Black Static #55 (November -December 2016)

By TTA Press

The November–December issue contains new dark fiction by Stephen Hargadon, Lisa Tuttle, David Hartley, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, Simon Avery, and Jeff Bowles. The cover art is by Martin Hanford, with interior illustrations by Ben Baldwin, Richard Wagner, and George C. Cotronis. Features: Coffinmaker's Blues by Stephen Volk (comment); Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker (comment); Case Notes by Peter Tennant (book reviews, including an in-depth interview with V.H. Leslie); Blood Spectrum by Gary Couzens (DVD/Blu-ray reviews).

Cover Art:

Catharsis by Martin Hanford

Fiction:

McMara's Rock by Stephen Hargadon
illustrated by Ben Baldwin

A Home in the Sky by Lisa Tuttle
illustrated by Richard Wagner

Pigskin by David Hartley

Something Deadly, Something Dark by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

A Very Lonely Revolution by Simon Avery
illustrated by George C. Cotronis

Vaseline Footprints by Jeff Bowles

Features:

Coffinmaker's Blues by Stephen Volk
(Steve's 60th and final column for Black Static)

Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker

Reviews:

Case Notes: Book Reviews by Peter Tennant
Releases from Fedogan & Bremer, plus books by V.H. Leslie accompanied by an in-depth interview

Blood Spectrum: DVD/Blu-ray Reviews by Gary Couzens
32 of the latest and forthcoming horror films

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Nov 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370942633

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 55

NOV–DEC 2016

© 2016 Black Static and its contributors

PUBLISHER

TTA Press

5 Martins Lane

Witcham

Ely

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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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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 55 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2016

TTA PRESS

COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2016

PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

CONTENTS

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COVER ART

CATHARSIS

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 BEN BALDWIN

McMARA’S ROCK

STEPHEN HARGADON

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STORY ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD WAGNER

A HOME IN THE SKY

LISA TUTTLE

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STORY

PIGSKIN

DAVID HARTLEY

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STORY

SOMETHING DEADLY, SOMETHING DARK

BONNIE JO STUFFLEBEAM

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NOVELETTE ILLUSTRATED BY GEORGE C. COTRONIS

A VERY LONELY REVOLUTION

SIMON AVERY

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STORY

VASELINE FOOTPRINTS

JEFF BOWLES

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BOOK REVIEWS + V.H. LESLIE INTERVIEW

CASE NOTES

PETER TENNANT

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FILM REVIEWS

BLOOD SPECTRUM

GARY COUZENS

COFFINMAKER’S BLUES

STEPHEN VOLK

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WHERE WAS I?

I think every writer should assess where they are from time to time. Not career-wise, but creatively. Are they moving forward, improving in their art and craft, or standing still? Tough questions. Easier to plough on with what you know you can do easily. But as Ed Catmull, president of Pixar, says in his wonderfully eye-opening book Creativity Inc., the goal is not making the job easy, it’s achieving excellence. (He also writes: For greatness to emerge there must be phases of not-so-greatness – spot on.)

I’ve written sixty pieces for Black Static now, and this will be the last, so it feels natural to take stock of that span of time between 2004–2016 – bookended for me by two TV series (Afterlife and Midwinter of the Spirit), with a feature film in the middle (The Awakening, 2011) and three story collections and numerous other projects along the way. Am I a different writer now, over a decade later? I hope so. I hope I play to my strengths while pushing myself into new, uncomfortable areas. Because that’s the only way I think you test what kind of writer you really are; and, sometimes, find out what you truly think and feel.

When I was sent Phil Rickman’s Midwinter of the Spirit, one of a dozen or so novels about small town vicar Merrily Watkins, single mother and Deliverance Consultant (Exorcist, to me and you), I was intrigued by the possibility of a long running TV series about the supernatural that wasn’t (in ITV’s derogatory phrase) weirdy-woo. Writing a capable but fragile woman not just battling external forces but internal emotions threatening to consume her, I was aware of similarities to Afterlife, but felt I was pushing the envelope – the subject of belief – into deeper and darker territory.

The key metaphor for me, bringing a twenty-year-old book bang up to date, was terrorism. While the Satanists’ motive in the novel was vague and intangible, I wanted their goal to be to destroy faith, with Rowenna a monster-victim created and manipulated by her father Denzil Joy, innocence as corrupted, deranged and normal as the self-proclaimed diplomat for Isis who tweeted #Robin Williams is dead? Weird. I grew up watching his movies.

Robert Eggers’ remarkable, chilling movie The Witch (starring, coincidentally, our Midwinter alumna Kate Dickie) shares the same subtext. An isolated Puritan family in 17th Century New England build their lives around the fear-mongering strictures of the Bible, creating a climate in which their young daughter flees from them into the arms of the very thing they dread, becoming the Other. The Enemy.

I couldn’t have imagined, as I wrote my harrowing dénouement in the cathedral, that barely a year later, in July 2016, teenage Jihadis would slit the throat of a priest, Fr Jacques Hamel, age 85, while he conducted morning mass in a French church in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray near Rouen. The Vatican spoke of a barbaric killing and horrific violence…in a church, a sacred place where the love of God is declared. In such a context, my crucifixion in the woods is not so implausible. It’s weird how playacting Satanism gives a peculiar atmosphere, and it did one night when I visited the set as they filmed Huw and Merrily finding the crow sacrifice at the country church – as if the very stones of centuries of Christianity shrank in revulsion, disapproving of our activity.

David Threlfall, a good actor, and thorough (as Maude Lebowski might say), got a bee in his bonnet about not saying the word demonic because our Esteemed Novelist had told him Huw didn’t believe in demons. I was adamant my words must remain intact – it was the key speech of the whole thing, nailing the concept of true evil. (Needless to say, I lost.)

Though I had to cut all Christmas decorations due to budget constraints, Hereford in spring turned bleak and barren December in post. Along the way, ITV were nothing but 100% supportive, encouraging us not to hold back, loving the crucifixion (which our Novelist hated), giving us great notes (show the Lee Rigby machete earlier: suspense is better than surprise), and being so pleased with the result they excitedly promoted it from ITV Encore to the main channel. Sadly the transmission dates clashed with unexpected BBC mega-hit Doctor Foster, and disastrous viewing figures meant ITV couldn’t renew us. Naturally we had a post mortem. Was it too horrific? (Alarmingly, half a million people switched over at one ad break following a particularly terrifying scene.) Would toning it down have guaranteed a bigger audience? No way of telling. Would it have fared better on Encore after all? Who knows? Would I do anything differently in retrospect? Absolutely not. Audience numbers notwithstanding, general feedback and a cascade of good reviews told me I’d achieved what I was trying to achieve.

But can we ever see our own work for what it really is, objectively? I know when I look at old stories or scripts they look alien – vaguely familiar, but more like the writing of a stranger to whom you feel a weird affinity. Do you ever know what your (laughingly called) body of work means in the world, if anything?

Certainly the idea of success as perceived by the wide-eyed public – movie and created by credits, books published – does not square with my daily battle with the laws of supply and demand, the feast or famine of being self-employed, or the ignominy of facing a financial adviser who looks at me when I talk of my future income with the pitying expression of a parent whose child has spilled Ribena down its front.

The new windmills to joust at are cultural appropriation and trigger warnings, proof of concept, IP and the Blumhouse model – as well as the asshat assumed-entitlement of a new, militant fandom who want creators to work to their own personal desires, message boards spilling with bile, Annie Wilkes types issuing death threats to Marvel. Netflix now spends $6 billion a year on content like the superb Bloodline, sending a chill down the spine of the entertainment industry according to the Hollywood Reporter. Suddenly TV is no longer the second class citizen lagging behind the creative integrity of cinema: cinema is suddenly the poor cousin, a system irrevocably broken by metrics and development, churning out feeble reboots of remakes of sequels. But, against all odds, great movies sneak out: the beautifully-realised Midnight Special; the almost unbearably suspenseful Eye in the Sky; low-beat creepy Brit flick The Forgotten; the aforementioned The Witch. So there’s everything to be optimistic about. Even if – as one leading TV producer recently said to me – today, getting an actual script commission is a miracle, and "getting the thing made is like winning the bloody lottery".

What to write next? As the poet Anne Sexton says: Put your ear down next to your soul and listen hard. I think that’s much sager advice to a writer, fundamentally, than any wisdom from agents and managers about the next career move. And it’s advice I feel compelled to take. My elderly mother, who has vascular dementia, recently remembered quite vividly a moment in school when the teacher berated her: Marion Hartnell! You’re not so clever you can afford to be staring out of the window! Similarly, Conrad Williams was rapped over the knuckles recently because his son was daydreaming, to which Conrad, as a novelist, replied: Good! I intend to go on daydreaming. Unashamedly. Because only we can look into the working of our own minds and find the unique and unexpected and dark and glorious. And we do it because, however hard it might be, if we didn’t share stories life wouldn’t be worth living.

So, as much as we might assess the past, it’s the future that matters. The future which offers us change, external and internal, to grasp eagerly with both hands.

In the end, whether a story is well written, well constructed, well made, well filmed, is nothing.

Why you told it is everything.

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

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THE KIDS AREN’T ALL RIGHT

Spoiler alert: This column contains some spoilers for the film February/The Blackcoat’s Daughter.

The more intimately you know any genre of literature, the more difficult it becomes to generalise about that genre, but I feel as though I am on fairly safe ground making the statement that horror stories are stories of intrusion. The form those intrusions take and the effects they have on the characters vary, but horror stories have a particular preoccupation with corruption of the innocent. Perhaps this is why, in stories of possession, it is so often children who are the focus of a demon.

But possession stories, and the necessity of buying into the Christian rituals that often accompany such stories, might have seemed tired and outdated, a strain on our suspension of disbelief, until Paul Tremblay’s masterful A Head Full of Ghosts reminded us that such stories, at their best, can be both very scary and extraordinarily poignant. The deterioration of the relationship between the narrator, Merry, and her allegedly demon-possessed sister Marjorie is simultaneously chilling and sad. Along similar lines, one of the reasons the film The Exorcist remains so effective more than forty years later is that it’s not just all headspinning and vomit; it’s because Chris MacNeil’s pain as she watches her daughter suffer is so palpable and heartbreaking.

Alongside possession stories and overlapping with them somewhat is the Evil Child subgenre. If we do indeed express our unease as a society through pop culture, and horror films in particular, then there may be something to theories that one of the seminal modern evil child stories, The Bad Seed, sprang from the 1950s anxiety in the United States about the rise of juvenile delinquency (which was, in part, just an anxiety about the rise of youth culture in general). Suddenly young people were not just disobedient but potentially monstrous; suddenly there seemed no limit to what they might do, and from that was born William March’s portrait of a perfect little sociopath in deadly eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark. It’s difficult for contemporary audiences born after the book’s publication to grasp either the environment in which the book was conceived and released or the shocking nature of its premise at the time – March was no pulp novelist but a serious writer, and the book garnered a National Book Award nomination for what was at the time a groundbreaking psychological examination of evil.

The trope of the evil child has remained popular, and I could fill an entire column just listing examples. The 1970s alone gave us murderous tykes, pre-teens and barely-teenagers in The Omen, Who Can Kill A Child?, Alice, Sweet Alice (aka Communion and Holy Terror), The Other (both the book and the movie), and The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, to name just a few of my favourites from that time. Then there’s one of the most terrifying evil child characters ever created, Jerome Bixby’s Anthony Fremont from ‘It’s a Good Life’, perhaps better known as the little boy on the Twilight Zone episode who would wish anyone who didn’t do his bidding into the cornfield – often preceded by myriad other tortures. Psychopathic children are one thing, but Anthony Fremont is something even worse because of the unlimited nature of his powers to alter reality. Anthony Fremont would make short work of little Rhoda Penmark.

In fact, Anthony Fremont is the manifestation of the fear that is really at the root of all these stories of evil and possessed children: the amorality of children, and of childhood itself. In the West, for at least a couple of hundred years, we have become increasingly enamoured with the idea of childhood as a time of innocence, but in reality, childhood is not really innocent in the sense of goodness or virtue. It is innocent in the sense of making no distinction between right and wrong, of acting on sheer instinct and self-interest. Of course, it is a theme that is far from exclusive to the horror genre – Lord of the Flies is perhaps the most obvious example but the lesser-known A High Wind in Jamaica, which preceded it, features children who, under the duress of capture by pirates, turn out to be more frightening than their captors in many ways. One of the most appalling aspects of children in these books is their remorselessness and their savage adaptability, traits that turn out to be critical for their survival. Like these children, Anthony Fremont is not an evil child, not in the manner of Rhoda Penmark. He is merely the unbridled id. Both the written and TV versions of the story ask us not to imagine the innocent face of a child masking a cold calculating evil, but rather what childhood devoid of consequences would look like.

In his most recent novel, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, Paul Tremblay doesn’t present us with a possessed child or an evil one, but he does expertly explore this amoral childhood terrain. What is particularly frightening in Tremblay’s more nuanced approach is how convincingly he demonstrates the susceptibility of children to manipulation. Tremblay, who is also a teacher of young people, displays in both this and his previous novel a real sensitivity not just to the narrative voices of children but to the full emotional and psychological range of childhood, and how quickly they can careen from sensitivity to callousness and back again. Tremblay’s kids aren’t bad kids, and that’s precisely what makes the things they are capable of so chilling.

Childhood, far from being the magical and carefree time that many adults like to imagine it as, is often about powerlessness, and loneliness, and an unarticulated fear of loss; this can leave children uniquely vulnerable. A 2015 film, February (also known as The Blackcoat’s Daughter) looks at just such a lonely little girl (Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka), plagued with anxiety about the possibility of losing her parents and left alone at a boarding school. Here is a possession story with a twist: the drama does not revolve around the traditional climax for such stories, the efforts to force the demon to leave the human it’s tormenting. Instead, the film hinges on what happens after the demon is expelled – in itself one of the most arresting moments, embodied in two words, that I’ve seen in recent horror cinema. We always assume that the experience of possession would be torturous, but what if it isn’t, or is no more torturous than existence itself? What if possession is really a relief from the existential burden of aloneness and meaninglessness? What happens if the possessed child is left bereft, and wants nothing more than to bring the demon back?

It’s often said that horror should grapple with taboos, but in what feels like the absence of any real taboos in our present society, this is too often misinterpreted to mean that horror needs more extreme and depraved depictions of violence. The truth is that we still have plenty of taboos, including those revolving around how we conceive of both childhood and parenthood. Loving parents believe they know their children on a primal, intimate level: many of these stories suggest otherwise. The best horror gives us a space to explore ambiguity and contradiction and nuance, and the best horror stories about children are those that do their best to immerse themselves in that childlike consciousness again, as much as any adult can. If death is the undiscovered country, then childhood is the one that is quickly forgotten and utterly unknowable by any but those who reside there, leaving us to tell stories about it that can never fully grasp its alien richness, as if it’s a place from half-remembered dreams. And if horror stories are stories of intrusion, then maybe ultimately it is not the devils, the demons, the murderous impulses, but the grown-ups who are the intruders here.

McMARA’S ROCK

STEPHEN HARGADON

illustrated by Ben Baldwin

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Out on the forlorn, green, western edge of Europe there’s a curious rock. The guidebooks and maps call it the rock of O’hEagra or Caoimhin’s boulder. We just call it McMara’s rock. You’ll find it in a gently sloping field, McMara’s field, among mushrooms and nettles, and the odd lost sheep, facing the great swell and sweep of the Atlantic, which ends or begins here, on Drumsheedy strand, in a flurry of mucky foam.

Apart from our strange rock, there’s not much to detain the casual visitor at Drumsheedy. A pub, a few winding roads, a brown stream, cluttered graveyards. It’s a remote place, bleak, the fields blasted by salty gusts and sodden with rain. Our houses are spread thinly across the rugged hills. Isolated, certainly, but never lonely, as the air is always talking to you, whispering, sighing, suggesting. You can feel the cold breath of the ocean, bringing with it the prayers of the drowned and the dashed. The woods, too, are full of mournful sounds, the crack and rustle of passing