Black Static #43 Horror Magazine (Nov - Dec 2014)

By TTA Press

The November–December issue has new dark fiction by Ralph Robert Moore, Usman T. Malik, Simon Bestwick, Annie Neugebauer, Andrew Hook, Aliya Whiteley. The cover art is by Ben Baldwin (for 'Drown Town' by Ralph Robert Moore), and interior illustrations are by Ben Baldwin, Tara Bush and Dave Senecal. 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), which includes an extensive interview with James Cooper.

So 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
Drown Town by Ralph Robert Moore
Ishq by Usman T. Malik
Night Templar by Simon Bestwick
Hide by Annie Neugebauer
Black Lung by Andrew Hook
Many-Eyed Monsters by Aliya Whiteley

The issue's artists are
Ben Baldwin
Tara Bush
Dave Senecal

Peter Tennant's Case Notes book and novella reviews this issue include
CHARACTERS IN TURMOIL: JAMES COOPER: Dark Father, Strange Fruit, author interview
TIM CURRAN: Worm, Nightcrawlers, Deadlock
ALISON LITTLEWOOD: The Unquiet House (guest review by Stephen Theaker)
RICHARD FARREN BARBER: The Power of Nothing, The Sleeping Dead
PENDRAGON PRESS: The Derelict by Neil Williams, Drive by Mark West
TIM LEBBON: APOCALYPSE X2: Still Life, Shifting of Veils
SKILLUTE REVISITED: S.P. MISKOWSKI: Astoria, In the Light
TELOS PUBLISHING: The Darkness Within + Kat on a Hot Tin Airship + What's Dead Pussykat by Sam Stone, Absinthe & Arsenic by Raven Dane, The Fall by Simon Clark, The Immortalists by Andrew Hook

Tony Lee's DVD reviews this issue:
Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection, The Island of Dr Moreau (1977), The Walking Dead Season 4, Devil's Knot, The Hour of the Lynx, Leprechaun Origins, Dark Touch, Found, WolfCop, Cold in July, Grand Piano, Oculus, All Cheeleaders Die, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Graduation Day, See No Evil 2, Devil's Tower, Nailbiter, Afflicted, Reaper, Kidnapped, Open Grave, Treehouse, Bad Milo!, Wrong Turn 6: Last Resort, Dark Tourist, Blood Shot

Non Fiction this issue;
Blood Pudding - Lynda E. Rucker - columnist
Coffinmaker's Blues - Stephen Volk - columnist
Blood Spectrum - Tony Lee - DVDs/Blu-Ray reviews
Case Notes by Peter Tennant - book reviews + guest reviewer Stephen Theaker.
Interviewee - James Cooper

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Nov 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310408953

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 43

NOV–DEC 2014

© 2014 Black Static and its contributors

Publisher

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

ttapress.com

Editor

Andy Cox

[e-mail]

BOOKS

Peter Tennant

[e-mail]

FILMS

Tony Lee

[e-mail]

Submissions

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

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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 43 NOV - DEC 2014 

TTA Press

Copyright TTA Press and contributors 2014

Published by TTA Press at Smashwords. ISBN: 9781310408953

DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF

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GRAHAM JOYCE

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EUGIE FOSTER

CONTENTS

Cover Art 

Ben Baldwin, for Drown Town

Comment

Coffinmaker’s Blues

Stephen Volk

Comment

Blood Pudding

Lynda E. Rucker

Novelette

Drown Town

Ralph Robert Moore

illustrated by Ben Baldwin

Story

Ishq

Usman T. Malik

illustrated By Tara Bush

Story

Night Templar

Simon Bestwick

Story

Hide

Annie Neugebauer

Story

Black Lung

Andrew Hook

illustrated By Dave Senecal

Story

Many-Eyed Monsters

Aliya Whiteley

DVD/Blu-Ray Reviews

Blood Spectrum

Tony Lee

Book Reviews, including an interview with James Cooper

Case Notes

Peter Tennant

COFFINMAKER’S BLUES

STEPHEN VOLK

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HOW TO STAY INSANE

There’s a massive myth about writer’s block, and it’s this – that is doesn’t exist. Those who’ve never had it cannot contemplate what it feels like, and laugh at those who claim to have experienced it – rather like sceptical investigators in a paranormal movie. You know, the assholes who always turn out to be wrong.

But if someone like former Doctor Who supremo Russell T Davies can openly talk about crushing fear, self-doubt and panic (in his book The Writer’s Tale), and Alan Bennett can say "I never believe in writer’s block: all writing is writer’s block", then it’s high time the subject got an airing.

For me, the phenomenon comes in three separate phases or types, each requiring different remedies.

First there’s the bog-standard Problem-Solving block – a plot thing, a knot in the wood, a tangle of logic you can’t figure out and it’s driving you nuts. Solution? Just get out of it. Walk, or talk – if not to your producer or editor, somebody. I guarantee if you sit with a friend over a pint by the time your glass is half empty you’ll have solved it, just by hearing yourself out loud.

Sadly this can all too easily descend into type two, and that’s called Pernicious Thinking. I don’t know if I can do this. It isn’t just this line or this scene, it’s this whole sequence, the whole damn script. Again, leave it. Do something else. Take a day off. A weekend away. Write something different. Above all, don’t get sucked into phase three.

Which is The Spiral of Negativity. Now it gets personal.

"I’m useless, I can’t do this, I never could do this, not only is this script shite but everything I’ve ever written is shite. In fact, I am shite!" It’s the final, irrevocable and unassailable Truth.

Neil Gaiman talks about waiting for the knock on the door and there’s a man there with a clipboard who says There’s been some mistake. This is such a common feeling amongst writers it must be more than coincidental: a fundamental fear of being found out to be some kind of fake. That we don’t deserve to be doing what we do and were never any good at it anyway.

The esoteric knots and fixations we get wrapped up in take us to this place, and very rapidly it can slide into terrors of where the next contract is coming from, whether the next idea will be good enough, the fear of drying up, treading water, becoming banal, or worse – out of date, not wanted any more.

And far from being stuck it can feel like a painful death would be preferable.

My worst experience was working for twelve weeks in LA with an Oscar-winning director who didn’t know what he wanted and required me to accompany him to the toilet as he took a piss. I worked 18-hour days, delivering fifteen pages every morning, getting through on copious amounts of coffee and not knowing a soul that hadn’t been sold. I was Barton Fink living in the Bel Air Sands. (I still have a Pavlovian response to the smell of Shake n’ Vac.) My lowest point was losing my wedding ring in the shower and thinking the TV newsreader was addressing me during an earthquake. Then the director started talking about killer trees.

I told my agent I needed to come home. He told me I couldn’t. I felt the Devil’s breath on my neck. I delivered my draft and got the hell out of there, realising with absolute clarity if I didn’t, I’d never write a word again.

Back home, my wife and I took a weekend on Burgh Island. My head was mush, with a billion indecisions and crap ideas ringing in my ears. I stood staring out to sea. I was fucked. Unable to write for weeks. Months. As long as I wrote nothing, I was safe. Yet still I had dreams of the Famous Director circling my house in a helicopter with a loud hailer, shouting: Stephen, come back to California! You haven’t finished the screenplay!

I knew, "If I don’t do something I’ll never write again, and then what’ll I do to earn a living?" But to be truthful I didn’t care, about anything or anybody, least of all myself.

My wife threatened me into seeking help. I saw a little guy who lived on a houseboat (like Robert in Afterlife – hey, nothing is wasted). We had a dozen sessions of what I now think was CBT (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy). No psychobabble. Minimal digging in the dirt. All about practicality of feelings, and how to address them on a week-to-week basis. I came to realise why I behaved the way I did: basically, I tried too hard to be liked, not wanting to let people down – so I developed strategies for the future: Nobody will die if you don’t deliver on Monday.

In time, I felt less bad. In time, I got pleasure from writing and didn’t associate it with my horrendous experience in sunny Hollywood, weeping in a hotel room every night. I put it in the past, but I can’t say it will ever go away. American accents on Skype still fill me with dread.

But what I learned is, these things pass.

As Stephen Fry wrote back to a desperate young lady called Crystal Nunn: You can’t change it by wishing it away. If it’s dark and rainy it’s dark and rainy and you can’t alter it. It might be dark and rainy for two weeks in a row…[but] it will be sunny one day. It’s best to accept moods like accepting the weather. If it’s a bad day, don’t fight it. Even – you know what? – wallow.

But waiting it out when you are in it is impossible, like telling somebody to stay still in quicksand or stare out a charging grizzly. Waiting it out is counter-intuitive. The intuition, if anything, is to end the bloody thing right now because this time you know for certain there is no light at end, it will be dark forever, and that infects everything around you – family, loved ones – and their inability to help feeds your self-hatred and helplessness and lack of worth. A million vicious, overlapping circles: you’re miserable and it makes you not want to go out, that isolation in turn making the depression worse, the lack of input and stimulation keeping the old soup boiling. The descent into the maelstrom: of course Poe knew it only too well.

The life of a writer, unless you’re absurdly lucky, is spent managing these highs and lows and illogical patterns, knowing but never quite believing that this time it won’t be the end of the world.

I’ve been writing for over twenty years, all my adult life, Anthony Minghella once said, and so I suppose I’ve made peace with myself and my hopeless, undisciplined technique. I’ve stopped unravelling every time I’m unable to write. I wait. The drawer opens. Waiting is part of writing.

A trick that I used to use when I was seriously low, says Pat Cadigan: "I would tell myself that I was now someone else, and I would go out among people, ride the bus, talk to strangers in my new identity as a competent, benign person with no problems – a vacation from being me. And of course that vacation could be in a new story. The brilliant, perfect story that isn’t written yet. They don’t call it losing yourself" for nothing.

Another piece of advice is to take your foot off the self-punishment throttle. Stop breaking your own balls over getting it right. Give yourself the chance to fail.

If you can’t fail, you can’t do this, says Emma Thompson, who had a spectacular flop with her TV show long before scripting Sense and Sensibility. It’s important to realise what [screenwriting] is like. There’s a lot of sobbing in foetal positions. But sobbing or not, she’s smart enough to know if you can’t fail, you can’t create.

continued next issue

BLOOD PUDDING

LYNDA E. RUCKER

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A Thing at Our Doorstep

One of the debates currently raging in genre circles concerns the suitability of Gahan Wilson’s rendering of H.P. Lovecraft continuing on as the World Fantasy Award statuette. This, too, will pass, as these conflicts inevitably must, culminating in either a replacement of the statuette or not, but more compelling than the sides taken in this specific argument are the wider questions it is asking, the underpinnings of the disagreement.

It would be easy enough to dismiss both sides with caricatures of their positions, one as militant thought police lacking any appreciation of Where We As A Genre Came From, the other as hidebound and possibly racist traditionalists. Yet you don’t have to be in favour of vigilantly policing people’s thoughts if you wonder whether it’s time the design of the award was rethought upon learning that at least one winner, Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor, was distressed upon learning of Lovecraft’s racist beliefs; likewise, you needn’t be an insensitive apologist dead set on maintaining the reign of Anglophone white men to the exclusion of any other points of view to object to what feels like the displacement of one of the great American fantasists from what is, let us not forget, only a very recently gained position of cultural prominence in the first place.

The culture wars continue to be fought on all fronts. Extreme positions are rarely very interesting, however, in part because they stifle debate. If you’ve already a) made up your mind and b) convinced yourself that the other side is not only utterly without merit but has staked a position clearly at odds with the only obvious moral choice, then there is very little else to be said. There is only shouting (mostly metaphorical, but to the same end) to be done, with very little listening in between, and there has been plenty of that.

Along with the shouting, we can set aside some of the more distracting and less engaging elements of the conflict – whether or not the statue is too ugly to display, the literary merit of Lovecraft’s prose – and instead look at the nuance and the subtext of the debate. It’s not about a statuette at all – indeed, by the time, you are reading this, the World Fantasy committee may have reached a decision about the statuette’s fate. But the issues of a genre with growing pains will remain.

What’s really being asked are a number of questions. First there are the ones about diversity. What does diversity mean in this context, and why do we want it? Is diversity inherently a good thing? What does it bring to the field and how do we encourage it – and why should we? How do we honour what has come before without shutting out what might be ahead?

The second set of questions, which I’ll address next issue, concern the places that horror and fantasy inhabit, and where they converge and diverge.

I don’t think diversity is a very useful word because it has been pressed into service in ways that dilute its meaning. For example, I used to live in Portland, Oregon, a city that prided itself on its diversity while being one of the more homogenous communities in North America overall. I think that what many Portlanders meant when they talked about diversity was theoretical, something like we want to imagine that we welcome a multiplicity of people and viewpoints (so long as they are the right sort of people acceding to the right range of viewpoints). Diversity was aspirational, a catch-all repository for a general expression of progressive values. I don’t mean this as a criticism, per se; I’m generally in favour of progressive values myself, but I don’t think diversity and progressivism are necessarily synonyms however often they may travel arm in arm giving that impression.

What most of us are really looking for when we use the word is a certain type of diversity, one that reinforces those progressive values. So: we do want fresh perspectives, we want to hear from writers with varied backgrounds, but only when those perspectives and values are not greatly in conflict with our own. There’s a range of approaches and subject matter I would find objectionable for reasons that seem to me self-evident – I don’t see anything to be gained by reading stories that try to convince me of the necessity for a fundamentalist religious state or the inherent inferiority of women or that posit a fascistic, might-makes-right worldview, but these are not outlandish viewpoints in some circles. It’s easy enough to find plenty of people who support such ideas and these ideas, too, can be included under the umbrella of diversity if we are defining it as a multiplicity of views and ways of being. It’s really a catch-22, then, this push for diversity; most of us want something different, but not too different.

So, while acknowledging that the word diversity has some baggage, what is generally desired when expressing a need for diversity in fiction? Novelty, certainly. Diversity in our fiction means we get to read stories from more perspectives, and we have the opportunity to read entirely new types of stories while old tales are given fresh spins. The second is a broader desire that is both selfish and selfless: we want people to at least have the opportunity to reach their full potential. We do not want someone turning away from writing fiction or any other endeavour because they felt that due to their nationality or gender or sexuality or some other marker that they were unable or unwelcome to do so. This results in two positive outcomes: one, no one is restricted from exploring their potential, which is generally a good