Black Static #52 (May-June 2016)

By TTA Press

Spring brings the May–June issue, #52, and Carole Johnstone's 17,000-word novelette 'Wetwork', which inspired Ben Baldwin’s cover and interior art. Damien Angelica Walters, Robert Levy, Michelle Ann King, and Ralph Robert Moore supply more stories with interior illustrations by Dave Senecal, Warwick Fraser-Coombe, and Joachim Luetke.
Features: Comment- Stephen Volk and Lynda E. Rucker; book reviews- Peter Tennant (Paul Meloy interviewed); Blood Spectrum- Gary Couzens (media reviews)

Fiction this issue
Wetwork by Carole Johnstone
Deep Within The Marrow, Hidden In My Smile by Damien Angelica Walters
The Oestridae by Robert Levy
My Sister, The Fairy Princess by Michelle Ann King
Trying To Get Back To Nonchalant by Ralph Robert Moore

The issue's artists are
Ben Baldwin
Dave Senecal
Warwick Fraser-Coombe
Joachim Luetke

Non Fiction this issue;
Coffinmaker's Blues by Stephen Volk -TO BEAT THE DARK, OR THE DISQUIET MAN
Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker - THEATRES OF BLOOD
Blood Spectrum - Gary Couzens - DVDs/Blu-Ray reviews
Case Notes - book reviews by Peter Tennant.
Interviewee – Paul Meloy

Peter Tennant's Case Notes book and novella reviews this issue include
FRACTURED REALITY: PAUL MELOY; The Night Clock plus extensive interview with the author
LITTLE MONSTERS; Insect Literature by Lafcadio Hearn, Teeming Terrors edited by Christine Morgan, Creeping Crawlers edited by Allen Ashley
THE SILVER SCREAM ;Stanley Kubrick's The Shining: Studies in the Horror Film edited by Danel Olson, The Making of George A. Romero's Day of the Dead by Lee Karr, Film Gutter Volume 1 by Alex Davis, Halloween by Murray Leeder, The Curse of Frankenstein by Marcus K. Harmes, The Blair Witch Project by Peter Turner

Gary Couzens's DVD reviews this issue include:
The Ninth Configuration, Symptoms, Audition, Yakuza Apocalypse, Martyrs (2016), The Green Inferno, Ghoulies, Ghoulies II, Scream Park, Anguish, Emelie, The Hallow, Dark Signal, Jeruzalem, Backtrack, I Survived a Zombie Holocaust, Bloodsucking Bosses, Fire City: End of Days, Exposed, The Forgotten

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: May 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310473982

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 52

MAY–JUNE 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

Gary Couzens

[e-mail]

SUBMISSIONS

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

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SMASHWORDS REQUESTS THAT WE ADD THE FOLLOWING:

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 52 May-June 2016

TTA PRESS

COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2016

PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS. ISBN: 9781310473982

CONTENTS

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COVER ART

WETWORK

BEN BALDWIN

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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 BEN BALDWIN

WETWORK

CAROLE JOHNSTONE

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STORY ILLUSTRATED BY DAVE SENECAL

DEEP WITHIN THE MARROW, HIDDEN IN MY SMILE

DAMIEN ANGELICA WALTERS

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STORY ILLUSTRATED BY WARWICK FRASER-COOMBE

THE OESTRIDAE

ROBERT LEVY

STORY

MY SISTER, THE FAIRY PRINCESS

MICHELLE ANN KING

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STORY ILLUSTRATED BY JOACHIM LUETKE

TRYING TO GET BACK TO NONCHALANT

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

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BOOK REVIEWS + PAUL MELOY INTERVIEW

CASE NOTES

PETER TENNANT

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DVD/BLU-RAY REVIEWS

BLOOD SPECTRUM

GARY COUZENS

COFFINMAKER’S BLUES

STEPHEN VOLK

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To Beat The Dark, or The Disquiet Man

Christmas Day, 1972. The world turns, in blue and beige. The distinctive and comforting BBC logo. But what is about to follow will be anything but comforting. I have no idea it will change my life forever.

I’m excited not only because ghost stories on TV are rare as hen’s teeth even then, but because of the expectation that goes with the writer’s name, famous for spooking the nation with Quatermass serials I was too young to watch but my father has told me emptied the pubs and gave people nightmares.

Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape came to embody the juxtaposition of science and superstition that was to become the writer’s trademark. A dichotomy that lit a fuse in my young mind. But more importantly, he and it showed me that genre work – horror, science fiction – needn’t be the stuff of trite and childish B movies, but could in fact be as thematically original, multilayered, naturalistic and hard-hitting as the best social realist dramas on the box. This was no less than a revelation.

I’ve often recounted how, nigh on twenty years later, I pitched Ghostwatch to a BBC producer and how she reacted to a drama we pretend is a live broadcast by saying it could be another War of the Worlds. Paramount in my own mind was: could I pull off something as smart, terrifying and unforgettable as The Stone Tape was when I was a teenager?

Kneale skirted around genre, sniffing at it suspiciously, but (unusually, perhaps uniquely) his visionary SF television plays (not forgetting he adapted Nineteen Eighty-Four) were as well-wrought and ‘grown-up’ as any Play for Today. His not-so-abominable snowman film The Creature (with its ultra-Kneale archetype of the abhorrent human ‘creature’ or ‘beast’: a brash and insensitive American) eschews a scare ending for one of alarming depth and wisdom, just as the Quatermass serials rejected Buck Rogers derring-do for tense, gritty post-war realism while reflecting upon the actual space race as an existential idea (or ideal), but one fraught with the dread of potential hubris, with the thought that we were courting not progress but a malevolent self-willed destruction. Something that via thrills and suspense nevertheless subtly examined what it means to be human – as all great writing should.

Perhaps in aspiring to the same goals, I could hardly have kept references to Kneale out of Ghostwatch if I’d tried. At the outset in both we have technology descending on a location, full of boyish drive and intent but also an air of smugness. In both cases the protagonists will be dabbling with things left well alone. But isn’t that what science always does in order to facilitate progress? And while we want and need progress, isn’t there a part of us fears what we might discover, what price might have to be paid?

Early in The Stone Tape there is a comic moment when a man is dressed up in an alien costume. To me, this was Kneale’s way of saying "Don’t expect Quatermass from me this time. You are not going to get rubber mask monsters here". I consciously used the exact same gag for the same reason when Craig Charles pops out of the kitchen closet to give Sarah Greene a cheap jump-scare.

But my most direct reference is when Dr Lin Pascoe, our parapsychologist ‘expert’, talks to a baffled Michael Parkinson about the onion skin – making a direct allusion to The Stone Tape in positing the theory that layer upon layer of people have lived and died in that place and, in some realm we can neither perceive nor detect as human beings, still exist there. Through such ideas, though never on the nose, Kneale hints at a subtextual stripping away of civilisation and a return to the primal, the pre-human, even pre-life. The literal unknown. Technology in both dramas is a gateway to deep and frightening knowledge – not by way of rockets to deep space but in this case, and in Ghostwatch’s case, to the deep past.

Another trope Ghostwatch shares with The Stone Tape, and, to an extent, with Professor Bernard Quatermass, is the Cassandra-like scientist up against a brick wall, arguing against narrow-minded officials set in their view, whether the military’s stiff-collared jobsworth Breen or dour Barnsley TV anchorman Parkinson. The lesson from Kneale (and from me) is pretty clear: the person in authority often doesn’t know what’s going on, let alone what’s best. And there’s nothing more frightening than the person in charge being out of control.

We knew all along that Halloween was the ideal date for Ghostwatch to be transmitted and Halloween provided another delicious Kneale connection. He wrote an early draft of Halloween III, in which children were affected by a cheerily insidious TV commercial in the run up to the Celtic festival of Samhain. In my own Halloween horror show, the programme itself was what was insidious – but half-knowingly I was using Knealean tricks: the innocuous nursery rhyme as a chilling portent – in his case, per the John Mills Quatermass, Huffity, puffity, Ringstone Round with its implication of a widdershins circle to raise the Devil or the Big Bad Wolf, and in Ghostwatch Round and round the garden, like a teddy bear…

The incantation having worked, at the end of Ghostwatch the Lord of Misrule has won. Pipes is being ‘piped’ into our homes, as deeply wanted and deeply reviled as most TV fodder. We have conjured him and we are abandoned as terror reaches its height. No end credits. I wanted to leave on a note of trauma, loss, confusion – just like the devastation at the end of Hammer’s Quatermass and the Pit, where the titles run over Andrew Keir’s titular character sitting in the Blitz-like rubble, the Martian demon defeated but the world beaten to a pulp.

Our desire (our invocation) created Pipes, just as the essence of the Martians was inside us waiting to erupt. We, as Kneale almost always conveys, are the problem. I often think that behind his stories he is pleading with Humanity to adopt a trace of humility. Or at least curb its obscene arrogance in placing Mankind at the centre of the universe, and our present-day selves as the pinnacle of all that has been achieved in the past: another delusion.

The craggy Quatermass, looking like a bearded Old Testament prophet in the sixties movie (or Father Shandor, vampire slayer, to be exact), faces netherworld devils albeit in science-fiction drag, while the communications boffins in The Stone Tape (based on actual BBC technicians) come to apply their machines to that most ubiquitous of supernatural entities, ghosts.

Kneale’s most fertile recurring preoccupation is this. Our attempt as human beings to apply rational thinking to the irrational, a hopeless contradiction at the core of us. Our left brain, logic, seeks to explore and understand but our right brain, emotion, fears what might be waiting for us. The desire, as Freud would say, and the repression of the desire. (Though I’m sure Kneale would baulk at anyone discussing his entertainments in psychoanalytical terms.)

He had a strong and distinctive voice. His themes permeate and resonate even in an industry, television, in which being a journeyman (better, a yes-man) is sometimes prized above all else. Yet in a business that records over its past all too swiftly, he has – to those who value true originality – a presence in the onion layers of television history, with Quatermass mentioned in the timeline on the walls of BAFTA headquarters, alongside, to my inestimable pride, Ghostwatch.

It’s a cliché that we stand on the shoulders of giants, and a truism that readers become writers, but TV viewers become writers too. Images and scenes as well as books become part of our shared lives, our creative DNA. I can only say that if Michael Bryant and the other scientists in The Stone Tape were to peel away the onion skin layers of my work, I’m pretty sure the ghosts they’d uncover would be themselves.

www.stephenvolk.net

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

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Theatres of Blood

Over the past year, I had the opportunity to write a short play, or rather, a playlet, as part of a larger anthology horror piece, and see it produced on stage in London.

The entire experience from start to finish made me think about how horror manifests in different mediums, how creators create that sense of fear and how we receive it as the audience. I’ve also realised that theatre offers some exciting possibilities for horror storytelling, partly due to the work of young British playwright named Alistair McDowall.

One thing I learned from my very brief stint writing for the stage is that like all writers I have a few crutches, and I didn’t get to use any of them in this new medium.

The first challenge I faced was the realisation that I didn’t have many examples I could call on of particularly frightening onstage horror; I just haven’t seen many horror plays. (I think my fellow columnist Steve Volk wrote a piece on the theatre and horror a few years back.) It’s not that I think horror needs to be scary to be effective – regular readers of this column will know that I regard fear as more of a knock-on effect rather than primary purpose of horror – but I usually do spend some time thinking about what might give my readers a chill and found that I had few examples in my personal experience to fall back on compared to film and books.

Then there’s the fact that so much of the horror fiction I like best is about a person’s interior state, and I couldn’t work out how to convey that effectively on stage. One aspect of writing drama is that it must be dramatic – that is, things must happen, in a manner that is interesting to watch as opposed to reading about it. There is, of course, the monologue, perhaps the closest thing to fiction writing that the stage offers, but since I’d never written drama before and might never again, I wanted to challenge myself.

But it did make me consider how critical prose is for me in creating a certain mood, and that was something I did not have access to in a piece of dramatic writing. Dialogue, yes, and I ended up using dialogue to tell a story that was (I hope) both funny and gradually more disturbing as what lies beneath a deceptive surface is revealed.

I was delighted with the end result thanks to the excellent acting and directing. Yet as much as I enjoyed the show in its entirety, and although my fellow writers had moments in their plays that did give me that elusive chill, I still wasn’t entirely certain how I might use those observations to achieve something as scary on stage as I might on paper – not, at any rate, without a massive budget that could allow for cinema-worthy effects.

You ask, you receive.

Within a couple of weeks of my own play’s run I had the opportunity to see the latest offering from Alistair McDowall, X. It’s the second thing I’ve seen by him in the last few months – I caught his previous play, Pomona, at the National Theatre in December. Despite Pomona’s invoking of Lovecraft and other genre references and its pitch-black storytelling, I had thought of it less as a horror play and more as a very weird piece of theatre – albeit one I liked a great deal. Now that I’ve seen a pair of his plays in quick succession it’s much clearer to me that McDowall is very much a horror playwright at least in part however much he may resist the label.

(In a recent interview in the Independent, he insisted that X was not science fiction because it was a relationship drama as though the two have never before coexisted.)

What struck me most about X, however, was that it had some extremely creepy moments and it dealt a great deal with the interior lives of its characters to horrific effect. In a nutshell, the play is set on a space ship on Pluto with a crew that appears to have been abandoned by an Earth that may have ceased to exist anyway. Told in a nonlinear fashion that reflects the fragmented nature of the characters’ consciousness and their utter loss of any sense of the passage of time, the play also mixes delusions with real events until we are as disoriented as the characters. This sense of disorientation and isolation that the play produces in the audience is easily as chilling as the straight-up horror moments.

As for those horror moments, what particularly surprised me was that the first two were no different from what I find particularly scary in the written word or in cinema respectively. One was simply a character’s report of something another had seen, a few well-chosen words that described something that was so off-kilter and unnatural that it sent a chill up my spine. Another was a moment surely influenced by Asian horror films that ought to have felt clichéd – and might have in a film – but was frightening on stage.

The third, however, was a tour de force, the sort of sequence that must have been terrifying to write, direct and perform because it was either going to make or break the audience’s reception to the entire play.

If the film Pontypool played with the breakdown of language, X pushes that concept to the limit of the audience’s endurance as memory and rationality dissolve and the actors’ dialogue becomes increasingly overlapping and repetitive, building to an intense climax within the scene. It works, and brilliantly, but more importantly, it was a moment that only could have worked as it did in the medium of theatre. It would be impossible to replicate on the page, and in cinema it would lack the immediacy needed to make it effective.

It made me think about how environment does or doesn’t play a part in how we experience horror, as well as the conventions we become accustomed to in the environment of each medium. Of course, we’ve all had the experience of watching a horror film with an unruly audience that spoils the mood, or that a book or a film can be much scarier when we are home alone with them. But beyond that, how is it that sitting in a cinema full of people can result in our feeling so fearful as we watch a film, even more so if the rest of the audience is