Black Static #50 (Jan-Feb 2016)

By TTA Press

The 50th issue (January–February 2016) contains new novelettes and short stories by Ray Cluley, Georgina Bruce, V.H. Leslie, Tyler Keevil, Tim Casson, and Gary Budden. The cover art is by Vince Haig (for 'White Rabbit' by Georgina Bruce), and interior illustrations are by Vince Haig again, Martin Hanford, and Richard Wagner. Features: Coffinmaker's Blues by Stephen Volk (comment); Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker (comment); Case Notes by Peter Tennant (book reviews and an extensive interview with Simon Bestwick); Blood Spectrum by Tony Lee (DVD/Blu-ray reviews).

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311700094

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 50

JAN–FEB 2016

© 2016 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

Submissions

Unsolicited submissions of short stories are always very welcome, but please follow the guidelines: tta.submittable.com/submit

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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 50 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2016

TTA PRESS

COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2016

PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

CONTENTS

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COVER ART

WHITE RABBIT

VINCE HAIG

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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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STORY ILLUSTRATED BY VINCE HAIG

WHITE RABBIT

GEORGINA BRUCE

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STORY ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD WAGNER

MAN OF THE HOUSE

V.H. LESLIE

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STORY ILLUSTRATED BY MARTIN HANFORD

CHILD OF THORNS

RAY CLULEY

STORY

GREENTEETH

GARY BUDDEN

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NOVELETTE ILLUSTRATED BY SEBASTIAN DEL VAL

FOUL IS FAIR

TYLER KEEVIL

STORY

BUG SKIN

TIM CASSON

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BOOK REVIEWS + SIMON BESTWICK INTERVIEW

CASE NOTES

PETER TENNANT

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DVD/BLU-RAY REVIEWS

BLOOD SPECTRUM

TONY LEE

COFFINMAKER’S BLUES

STEPHEN VOLK

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10 WAYS COMEDY AND HORROR ARE ALMOST THE SAME THING

Horror can of course be played for laughs, as we all know (and as Lynda Rucker explored in the last issue) – there are horror movies that are holding-your-ribs hilarious, like Peter Jackson’s Brain Dead, or laffers (as Variety would call them) with a dark undercurrent, like Lars and The Real Girl – but a comedy idea can be played for absolute horror, too.

Lars Von Trier’s magnificent but bleak-as-all-hell Melancholia is, in my opinion, a comedy made with an absolutely straight face. It takes the science fiction concept of a planet crashing into the Earth, but its ultimate joke (if you can call it that) is that the clinically depressed sister (Kirsten Dunst) achieves a kind of inner peace when the world is destroyed, whilst her balanced and practical sister completely falls apart.

It made me think about the unholy alliance between horror and comedy, as crafts and disciplines that aren’t such polar opposites as we might assume.

1. INSTINCT

As I’ve mentioned before in these pages, I attended the Q&A after a performance of mega-hit play Ghost Stories when one of its co-writers, Jeremy Dyson, was asked by a naive but eager creative writing student: What advice would you give on writing horror?. Dyson thought for a minute, then said, politely but firmly: Sorry, but there is no advice. You either find things scary, or you don’t. You can’t teach it. You can’t learn it. In the same way, you can’t learn what’s funny. You either know or you don’t. Dyson said: People talk about having a funny bone, but there’s also a horror bone. It’s exactly the same thing.

2. RHYTHM

Listen to David Sedaris. Listen to old Woody Allen recordings. Steve Martin talks about rhythm being so innate to the success of a joke that in his early years he noticed some comedians got a laugh even when the punch line was mumbled. The audience didn’t hear it, they simply reacted to the musicality. Similarly, I think horror has a musicality too. A maestro director gets a sequence to work at the right tempo and emotional volume, while film-makers less well versed in the genre spectacularly drop the ball. The editing is clumsy, the pace leaden, the climax ham-fisted. The moment doesn’t work. You think: "Have you ever actually seen a horror film?"

3. SURPRISE

From Freud onwards psychological studies of humour theorise confidently that a joke is based on surprise. Tee-tum, tee-tum, tee-BANG! The outcome isn’t what you were led to expect. And this is the currency of horror, too. Think of the so-called bus moments of Val Lewton, now painfully de rigeur in every pathetically-formulaic scary movie of the last ten years. These now hideously predictable jump scares like the ending of Carrie or the fish bucket moment in Jaws (to cite two classic examples) are in fact so often followed by a laugh, the requisite release of tension in the viewer, that they often are difficult to differentiate from actual jokes.

4. MYSTERY

What makes one joke funny to one person, yet the person next to them remains stony-faced? By the same token, why does a horror film scare one person rigid, yet their friend finds it yawn-inducingly ridiculous? (When I first saw The Exorcist with a Chinese student friend, he tittered all the way through.) It’s a mystery. Because in both cases, it’s entirely personal. Which is why we pay those singular individuals who come up with the universal joke (Martin in his prime or, again, Woody Allen) or the universal monster (like Spielberg or Wes Craven) the mega bucks.

5. THE FLIPSIDE

It’s a cliché (or truism) but comedians definitely have a dark side of their personality. Think of those grim BBC4 biopics about Frankie Howerd, Kenneth Williams and Tony Hancock for a start. Weirdly, if you want to have a laugh, don’t meet up with a bunch of comedy writers, go for a drink with a bunch of horror writers. They’re the nicest people you could ever hope to meet, and funny as hell. The reason for this paradox? Perhaps they’re more alike than they let on. One aspect keeps the other buried. Yin and yang.

6. TELLING AN UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH

Comedy does this, at its best. So does horror. As somebody once said, News is something that someone doesn’t want to hear. The rest is advertising.

7. THE GAG

When I’m in script meetings about horror films I’m working on, I often find myself talking about the gag. Not because the scene I’m discussing is funny, but because it’s a beat, a punctuation which needs skilful consideration to make work.

8. IT’S THE TELLER NOT THE TALE

As everyone knows who has listened to a pub bore telling a yarn, compared to a genius like George Burns. Similarly in horror, the voice (or hand) of the writer or film-maker is paramount. (Who’d think that a possessed car could be terrifying? But in the hands of Stephen King, it is.)

9. NO MIDDLE GROUND

A joke either gets a laugh or it doesn’t. It’s blunt and merciless. It separates the men from the boys. Similarly, a horror film either horrifies or it doesn’t. The line between success and failure is absolute and palpable. Which is why this is no territory for namby-pambies. They can run off and play in the sandpit marked Worthy Drama or Social Realism. While bad comedies and bad horror films get ripped new ones by the critics.

10. COMEDY AND HORROR CONVERGE AT THE ULTIMATE

Which is black comedy. This is where funny and frightening meet at the crossroads. For me, this is probably the platinum card of all genres in literature and film because – as Billy Wilder knew, and as Wes D. Gehring (author of the highly recommended American Dark Comedy: Beyond Satire) espouses – black comedy is the most like our real experience of actual life. Neither scary nor hilarious, but both. Sometimes at the same time. Think of the butcher trying to hide the severed finger from the Sheriff in TV’s Fargo. The cowboy riding the atom bomb in Dr Strangelove, Blood Simple, A Clockwork Orange, Chopper, Bronson, Natural Born Killers, Reservoir Dogs, Black Swan, the weird worlds of David Lynch. Even The Walking Dead, where the sickening but monotonous job of spiking zombies in their brains at the perimeter fence was played as an existential gag worthy of Samuel Beckett.

I could go on, but I won’t. We all have our favourites. The movies that make us laugh when we shouldn’t, or scare us in a way that makes us deeply uncomfortable in scenes we’ll never forget.

Which brings me back to Steve Martin. In Born Standing Up the most moving part is nothing to do with his stand-up career at all, but a description of himself at the death bed of his physically abusive father, Glenn. Any author could have tackled this archetypal subject adequately, but in Martin’s sensitive hands it is just simply what we all aspire to: good writing. Later, the comedian describes visiting his mother, who by then was falling into a vacant mental decline: She began to alternate between lucidity and confusion, creating moments of tenderness and painful hilarity. She told me Glenn had treated me unfairly, that she wished she had intervened. She said when I was a child, she hugged me and kissed me a lot, something I did not recollect. Then she took a long pause. She looked at me, quietly puzzled, and said, ‘How’s your mother?’

Badum-tish.

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

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MEET THE NEW GOTH, SAME AS THE OLD GOTH

It’s something of a fool’s game to try and chase the origins of a mode or genre of fiction. No matter how far back we look there seems to be something that arguably came before, and even if we start with the earliest known stories, we must assume that something preceded them. It is certain, however, that while horror storytelling did not originate with the gothic, it is one of the more significant waystations in the development of horror fiction as we know it today.

After the film Crimson Peak came out, I was surprised to see many people characterise it as not a horror movie – it’s a gothic. (I know its director, Guillermo del Toro, did so as well, but as well-versed as he is in genre I think it’s likely he did so for marketing reasons, hoping to keep the gorehounds who would hate it away from the cinema and appealing to the audience who would actually like it.) But what is the gothic story if it is not also horror?

I’ve written and spoken before about my primal attraction to horror imagery from a very young age, but when I encountered this characterisation of del Toro’s film, it occurred to me that what I am really thinking of when I say horror imagery in terms of that early attraction is primarily gothic imagery: the haunted old house or castle, the secret passageways and chambers, the ornate cemetery. The idea, too, of forbidden knowledge. I love that writers like Fritz Leiber and Richard Matheson brought horror into modern urban mid-(last)century America, but because I grew up reading contemporary horror influenced by those writers, those gothic settings never felt tired to me. In fact, they felt lost to me, and I mourned their scarcity in the contemporary horror I grew up with.

I think that the gothic in its more modern form is a genre primarily associated with women, or at least with something distinctly feminine. I don’t think the people who split these hairs about gothic-or-horror are necessarily sexist or think that women can’t do horror; I do think that there have been attitudes toward the gothic and its traditional audiences and writers over the centuries that still affect how we view the subgenre today.

My own fictional proclivities in reading and writing are partly shaped by a handful of gothic novels and novelists. I say a handful because I remember trying out a few of the generic mass market paperback variety and disliking most of them. By the time I was growing up, that particular expression of the subgenre, largely dating from the 1950s–1970s, had peaked and its popularity was in the past, but there were still a few tattered paperbacks hanging around my house and that of relatives that I would pick up and then put down in disappointment. What was inside their covers was never as compelling as the cover itself, which usually depicted some variation on a vulnerable-looking woman cowering in the shadow of a forbidding castle or mansion. Isn’t the failure of the cover to live up to the contents (and vice versa) forever a danger of the horror genre?

Of those gothics that did influence me, I think first of Jane Eyre, a book I initially read as a young teenager and return to every few years to find that I seem to be reading a different book each time. Then there’s Daphne Du Maurier: Rebecca, of course, and books like Jamaica Inn. From the days of mass-market popularity came Joan Aiken, Mary Stewart, and Victoria Holt, billed as the queen of romantic suspense and the only one who continued to publish in any significant way through the 1980s. I never thought of any of these as especially tied in to my love of horror (though I’d have turned up my nose at the idea of reading a straight romance novel) but they certainly all are grounded in the gothic tradition of the decaying or decrepit or exotic setting, the damsel in peril, the troubled and mysterious hero, and the secrets involving madness or murder or other shocking revelations. As I grew older, though, I went through a stage where I was vaguely embarrassed about that particular stage in my reading: those books weren’t serious enough, the unspoken subtext being because they were aimed at women.

Of course, these books take their inspiration from the original gothic novels of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the over-the-top stories of Horace Walpole, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Ann Radcliffe and others, which were ubiquitous enough that Jane Austen was already parodying them in her novel Northanger Abbey that she wrote around the end of the eighteenth century (though it was only published posthumously). Like horror today, the gothics in their heyday were considered a disreputable genre.

A distinction between gothic horror and gothic romance had never occurred to me until I heard Crimson Peak described as the latter rather than the former. I couldn’t disagree more. I would class those writers I listed as influences as writing in the gothic romance mode; even I, with my generous definitions of horror fiction, can’t quite manage to shoehorn those stories into horror although a few may straddle the border and Du Maurier and Aiken certainly penned their share of short horror fiction. So maybe a gothic story is not always a horror story after all. But however superfluous the supernatural element may have been in Crimson Peak, the movie offered horror aplenty in the form of over-the-top bloodletting. Crimson Peak is definitely a horror movie, and a gothic, but it does feel like a very feminine mode of horror, and to movie audiences in particular that may be an unacceptable mode.

By feminine, of course, I am not talking about any kind of gender essentialism; I am simply speaking of an association. There is more than one love story at the core of Crimson Peak, but this doesn’t make it a gothic romance. Romanticism, in the nineteenth century sense of the word, is one element of the gothic, and while romanticism in that context does not specifically refer to romantic love, it can certainly encompass it. And like a good gothic, the film also gives us romantic love that is decidedly unwholesome and definitely forbidden.

This is where it occurs to me that, once again, labels are really doing more to confuse than clarify: what I mean and what you mean when we say horror and gothic and gothic horror and romance and gothic romance and romanticism may not at all be the same thing.

A lot of conversations in the genre feel this way sometimes, as though we are either all talking past one another without realising it or spinning our wheels splitting hairs over labels. And I think this is why many of us find labelling things so maddening. Where some people seem to think they are terrific shorthand for getting to the meat of a conversation, for me, they either seem reductionist or obfuscating. Worst of all, they collapse nuance. This is probably why the internet, the place where nuance goes to die, loves labels so much.

What’s old is always new again, and I understand that there’s now a movement afoot to saddle the gothic with the awful label dreadpunk. It’s particularly ironic that some fans of a subgenre largely concerned with the past aren’t satisfied until it’s re-branded as something shiny and new. Whether we call it horror, or gothic, or supernatural thrillers or suspense, or ghost stories – it’s all part of the