Black Static #53 (July-August 2016)

By TTA Press

The July–August issue contains 'Inheritance, or The Ruby Tear', a novelette by Priya Sharma, plus stories by Steve Rasnic Tem, Harmony Neal, Kristi DeMeester, Danny Rhodes, Stephen Hargadon, and Charles Wilkinson. The cover art is by Tara Bush, with interior illustrations by Tara Bush 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); Blood Spectrum by Gary Couzens (DVD/Blu-ray reviews).

Cover Art:

'Transition' by Tara Bush

Fiction:

Inheritance, or The Ruby Tear by Priya Sharma
illustrated by Tara Bush

Breathing by Steve Rasnic Tem
illustrated by Richard Wagner

Dare by Harmony Neal

The Rim of the World by Kristi DeMeester

Tohoku by Danny Rhodes

Mittens by Stephen Hargadon
illustrated by Richard Wagner

In the Frame by Charles Wilkinson

Comment:

Coffinmaker's Blues by Stephen Volk

Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker

Reviews:

Case Notes: Book Reviews by Peter Tennant
THEMED ANTHOLOGIES: Reality Bites edited by Alex Davis, Dead Water edited by Len Maynard & Mick Sims, Jews Versus Zombies edited by Rebecca Levine & Lavie Tidhar, Darkest Minds edited by Ross Warren & Anthony Watson EPISODES FROM ANOTHER WORLD: Storylandia #15 by Julie Travis, Lost Cartographies by Cyril Simsa CLIVE BARKER: The Scarlet Gospels by Clive Barker, Midian Unmade edited by Joseph Nassise & Del Howison, Voices of the Damned by Barbie Wilde, Horrorology edited by Stephen Jones

Blood Spectrum: DVD/Blu-ray Reviews by Gary Couzens
The Witch, Penda's Fen, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Goosebumps, The Hound of the Baskervilles, That Cold Day in the Park, Journey to the Shore, Evolution, Night of Fear, Inn of the Damned, Me and My Mates vs the Zombie Apocalypse, The Club, Even Lambs Have Teeth, Cherry Tree, The Ones Below, Visions, Baskin, i-Lived, The Forest, Intruders

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Jul 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310333729

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 53

JULY–AUGUST 2016

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© 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

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 53 JULY-AUGUST 2016

TTA PRESS

COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2016

PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

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CONTENTS

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COVER ART

TRANSITION

TARA BUSH

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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 TARA BUSH

INHERITANCE, OR THE RUBY TEAR

PRIYA SHARMA

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STORY ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD WAGNER

BREATHING

STEVE RASNIC TEM

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STORY

DARE

HARMONY NEAL

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STORY

THE RIM OF THE WORLD

KRISTI DeMEESTER

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STORY

TOHOKU

DANNY RHODES

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STORY ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD WAGNER

MITTENS

STEPHEN HARGADON

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STORY

IN THE FRAME

CHARLES WILKINSON

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BOOK REVIEWS

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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UPDATE STATUS

In the mid-1980s, faced with a horrendous deadline writing Horror Movie for Goldcrest, I literally cut and pasted parts of my old draft with newly-typed scenes to save time. Now cut and paste are a keyboard-click away. Now a director can show me graded footage on his phone, I can see a rough cut of a whole episode on i-cloud, an exec has her weekend reading on her tablet, and everything is sent by email. No licking of stamps, no posting of envelopes. Even photocopying is a thing of the past.

The writer’s world always changes but now it’s truly transformed. In days of yore, if your local library didn’t have a book or article you wanted, you’d have to wait weeks to get it on inter-library loan. Today you have access to a million libraries in seconds. And what has revolutionised Hollywood is not CGI but Skype. I’ve talked to directors and producers in Australia, LA and Brazil and it’s like they’re in the room with me. Magical.

So it might come as a shock, given these positives, to say that I’ve come off Facebook since January, and feel immeasurably better for it.

The benefits of social networking to a writer hardly need spelling out. In a solitary profession it can give you a much-needed boost, and, as Mark Chadbourn says, Anything that gets the writer out of that bubble of introspection is a good thing. And it’s also good creatively. Paying attention to what the world is saying is vital. It keeps you in the know, enables you to interact with colleagues, and maintain a presence with fans.

But in the know also means ploughing through interminable garbage. Interaction means vitriolic arguments, misinterpretations and recriminations about stuff nobody sane should care about. (As one commenter put it: Welcome to the digital age. Can’t have a shit without it getting put on here. It’s like fear of being forgotten.) And maintaining a presence – why?

Apparently, a new rule of the 21st century is that the communication age demands this. A writer is not allowed to be invisible. Rob Shearman confessed to me he longs for the now-impossible time when authors weren’t appearing all over TV and radio as roped-in pundits, on blogs or at LitFests obliged to meet their public. When books could be sold with no mug shot or personality attached. When novels, plays, films, could be themselves without this growth, this ganglion – yourself – glued to it.

Germaine Greer has said of her public persona in an interview, I don’t own that version of me people have. Stephen Fry makes a joke at the BAFTAs about the costume designer of Mad Max looking like a bag lady and the twittersphere becomes a lynch mob of sanctimonious fuckers even though it’s a josh between old friends. Under a live blog Q&A for Alexei Sayle’s new book, one self-entitled troll asks Why did you stop being funny, Alexei? (Another: When will you start?) Little surprise, then, that Amanda Holden says in Hello magazine she’ll write a book called I Never Scroll Down. We writers aren’t public property in the way these names are, but it’s disturbing to have as friends complete strangers who presume a level of intimacy on the basis of pressing a button with your name on.

But the main reason is that it’s all a massive Time Suck – that, and the head space it puts me in. You go on Facebook for instant gratification – news, banter, feedback, a pat on the head – but don’t come off until something really pisses you off. So you face your real work, writing, full of anger and negativity instead of the clear horizon, without worries which Hitchcock prescribed as the ideal condition for creative work.

I also believe – certainly in my own case – social media is an addiction. It creates a palpable Fear Of Missing Out, sated only by constant, empty indulgence, which in turn inculcates fluctuating senses of disappointment and failure.

In Matt Haig’s book on depression Reasons to Stay Alive he lists things that make me worse including Facebook (sometimes), Twitter (sometimes), TV, Advertising, Coffee, and Bad Posture. In a Facebook post (ironically) he advocates stopping social media for a bit and realising the uplift that has.

But depression isn’t a normal disease. Stephen Ilardi (The Depression Cure) says We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, socially isolated, sleep-deprived, frenzied pace of modern life. Crucially, we’ve replaced face time with screen time. When you’re ill you withdraw, shut down, but with depression that’s the last thing you should do. And that’s social media personified: the illusion of social contact whilst getting none.

Furthermore, I’m absolutely convinced that internet and computer reliance creates problems of attention and concentration. I recently watched a girl on the train who had the Stephen King miniseries 11.22.63 playing on her laptop, yet did the filmmakers a huge disservice by scrolling through messages on her phone while it played. If you walk through London, people are unable to navigate pavements any more, so fixated are they on their phones. Young producers fumble to remember names because they’re on screens all day. There’s no doubt we’ve given up moments of stillness and contemplation. Talk is king in the jabbersphere. What is this life so full of care / We have no time to stand and stare wrote W.H. Davies. And we don’t. Not any more. Cyberspace lures us away with the promise of unmissable goodies.

Listen. I’m not a Luddite. I love my computer (after all, Alex Gibney, the documentarian, is convinced Steve Jobs made personal computers extensions of being human; not expressions, but literally who we are), but I worry about my brain. It’s infested by cats and rope swing fails and Game of Thrones spoilers, and my wife is on her iPad before I wake up in the morning, and before I go to sleep at night. Baroness Greenfield thinks it’ll change the way our heads are wired, and maybe she’s right.

But that’s not my only worry.

The new Snooper’s Charter (Theresa May’s Investigatory Powers Bill) will allow the police to look into everyone’s internet browsing history. Every website you have visited, your photos, your medical records and personal finances, all laid bare. It will basically make blanket surveillance legal. Think about that.

It’s tempting to believe if you’ve done nothing wrong there is nothing to fear. But what happens when the police decide you’re not the kind of person they like? At one time syncopation and ragtime was seen as evil. There was a terror that loose garments would lead to immorality. You watched that film. You went to that website. You commented on that thread. Couldn’t happen here? It happened in Argentina in the ’70s. And they knew exactly who to round up when they needed to, because they had all the names.

And remember, Horror has always been deemed bad for society, so we’d better watch out.

The internet offers us infinite information (and unlimited communication, even if we have nothing to say). Within years we will be able to access virtually all human knowledge from Siri on our phone – but what’s the trade off? The game plan of many governments now, says Adam Curtis, is to give us contradictory messages so that we feel wrong-footed: hence that abiding feeling that the more information we get, the less we understand. We are sucked in, addicted, worried, compliant, and unquestioning in a way the most dystopian SF could never have imagined. As one meme has it: What Orwell failed to predict was that we’d buy the cameras ourselves, and that our biggest fear would be that nobody was watching.

But really, I hear you scoff, how can the internet and social media, something we desire and require so much, do us harm? I suspect, in the decades to come, we shall find out. Or rather, we will never know. We will just be living in a very different world to write about, and wonder how we got there.

www.stephenvolk.net

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

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IN THE DARK WOODS

The menacing Scandinavian woods, suffused with a pagan presence, of Adam Nevill’s The Ritual. Ramsey Campbell’s Liverpool and its urban horrors. The haunted East Anglia of M.R. James. Michael McDowell’s humid, deadly Perdido, Alabama. The sylvan locales of Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen, hiding a terrible transcendence. Daphne Du Maurier’s narrow, menacing Venice streets. The sweltering farm community of TED Klein’s The Ceremonies. Three very different New Englands: Stephen King’s small-town Maine, where the people can be as monstrous as the monsters; Shirley Jackson’s more suburban vision of narrow-minded repression; and for H.P. Lovecraft an antiquarian Eden lost to rural white-trash inbreeding and an urban invasion of terrifying foreign folks. I could go on and on, and I don’t doubt that you could too, naming iconic horror settings that are easily as fundamental to the story as the plot and character – stories in which the setting, in many ways, is another character, and a key driver of the plot.

Horror is an elusive genre to define. It’s also a genre that often works best in defiance of conventional wisdom about creating commercial fiction: characters must have an arc and must not be passive; there needs to be a strong plot; language and mood alone do not a story make; setting is an element of fiction but hardly the critical element. And yet in horror fiction, none of these aphorisms are true.

Perhaps it is because I am obsessed with setting myself. So many of my stories begin not with a plot or a character or an idea but a place that evokes a sensation I want to capture, that I am particularly sensitive to setting in fiction – and in life, for that matter. I have never been able to get enough of travelling to new places and soaking up the mundane details. Place is possibility. There are places that are entire stories themselves, and places that evoke stories that demand to be told.

When I think of place and setting in dark fiction, I think primarily of geography, but place is not just about geography. Certainly not, in a genre that has an entire subfield devoted to place – the haunted house story, and what place in a haunted house story is more memorable than Shirley Jackson’s Hill House? Or Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, or the titular hospice of the Robert Aickman story, or the crumbling mansion of Elizabeth Hand’s Wylding Hall?

Then there is the horror of being trapped in a single room – a constraint women writers in particular have employed in part to reflect the very real constraints in the lives of their characters and all too many women up to the present day. Young Jane Eyre is forced to spend a night locked in the dreadful Red Room by abusive relatives, and the terror that accompanies her conviction that the ghost of her dead uncle is rising up leads to her collapse and haunts her for a lifetime. More than 150 years later, in Room, Emma Donoghue was inspired by horrific contemporary headlines to imagine the life of a woman held prisoner in a single room.

But perhaps no woman-in-a-room story is so influential and so unforgettable as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 tale ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. In just a few thousand words Gilman evokes a literal and metaphorical prison that continues to resonate with women readers today. The setting here is an ordinary room that grows increasingly sinister as the unnamed narrator’s doctor husband attempts to treat her nervous condition by isolating her more and more and even taking away her writing materials. The narrator becomes obsessed with the pattern and colour of the wallpaper, which is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, and then with the woman who she comes to believe is living behind it, a woman who is able to get free when the narrator cannot. In ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ the setting is the story, symbol and antagonist.

It isn’t that men have never been imprisoned in a room before, it is that the girls and women are placed there specifically because they are women: Jane, for disobedience that would carry far less punishment were she a boy; Donoghue’s character as a victim of sexual violence; and Gilman’s unnamed narrator largely because she is judged to need help for being unsuited for the role of wife and mother. And let us not forget the madwoman in the attic of Jane Eyre, another woman locked in a room for reasons Jane accepts unquestioningly despite her own experiences of confinement, a horror that was not explored fully until novelist Jean Rhys took it on more than one hundred years later in The Wide Sargasso Sea.

Carl Jung believed that houses are symbols of the human psyche, and horror writers are aware of this either explicitly or instinctually, creating houses and rooms and buildings that menace and haunt their characters and shape the narrative. Journeys end in lovers meeting, Eleanor tells herself in Hill House, and only later does it becoming horrifyingly apparent that this is a demon lover, and that that demon is the house itself.

For such a long time, setting in horror meant something gothic, historical, or at the very least – for many Americans anyway – someplace foreign. I remember as a kid reading interviews with writers like Stephen King saying that for them writers who transferred those gothic horrors to urban America seemed revolutionary. Chief among them were Fritz Leiber – his short story ‘Smoke Ghost’ was often cited as particularly groundbreaking – and Richard Matheson. In Danse Macabre, King praised Anne Rivers Siddon for her 1978 novel The House Next Door for its then-innovative approach of making a bland, modern, suburban home a place of supernatural horror.

Modern horror writers took these contemporary settings and ran with them, and few horror stories epitomise this like Dennis Etchison’s classic ‘The Late Shift’, a tale of the undead working at places like 7-11s, first published in Kirby McAuley’s equally classic Dark Forces anthology in 1980. Today we expect these types of settings for our horror fiction, and it’s hard to remember that they were ever innovative.

In the 1990s it was perhaps the UK’s miserabilist horror writers who most effectively used setting to reflect the psyche of their characters and drive the grimness of the narrative. Although psychogeography, the exploration of how the environment – and the urban environment in