut'.)
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 comment columns, reviews of books, movies, DVDs and TV.

Fiction this issue
A Knot of Toads by Andrew Hook
The Last Fear by Tim Waggoner
Passion Play by Malcolm Devlin
The Hanging Tree by Maura McHugh
Passchendaele by Danny Rhodes
His Artist Wife by John Grant

The issue's artists are
David Gentry
George Cotronis
Geoffrey Grisso
Richard Wagner
Vincent Sammy
Joachim Luetke (Cover art)

Peter Tennant's Case Notes book and novella reviews this issue include
Gary Fry’s
Shades of Nothingness
Conjure House
Emergence
Lurker
Menace
plus author interview
Rupetta by N.A. Sulway,
Darkscapes by Anne-Sylvie Salzman
La Squab by David Britton,
Lord Horror: Reverbstorm by David Britton & John Coulthart,
The Réparateur of Strasbourg by Ian R. MacLeod
Flying Fish by Randall Silvis
Dogs With Their Eyes Shut by Paul Meloy
In the Broken Birdcage of Kathleen Fair by Cate Gardner
Broken Sigil by William Meikle
The Black Church by Toby Tate
The Fading Place by Mary SanGiovanni
Nightmare Man by Alan Ryker

Tony Lee's DVD reviews this issue:
The Conjuring, Insidious Chapter 2, Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters, You're Next, Blood Glacier, Bounty Killer, The Complex, Kiss of the Damned, Odd Thomas, John Dies at the End, Big Ass Spider, The Colony, Prisoners, Frost

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Jul 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311787699

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 38

JAN–FEB 2014

ISSN 1753-0709 (PRINT ISSUE)

COVER

Cover art: Joachim Luetke

© 2014 Black Static and its contributors

PUBLISHER

TTA Press

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

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EDITOR

Andy Cox

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BOOKS

Peter Tennant

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FILMS

Tony Lee

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EVENTS

Roy Gray

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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 #38 Horror Magazine Jan-Feb 2014 

TTA Press

Copyright TTA Press and contributors 2014

Published by TTA Press at Smashwords. ISBN: 9781311787699       

In memory of Joel Lane

(1963–2013)

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CONTENTS

OBITUARY

JOEL LANE: THE CONSCIENCE OF THE CIRCUIT

NICHOLAS ROYLE

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COMMENT

COFFINMAKER’S BLUES

STEPHEN VOLK

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COMMENT

BLOOD PUDDING

LYNDA E. RUCKER

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STORY ILLUSTRATED BY DAVID GENTRY

A KNOT OF TOADS

ANDREW HOOK

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STORY ILLUSTRATED BY GEORGE COTRONIS

THE LAST FEAR

TIM WAGGONER

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STORY ILLUSTRATED BY GEOFFREY GRISSO

PASSION PLAY

MALCOLM DEVLIN

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STORY

THE HANGING TREE

MAURA McHUGH

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STORY ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD WAGNER

PASSCHENDAELE

DANNY RHODES

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NOVELETTE ILLUSTRATED BY VINCENT SAMMY

HIS ARTIST WIFE

JOHN GRANT

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DVD/BLU-RAY REVIEWS

BLOOD SPECTRUM

TONY LEE

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BOOK REVIEWS

CASE NOTES

PETER TENNANT

BACK COVER

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THE CONSCIENCE OF THE CIRCUIT

Nicholas Royle reflects on the passing of novelist, short story writer, poet and anthologist Joel Lane, who died in November 2013

When Mark Morris called to tell me the terrible news, I was waiting for a train on a freezing cold station platform. But for the setting (Godalming, Surrey), I could have been a character in one of Joel Lane’s stories, many of which featured trains and railway stations, and death was never far away. (Though, for some reason, telephones featured rarely, mobiles hardly at all.) I couldn’t take it in. I still can’t, more than a month later, even after attending his funeral on 23 December. A huge crowd braved gales and torrential rain to get to Robin Hood Crematorium, between Shirley and Solihul, on the outskirts of Birmingham. We hugged and shook hands and slapped each other on the back, and we smiled and even laughed and shared reminiscences and jokes. We listened to moving tributes from Chris Morgan, Poet Laureate of Birmingham, and Joel’s brother Tom. I also said a few words. Perhaps we met people we had never met before, people we had heard of from Joel and always wondered about but never met. We definitely had some tea and very moreish cake afterwards, and a great deal of good feeling and comfort was given and received, but, there was no denying, a new and very large hole had been torn in our lives and we were all a little bit diminished by it.

I stayed in Birmingham that night. My girlfriend and I searched the streets of Moseley for a balti house. I tried to find one of the places Joel had taken me to in the past. We entered somewhere. I wasn’t sure about it; it didn’t look the same. I wanted to ask Joel if this was the place. The following morning I saw the bold new Library of Birmingham for the first time. I liked it, but I wanted to ask Joel what he thought. Anything to do with Birmingham, I would always think of Joel. But Joel was more than just my link to the West Midlands and, particularly, the Black Country. We had been friends and collaborators and/or colleagues for more than twenty years. We had each helped the other out of tight spots. We read each other’s stories, occasionally published one another. Joel was the most amazing reader, extraordinarily generous with his feedback. This Christmas was the first for many years we didn’t exchange gifts. My experience, I am sure, is no different from that of many of Joel’s friends.

Joel suffered from chronic health problems, but no one had an inkling that his life was in danger (as I write this, in the first week of January, there is still no known cause of death, Joel appearing to have died in his sleep). A sudden, unexplained death at a young age (Joel, like me, was born in 1963) presents particular difficulties for family and friends. While you take comfort from the fact that the deceased was spared, for example, a long, slow decline, would never lose his sight (as a result of his diabetes) or his mind (Joel was exceptionally intelligent), you never had a chance to say goodbye. More to the point, he never had a chance to say goodbye. We know from his work that he hardly lived in ignorance of mortality, but for him to go to bed one night and simply not wake up in the morning is so bewildering you really do struggle to get your head around it. What the fuck is that about?

Last night I reread the first story of Joel’s I ever read, ‘The Foggy, Foggy Dew’. Mark Valentine published it in a chapbook in 1985 and Karl Edward Wagner reprinted it in his excellent series The Year’s Best Horror Stories. Like many of Joel’s most successful stories, it’s like a dream, not because it resembles a dream, with dreamlike logic and surreal imagery, but because it is vivid and absorbing and totally believable and when you look back on it you find you can hardly remember it. I’m not suggesting that this was Joel’s intention, but I would argue it’s a virtue. His best work was subtle and achieved its effects without your being aware of what strings he was pulling. He wasn’t sly or underhand, though he did have a sly humour, with a great fondness for puns, but much of the work of his stories went on, as it should, behind the scenes. Sure, he had a roster of favourite words and images – smoke, ash, dust, fibres, vapour, scars, even ectoplasm – at least one of which would turn up in most stories, but it wasn’t like he had them written on a Post-it note stuck to his computer. They were just in his head, they were what he saw about him. Perhaps one word that recurs more than any other, as I’ve come to appreciate over the last few days, rereading as many of his stories as possible, is ‘district’. A less evocative word than ‘ash’, ‘vapour’ or certainly ‘ectoplasm’, ‘district’ nevertheless somehow seems to possess a dark, almost wintry resonance, perhaps because of the subconscious effect of reading it so many times in Joel’s stories over the years. There’s ‘The Lost District’, of course, the title story of his 2006 collection published by Night Shade Books (the story was originally published in The Third Alternative), but the word crops up again and again. ‘Peter and his mother had moved away to another district,’ we read in ‘The Foggy, Foggy Dew’; in ‘The Earth Wire’, the title story of his 1994 collection (published by my own Egerton Press), when Geoff goes to look for his parents’ house, he finds that, ‘In isolated districts, violence between gangs was still escalating’; in ‘The Country of Glass’, a powerful story about alcoholism, ‘Lang revisited the district where he’d grown up’.

Joel wrote about Birmingham and the Black Country, an area slightly to the north-west of the city characterised by a post-industrial landscape that he described and evoked with great potency. He named the districts he wrote about, those in the Black Country and in south Birmingham where he lived in a series of rented properties over the years. Names such as Clayheath, Netherton and Tipton, Acocks Green, Moseley and Yardley Wood, came to acquire great resonance for me. I wanted never to lose myself in Digbeth at night; it probably wouldn’t be wise to wander up the Hagley Road, whether after dark or not. His settings were persuasively real, yet his characters sometimes doubted that. ‘The landscape itself felt unreal,’ finds Geoff in ‘The Earth Wire’, while Jason in ‘Waiting For a Train’ has a different but equally alienating experience: ‘The landscape was too real for him to pass through it.’

For all the imagery of ash and vapour, the details are solid, nailed down. The industrial part of Handsworth is a ‘jigsaw of iron and concrete’ (‘Coming of Age’); the canal system is ‘an endless stony network that led nowhere but onto renewed outgrowths of itself’ (‘The Earth Wire’). But like Blake and like M John Harrison, who once remarked to me that Joel was so good he – Harrison – was envious of his talent, Joel was also a visionary. ‘The Country of Glass’ is a story not only about alcoholism but also about redemption, shot through with amber-hued glimpses of the rumoured land of the title, Vitraea. Matthew Lang starts to half-see ‘a kind of wavering or rippling in buildings… Worse, sometimes he’d look along a tree-lined avenue or sunlit canal and see images from his own past clotted with dust and dead leaves, abandoned… The past was not biodegradable.’ Lang, German for ‘long’, is filled with longing; the story, one of Joel’s best and most affecting, is basically Harrison’s ‘Egnaro’, with ice and a slice. ‘As the afternoon light flickered through trees like a distant candle, Lang walked through the park where he and his brother had played cricket with a tennis ball.’ I now read this line somewhat differently since hearing the following words in Joel’s brother Tom’s moving tribute at the funeral in December: ‘I have so many fond memories: going to parks every Sunday and playing football and cricket; playing cricket in the road, the telegraph pole as the wicket…’

In ‘The Sunken City’, one of the original stories written for his World Fantasy Award-winning collection Where Furnaces Burn (PS Publishing, 2012), Joel writes, unusually, about a writer, bravely electing to make him a rather pompous and arrogant character. Corin Ward, arrested on suspicion of murder and attempted murder, declares, ‘You have no idea who you’re talking to. I’m a man of visions. My soul is as far above that of the herd as it is above the rats and cockroaches in the sewers.’ Joel was a fiercely intelligent critic and often wrote about authors he admired in Wormwood,All Hallows and other publications, but he would never make special pleading for writers, who were the same in his eyes as anybody else, for he was a passionate supporter of equality and a tireless scourge of fascism, and, indeed, any politician or political party to the right of the hard left. He scorned Tony Blair and New Labour long before it was clear to most people (including myself) what a disaster the Iraq war was always destined to be. He was respectful of my arguments for pragmatism, in private conversations on the subject of politics, but I would be left in no doubt about the strength of his convictions.

In ‘The Earth Wire’, Mark unscrews a plug and shows it to Geoff. ‘You know what the middle wire is? The earth wire. Right. The plug can work without it. It’s just a safety device. The conscience of the circuit.’ The conscience of the circuit. Joel’s political beliefs and acute sense of justice informed most of what he did. Often, and perhaps most effectively, it was buried in his stories; occasionally it surfaced and became explicit, and with Allyson Bird he co-edited Never Again (Gray Friar Press, 2010), an anthology of anti-fascist fiction.

While politics, for Joel, was arguably no laughing matter, he did possess a wonderfully childlike sense of humour that would surface in his work from time to time, not quite as often as in social situations and personal exchanges. His criminal weakness for puns is revealed in the opening to ‘Quarantine’, another crime story written specially for Where Furnaces Burn: ‘DC Morgan looked around the bare room. There was nothing new to see, in here or outside. If a killer returns to the scene of the crime, he said, does that make him a SoC puppet?’ Sometimes the humour gets darker. Assault victim Carl Bradmore in ‘Incry’: ‘Can you hold your breath in your sleep? But it’ll be over soon. Because I’m going downhill. You’d think that was easy in a wheelchair, but it isn’t.’

In the absence of a cause of death in the real world, one searches for clues in Joel’s fictional one. That line of Carl Bradmore’s – ‘Can you hold your breath in your sleep?’ – while apparently throwaway must surely refer to the sleep apnoea from which Joel suffered. In the same story, the policeman narrator refers to ‘a trapped rage’, which he says he felt in the automatic toilet where Carl was beaten up. It’s a good description for how it feels to have lost a friend unexpectedly and at far too young an age, while the line about the canal network from ‘The Earth Wire’ already quoted above would not be a bad metaphor for the thought processes one goes through trying, and failing, to make sense of the loss.

Same-sex relationships are common in Joel’s fiction, but they aren’t the whole story. He wrote equally insightfully about homosexuals and heterosexuals, men and women, boys and girls – and adolescents and adults, for that matter. ‘It wasn’t until their third date that the boy asked Richard to behead him’ – the opening line to ‘The Window’ and easily the most arresting opening line to a story I can remember reading. The closing lines of ‘You Don’t Have to Say’, originally published in The Freezer Counter: Stories by Gay Men (Third House), occupy similar territory and return us to Joel’s fondness for wordplay: ‘He stood up and pressed against me. His hands pulled at my ribs. Neil. Neil. So I did. Wishing there was some way I could swallow his energy and spit out his unreason.’ For some inexplicable reason, during the editing process at Third House, ‘So I did’ was changed to ‘So I said it’, which destroyed the joke and rendered the ending of the story incomprehensible. (Joel also wrote the most terrifying ending to a short story I’ve ever read, in ‘Face Down’, collected in The Terrible Changes published by Ex Occidente Press in 2009.) But perhaps my favourite passage of Joel’s about men and women and the difference between them is this one from ‘The First Time’: ‘By his mid-twenties, Gordon had all but given up on relationships. Men were like suits of armour: bright containers of darkness. Enclosed and choked by their own defences… Women were more human.’ Bright containers of darkness… Women were more human. One wonders how revealing Joel meant those lines to be.

I have ignored Joel’s novels – From Blue to Black (2000) and The Blue Mask (2003), both published by Serpent’s Tail – and his novella, The Witnesses Are Gone (PS Publishing, 2009). These were all outstanding works and displayed all the qualities of his best short fiction, but they merit their own full-length article rather than being tacked on here. I’ve mentioned only one of his anthologies; there was also Birmingham Noir (Tindal Street Press), co-edited with Steve Bishop, and Beneath the Ground (The Alchemy Press). Tindal Street Press grew out of the Tindal Street Fiction Group, of which Joel was an active long-term member. Throughout his career he supported small presses and encouraged new writers. And older writers, for that matter. Nine Arches Press published his chapbook-sized mini-collection Do Not Pass Go, a precursor to Where Furnaces Burn, in 2011, and talking of chapbooks, I was fortunate enough to publish his story ‘Black Country’ in my Nightjar Press series in 2010. This story, conceived as a companion piece to ‘The Lost District’, was reprinted in Where Furnaces Burn, which, while not including either his story with my favourite opening line, or his story with my favourite ending,