Black Static #44 Horror Magazine (Jan-Feb 2015)

By TTA Press

The January–February issue of Black Static contains new dark fiction by Simon Avery (novelette), Priya Sharma, Jackson Kuhl, E. Catherine Tobler, and Tyler Keevil (novelette). The cover art is 'Ghost' by Martin Hanford, and interior illustrations are by Martin Hanford, Richard Wagner, and George Cotronis. The usual features are present, including the regular comment columns by Stephen Volk (Coffinmaker's Blues) and Lynda E. Rucker (renamed Notes From the Borderland); Blood Spectrum by Tony Lee (DVD/Blu-ray/VoD reviews including The Girl Who Knew Too Much, Nekromantik, Sin City 2: A Dame to Kill For, Deliver Us From Evil, Dead Snow 2: Red vs Dead, Ragnarok: The Viking Apocalypse, Vikings Season Two, True Blood Season Seven, The Strain Season One, The Rover, Honeymoon, Ganja & Hess); Case Notes by Peter Tennant (book reviews including titles by Tim Waggoner, Aliya Whiteley, Michael Marshall Smith, Joe R. Lansdale, Evangeline Lilly, Gary McMahon, and many others). There is also an extensive interview with prolific author Tim Waggoner.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310664090

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 44

JAN–FEB 2015

© 2015 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 contributors’ guidelines

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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 44 JAN–FEB 2015 

TTA PRESS

COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2015

PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS. ISBN:

CONTENTS

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Cover Art

GHOST

MARTIN HANFORD

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Comment

COFFINMAKER’S BLUES

STEPHEN VOLK

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Comment

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

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Novelette Illustrated by Martin Hanford

GOING BACK TO THE WORLD

SIMON AVERY

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Story illustrated by Richard Wagner

THE ABSENT SHADE

PRIYA SHARMA

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Story

THE FISHERS OF MEN

JACKSON KUHL

Story

SWEET WATER

E. CATHERINE TOBLER

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Novelette Illustrated by George Cotronis

SAMHAIN

TYLER KEEVIL

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DVD/Blu-ray/VoD Reviews

BLOOD SPECTRUM

TONY LEE

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Book Reviews + Tim Waggoner Interview

CASE NOTES

PETER TENNANT

COFFINMAKER’S BLUES

STEPHEN VOLK

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How to Stay Insane (Part 2)

The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark. So said Emma Thompson quoting choreographer Agnes de Mille – or, as Ray Bradbury put it: Sometimes you have to jump out of the window and just grow wings on the way down.

But nothing stops you being creative more than the feeling you might be doing something wrong. Working in film and television, you can easily feel everyone is looking over your shoulder: at every turn, someone is marking your homework. Afflicted with the Curse of Pleasing People, it’s sometimes impossible to remember the person you really have to please is yourself.

Yes, writing can be bliss. Joy. Until you expose it to external validation, and it’s criticised, altered, rejected, ridiculed, even hated – but inevitably and certainly judged. This is inescapable. Unless you live as a hermit and write haikus which you then burn to ash on the wind and which no-one will ever read or hear, and you are happy with that. But most writers who are serious about their work want to communicate their ideas. And that involves other people.

Which is why it is so extraordinary to think of Russell T Davies’s balancing act on Doctor Who – with ratings to accomplish, an impossible budget, other writers and other drafts to juggle, arcs to plot and lynch-mob fans to keep undisappointed. No wonder he confesses: Fear is always the same. Different worries with different scripts, but the same baseline fear. He’s also aware that this kind of pretentious talk makes writing sound a unique activity. Would I be like this if I worked in Greggs? Would I spend all my time getting the lattice pastry on the chicken-and-ham pies correct? (The answer is yes.) But do dentists and bus drivers get blocked? Good question.

The day after Robin Williams committed suicide, my local road sweeper said to me: Troubled genius. I know the feeling. And maybe he does. Richard Attenborough was fond of saying Be kind. Everyone has their battles. But one symptom of depression, complementing the writer’s necessary self-absorption, is that our battles feel not only all-consuming but more important. To us, anyway.

Can there be a positive spin to this? Well, yes.

The psychotherapist Philippa Perry in How to Stay Sane says: The right kind of stress creates positive stimulation. It will push us to learn new things and to be creative, but it will not be so overwhelming that it tips us over into panic. Good stress causes new neural connections. It is what we need for personal development and growth.

Self-doubt can make you strive when, it could be argued, too much self-belief produces complacency.

Having a fragile ego and lack of confidence, says Tim Lebbon, waiting for the hand on the shoulder and the voice that says ‘Actually, you’re not a writer at all’, leaves you open to mood swings and anxiety. But I also believe it’s part of what keeps the creative fire ablaze.

What’s more, Perry (wife of Turner prize-winning potter Grayson) says writing can be an act of emotional processing that helps deal with experiences of danger or loss of control. But hang on. Outside the remit of the fifty minute hour, what if some of us feel endangered and out of control most of the time?

All this is particularly fascinating when you think that fear and anxiety are the very fuel of creating horror.

They say Freud’s theories could only have come to fruition in Vienna, where Kokoschka exposed Die träumenden Knaben – his record of my own state of mind – to a shocked public, and Egon Shiele dared to paint what humans are really like. Does this mean Vienna is a city of extraordinary neurosis, or of extraordinary creativity? What’s the difference? The neurotic doesn’t think they are seeing a distorted view of the world, they are convinced it is the truth. Even a truth others cannot see. Could creativity + neurosis = Horror?

I visited the Edvard Munch Museum last month and learned that a doctor once told the artist he could cure his nervousness forever. Munch said: No! I want to keep my nervousness! He was afraid if he lost it he would lose his talent too. Without fear and illness I could not have accomplished all that I have.

A sentiment echoed by Hitchcock: My good luck in life is to be a really frightened person. I’m fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero can’t make a good suspense film.

Perhaps the key to writer’s block, and to self-doubt, is the fear of being judged. The solution, of course, is to not give a shit. But the job of being a writer is to give a shit. And the giving of shits is both what gives birth to the work, and the catalyst for the doubts.

Annoyingly, those of us who suffer from this are told to Man up! as if to be thus afflicted is a sign not only of weakness but of femininity. We are told to don armour to protect our feelings, to be tough, even callous – contributing to our instinctive belief that the system considers us outsiders, dopes, childlike, dreamers, unstable, untrustworthy, soft.

(Novelist Mark Chadbourn hits the nail on the head: In this civilisation we’ve built for ourselves, the traits you need to get to the top are the very traits that define psychopathy, neatly summed up in the phrase ‘Nice guys finish last’ – which was, no doubt, invented by a psychopath to justify their behaviour.)

The answer, surely, is not to deny the fear, the anxiety, the self-doubt, but stop it having a strangle-hold on what you do best – and what you love. Which is what I always say the direct effect of my nightmare LA experience was. They made me hate what I love.

They killed my soul. For a time.

Even now, writing can sometimes feel more like survival than enjoyment. Part of my brain is always worried about something, even when I’m having a good laugh with friends. I feel more like Salvador Dalí who used to walk around with a rock in his mouth so that when he took it out he’d feel good.

Yet, as John Skipp says: I find myself acutely sympathising with every writer who ever attempted to blunder their way toward meaning, much less quality. Which is to say, basically every writer.

How many of us have the luxury of sitting at our desks all day dreaming up a future earth devoid of adults, or a film director’s early life in East London, or Jules Verne implicated in a UFO abduction, let alone get paid for it? For what’s in our heads. For what preoccupies us. For what terrifies us.

The Muse is a creature we believe in at our peril. But nevertheless, some days are easy, some days are like pulling teeth. Then again, when you’re on a roll or in the zone, it doesn’t feel like you’re writing at all. Sometimes it feels like you’re just taking dictation. That damned animal you were wrestling, the story, is telling you what it wants to be. (Funny how those zoological metaphors abound. The black crow of guilt, Churchill’s black dog of depression, the deadline nipping at our heels…)

There’s a short film made by photojournalist Charlie Hey about Cornish tin miners. It shows a man in darkness, hacking into sheer rock, then standing in a space that had never been a space before. At its best, that’s what writing is like – digging underground and finding those spaces that didn’t exist till now. How can that not be thrilling, awe-inspiring, humbling – but also riven with a unique kind of fear?

But: Sometimes I think of giving [it] up, and that thought seems utterly wonderful. RTD again. Like a release. Freedom. Imagine having no deadlines ever again… That shouldn’t feel so brilliant, should it?

Which is the scariest, and most insane, thought of all.

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Horror

As I mentioned in my previous column, some of the questions raised in the debate over the design of the World Fantasy Award have more merit than others. How can we say we welcome diversity while handing out a statue of an avowed racist as an award – sometimes to writers of the very races Lovecraft claimed to loathe, no less? and Is Lovecraft’s visage still the best representation of a global award celebrating an enormous variety of fiction of the fantastic? are worth addressing. Others are not: Lovecraft is not even a good writer. And still others seem to miss the point entirely: Why is a horror writer’s face on an award that’s given out for fantasy fiction?

Entirely divorced from the debate over the statuette, I was surprised at how often I saw this argument come up, as though there is some hard dividing line between fantasy and horror. I began to wonder about the places that horror and fantasy inhabit. Where is that dividing line? Is it, after all, one that is bright and clear to everyone but me? Does horror have a place here at the table of fantasy at all, and if so, is it a place of honour or will it be asked to restrict itself to the servant’s entrance, keeping its ghouls, its blood spatters and its other more unsavoury elements out of sight?

Tales of horror are as old as storytelling itself. Demons and devils and monsters, underworlds and hells, and intimations of a great and terrifying unknown permeate our most ancient religious texts and mythology, our folk tales, our fairy tales.

The rise of the Gothic novel in the 18th century was perhaps the first time horror emerged as a separate category of literature. Maybe that was where it all started to go wrong for horror as far as public perception – not with the pulps, and not with the oft-cited boom and bust of a narrowly-focused, largely creatively conservative commercial novel genre that publishers dubbed horror in the 1980s and the 1990s, but with Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto and the Gothic genre it spawned.

Gothics were embraced in a populist sense and reviled by critics. It wasn’t just that the books were thought to be bad, though, as in badly written. These terrorist novels, as some critics dubbed them, were believed to pose a grave danger to the very fabric of society itself, particularly via its most vulnerable and presumably weak-minded members: women and young people, who also made up the bulk of the audience. Meanwhile, the authors themselves were largely considered to be hacks, having long since abandoned any sense of artistic integrity in the pursuit of money. All sound familiar?

Make no mistake – whatever the Gothic did to popularise the novel form among the general public, many of them were silly, overwrought and formulaic, so much so that less than forty years after the appearance of Otranto, Jane Austen had penned an early draft of her clever send-up of genre conventions, Northanger Abbey. Those very conventions were among the elements of the Gothic that critics of the day railed against. The idea that women in particular would be so entranced by these grotesque stories of ghouls and murder, blood and dungeons and nightmares, was repellent. What kinds of wives and mothers would these tainted women make?

This unwholesome reputation would follow horror throughout the 19th and 20th centuries and into the present, even as a more respectable strain of supernatural fiction always existed alongside the more gruesome pulp excesses. Writers of stature have always enjoyed dabbling in the field, from Elizabeth Bowen and D.H. Lawrence to Truman Capote, Joyce Carol Oates and Sarah Waters to name only a few. Somehow, though, no matter how popular a work of horror becomes or how esteemed the writer who takes a holiday amid the ghoulies and ghosties, horror retains its disreputable sheen.

Certainly there are advantages to being disreputable, and as horror writers and fans we’re supposed to embrace our outsider status. To some extent I do. Remarkable work can be done in the shadows. But shadows obscure as well as protect, and sometimes I despair that the potential and output of such a rich and varied genre goes largely unrecognised by the wider world. It doesn’t help that the genre seems plagued by the no true Scotsman logical fallacy: point to a superior example of excellence in the genre and see how quickly someone leaps in to explain to you why well that’s not really horror because.

This is frustrating, but I’m used to it; I’ve come to expect it. What I am not accustomed to, what I did not expect, is how many people see horror and fantasy as separate, and horror as something that has no place in fantasy. Seeing it repeated in various places that the World Fantasy Award is for fantasy and horror is not fantasy I felt a little bit like I’d just turned up at the house of people I liked, people with whom I’d always imagined to be fellow travellers and like-minded colleagues, only to have the door shut in my face. But I shouldn’t have been so surprised; these complaints are no different from the ones that plague the British Fantasy Society as well, so much so that the society decided to award horror and fantasy novels separately, and where squabbles continue about the place of horror in the society and whether it should have one at all.

It’s not that a good deal of fiction with fantastical elements can’t be fairly readily classed as either fantasy or horror, although that certainly isn’t true for everyone’s writing. Are the works of Arthur Machen horror or fantasy? What about Graham Joyce? Elizabeth Hand, particularly much of her short fiction? The strange stories of Robert Aickman? Tanith Lee’s collection Red as Blood, or Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber? Stories like these exist in a liminal space between the two genres, and to my mind, this is often the richest and most interesting space of all.

Horror’s roots are in fantasy, even non-supernatural horror which may feature serial killers or psychological delusions rather than genuine monsters. Horror is what happens when the darkest fantasy stories turn darker: when you enter Grendel’s lair, when the fairies keep you for a hundred years, when you get trapped in the underworld. And to return to the original prompt for this column: anyone who knows their history knows that the World Fantasy Society and awards (like the British Fantasy Society) are as steeped in the darker strains of fantasy as they are in the light: the list of guests and award nominees and recipients from its inception in 1975 reads like a who’s who of horror and dark fantasy writers with Fritz Leiber, Robert Aickman, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Karl Edward Wagner, Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, Poppy Z. Brite, T.E.D. Klein, Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Suzy McKee Charnas and many, many more among their numbers.

By all means, change the statuette, but do so because it’s time, because what once may have been the right choice for the award no longer is for too many people. But don’t change it because horror should be driven out of the fantasy fold altogether. Horror is inherently a part of fantasy just as it is a vital aspect of literature itself, and it always has been despite efforts to suppress and