Black Static #56 (January-February 2017)

By TTA Press

The January–February issue contains new dark fiction by Scott Nicolay, Eric Schaller, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, Danny Rhodes, Eugenia M. Triantafyllou, Charles Wilkinson, and Ian Steadman. The cover art is by Joachim Luetke, with interior illustrations by Ben Baldwin, Vince Haig, Richard Wagner, and George C. Cotronis. Features: Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore (new); Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker; Case Notes by Peter Tennant (book reviews, including an in-depth interview with Stephen Volk); Blood Spectrum by Gary Couzens (DVD/Blu-ray reviews).

Cover Art:

From Hell by Joachim Luetke

Fiction:

The Green Eye by Scott Nicolay
illustrated by Ben Baldwin

Smoke, Ash, and Whatever Comes After
illustrated by Eric Schaller

Border Country by Danny Rhodes
illustrated by Richard Wagner

What We Are Moulded After by Eugenia M. Triantafyllou
illustrated by George C. Cotronis

The Solitary Truth by Charles Wilkinson

The Maneaters by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

Stanislav in Foxtown by Ian Steadman

Features:

Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore

Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker

Reviews:

Case Notes: Book Reviews by Peter Tennant
The Parts We Play by Stephen Volk and an in-depth interview with the author, plus sixteen other books

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

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Jan 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370981892

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 56

JAN–FEB 2017

© 2017 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

logo bw-new.tif

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 56 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2017

TTA PRESS

COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2017

PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

CONTENTS

COVER ART

BS56cover-section-bw.tif

FROM HELL

JOACHIM LUETKE

WRITING IN THE DARKNESS

lyndarucker3supercropped.tif

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

THE PERISHABILITY OF METAPHORS

RalphRobertMoore-woods2.tif

INTO THE WOODS

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

STORY ILLUSTRATED BY BEN BALDWIN

The Green Eye.tif

THE GREEN EYE

SCOTT NICOLAY

STORY ILLUSTRATED BY VINCE HAIG

smoke-ash.tif

SMOKE, ASH, AND WHATEVER COMES AFTER

ERIC SCHALLER

STORY ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD WAGNER

border country (2).tif

BORDER COUNTRY

DANNY RHODES

STORY ILLUSTRATED BY GEORGE C. COTRONIS

bseug.tif

WHAT WE ARE MOULDED AFTER

EUGENIA M. TRIANTAFYLLOU

STORY

solitary-truth.tif

THE SOLITARY TRUTH

CHARLES WILKINSON

STORY

THE MANEATERS

BONNIE JO STUFFLEBEAM

STORY

stanislav-foxtown.tif

STANISLAV IN FOXTOWN

IAN STEADMAN

FILM REVIEWS

DONNIE_DARKO_contents.tif

BLOOD SPECTRUM

GARY COUZENS

BOOK REVIEWS + STEPHEN VOLK INTERVIEW

3D-The-Parts-We-Play-SC.tif

CASE NOTES

PETER TENNANT

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

lyndarucker3supercropped.tif

WRITING IN THE DARKNESS

Much like fairy tales, there are two facets of horror. One is pro-institution, which is the most reprehensible type of fairy tale: Don’t wander into the woods, and always obey your parents. The other type of fairy tale is completely anarchic and anti-establishment.

—Guillermo del Toro on horror as a political genre

Earlier this week, I had dinner with a friend I hadn’t seen in several months, a fellow writer and expat American. It wasn’t that we kept circling back round to that topic, the US election, over and over, it was that we couldn’t seem to leave it. We have to stop talking about this! she said at last. What are you working on? Nothing! I said. I’ve been too upset to write any fiction! And so on.

Of course, a not-trivial part of the conversation consisted of What can we do? and more specifically "What can we as writers do?" My friend, who is steeped more in fantasy and science fiction and the worldbuilding aspects found therein, confessed that she couldn’t even figure out how she would write a way out of the current situation, one that encompasses not just the US (and the fact that what happens in the US tends to have worldwide reverberations), but a nationalist, far-right agenda spreading throughout Europe. And yet we agreed that at times such as these, art is critical, even if we weren’t quite certain whether we were up to the task.

A disclaimer: I am well aware that horror readers and writers hail from across the political spectrum, that even now someone might be tossing this column aside in disgust at having to listen to yet another leftist/liberal/progressive complain. I can’t apologise – art is almost never apolitical, and I feel a renewed duty to wear my own beliefs on my sleeve following yet another vote this year that seems to herald a new and darker age of oppression – but my main intention in this month’s column is not to pillory anyone for their beliefs or to indulge in performative outrage but to look at the intersection of politics and horror, and how artists can respond in difficult times.

In many ways, horror would seem to be a strange choice for exploring politics, the polar opposite of political art – so much of it is interior, deeply concerned with the psychological state of the individual. Of course, art is rarely truly apolitical. The argument over whether horror is an inherently conservative genre is not a new one, and certainly some of its conservative writers have produced some of its very best tales: H.P. Lovecraft, Russell Kirk, and Robert Aickman all come to mind as conservative thinkers who produced some of the finest horror and weird short fiction of the twentieth century, with their own preoccupations suffusing the work to varying degrees. They are joined by M.R. James, who along with his characters occupied a world that exalted the past and scholarly, antiquarian interests, one made up largely of educated white men. And there is, of course, the conservative subtext that underlies so much horror: the fear of the Other.

Inherent in that fear of the Other is the conviction that order must be restored by driving the Other out – sounds familiar in today’s political climate, doesn’t it? – and things must be returned to the way they used to be – another familiar notion. This became the formula for a number of horror novels in the 1980s, often featuring a nuclear family besieged by this Other during an era when the US was governed by politicians who constantly beat the drum of family values while systematically dismantling as many programs as possible that would allow any but the right kinds of families to thrive.

However, if everything is restored in the end to the way it used to be, is it truly horror? In a 2015 article for Nightmare Magazine, writer Paul Tremblay argued that this kind of restoration represents a failure of the horror story. By way of illustration, he contrasts the end of Alien, a horror movie, which finds Ripley alone in the cosmic darkness with no one to save her, versus Aliens, an action-adventure movie, that restores the family unit. Tremblay also points out that the rejection of the conservative narrative device can be as effectively used to express conservative fears, as Lovecraft understood. It is that inability to return to the status quo that is the source of so much horror in Lovecraft’s fiction.

For me, the more interesting horror fiction is that in which the Other is not some invader, randomly targeting the innocent, but stories in which the protagonist is uniquely vulnerable due to their own psychological state. There may still be an Other, but the Other is also a reflection of the protagonist’s anxieties and weaknesses – just as our collective fears as nations reveal perhaps more about us as societies than they do about the nature of the actual threat.

However overt or subtle, deliberate or not, certainly sociopolitical concerns permeate horror, from the morality tales of slasher movies and Christian horror novels by the likes of Frank Peretti that are genuinely intended as manuals about the dangers of demons and secularism to the work of writers like Joel Lane, who wove both implicit and explicit political themes throughout his stories. Horror offers a canvas on which to explore a number of issues beyond the state or existence of the human soul and whether or not evil is an actual force in the world: in film, the genre has looked at sexism and gender roles (American Mary, The Stepford Wives), the dangers of conformity (They Live, The Mist), and race (Night of the Living Dead, Candyman) among many other topics. Recent years have seen more overtly political conversations arise in the horror field and efforts by writers to riff on some of the genre’s more unexamined attitudes about gender and race.

To suggest that horror cannot be political is to consign it to that same genre dustbin that suggests horror exists with only a very limited palette, one that cannot fully explore the human condition because its primary concern is to frighten and its primary mode is a juvenile one. With its willingness to explore the very darkest themes and its powerful potential for subtext, I would argue that it is uniquely poised to work as political fiction.

What, then, are we to do, those of us who look at the world around us and see a narrowing, a meanness, a falling back to fight old battles we thought were won? And how can stories about monsters help anyone in times like these?

Well, horror isn’t just about monsters, and even when it is, those monsters are often more than just monsters. If it is indeed a time of repression our fearless leaders are steering us toward, well, fantastical art has long thrived in such conditions. And there is a value in escapism as well, in providing a respite for people so that they can breathe and restore themselves to go back out and keep fighting, or maybe just surviving.

When it comes to art, I remain an idealist. I believe art can save us. I know in the absolute darkest time in my own life, it became all that I could hold onto – not even the consumption of art, which was too demanding in my devastated state, but the making of it, writing and writing and writing about and against that dark that wanted to snuff me out of existence. I emerged from that period with the belief and the determination that nothing I went through would ever be that terrible again. I hope now that I am not proven wrong, but I also know that deep in that darkness of horror fiction there is a path – one that may not lead you directly into the light, but that can keep you placing one foot in front of the other, even when you’re still in the dark.

INTO THE WOODS

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

RalphRobertMoore-woods2.tif

THE PERISHABILITY OF METAPHORS

The other day while Mary and I were changing our bed sheets, tossing pillows sideways, cats scattering, resentful, I tried to remember a Nabokov metaphor.

One of my favorites of his, because it’s the type of comparison so obscure, yet so true, you wonder how he ever discovered the connection.

Like a lot of us, I was a precocious child. Started reading Nabokov when I was twelve. My parents were the best type of parents, utterly indifferent about what I read. Whenever my mother changed the sheets on my bed, chances are there’d be a closed volume of, for example, The Story of O lying on my night stand, bookmark a torn strip of newspaper sticking its tongue out at her as she lovingly tucked the stretched white corner of a bottom sheet under the mattress.

When I moved out of my family home in my early twenties, I left my books behind. I didn’t need them anymore – they were in my head. Whenever I’d come back for a visit, I’d see all my childhood books proudly displayed on the wall to wall bookcase in the dining room, without my parents ever cracking one open to read its contents, so that watching down on my parents’ guests were the unexpurgated works of the Marquis de Sade, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Naked Lunch, Our Lady of the Flowers, and much, much more.

The metaphor from Nabokov I was trying to remember had to do with a comparison between a drive-in movie screen and soapy dishwater.

But I couldn’t remember the actual quote, and it bothered me I couldn’t.

Two of my shelves in my upstairs study are filled with books by Nabokov, or about him. One early morning, me up, but not yet the sun, I sat in my swivel chair, went through some of those books, eyes rapidly rolling down each tower of text, looking for drive-in or soapy. As a child, I used to pride myself on being able to quickly scan a tall rack of paperbacks at a drugstore, immediately knowing if I wanted to lift a paperback out of its square metal display space on the rack, before some other reader standing on the opposite side of the rack revolved my choices away from me.

But I could not find the metaphor. I emailed Brian Boyd in New Zealand, the preeminent Nabokov scholar, not really expecting a response, but in fact he did answer me within a few hours, a friendly, gracious email that supplied the quote and cited its source (Lolita). While searching for night lodgings, I passed a drive-in […] on a gigantic screen slanting away among dark drowsy fields, a thin phantom raised a gun, both he and his arm reduced to tremulous dishwater by the oblique angle of that receding world…

What fascinated me about the metaphor is that its capability to evoke its comparison is slipping into the past. Nabokov is talking about how a moving image projected onto a giant white screen loses its visual sense once it’s viewed from an increasingly oblique angle, so that eventually it becomes the chaotic nonsense of soapy water. But as more and more drive-ins close, a modern reader’s ability to visualize the metaphor is diminishing. Unless you’ve actually driven past the side of a drive-in screen at some point in your life while a movie was being projected, once a common occurrence, it’s hard to understand what Nabokov is saying.

The perishability of metaphors.

One Saturday in the mid-Nineties while Mary and I were working outside in our backyard garden, arms covered in dirt, sweat trickling out of our hair, I took a break under the tall trees at the rear of our property, sitting on a white plastic chair where there was at least some shade from the hot Texas sun, lighting up a cigarette, leaning back. Lifted from the green plastic table beside our chairs the wristwatch I had unstrapped hours earlier, checking the time. Another hour, and we’d be able to stop for the day, uncapping two bottles of Spaten Optimator, tilting back our heads, gulping down that cold darkness. Once we had all the plants, flowers, blooming vines in place, we were going to wind grass paths around the beds, like a park. The grass we were going to use, because it does well in shade, was… I drew a blank.

Bent my head. What was that grass called? Such a common name! But I couldn’t remember it. That scared me. Once Mary came over, I asked her the name of the grass. Standing in her jeans with an orange-handled trowel in her right hand. St Augustine. Over the years since, like a test, I sometimes ask myself what the name of the shade-tolerant Southern grass is. Always reassured when I can come up with the name.

The perishability of memory.

Like most of us, I’ve probably seen a thousand horror movies over the years. Many have a depressing sameness to them. But there are those rare moments in a few films where we suddenly do see horror, feel it up our spines, and those moments are worth all our years of searching.

The Night of The Living Dead, the young couple trying to get gas into the truck so the group can leave, Ben waving a torch to keep the dead at bay, and it all goes horribly to shit, truck exploding into flames with the couple still inside, the devastation of what just happened captured in Harry Cooper’s hopeless stare from behind a boarded-up window.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, two members of the group knocking on a front door, no one answers, the man ventures down the front hall, the woman hanging back, gets to the doorway at the end, and Leatherface, in his first appearance, sliding into view, slamming a long-handled hammer against the man’s head, dropping him, the man’s feet vibrating on the floor like a cow in a slaughterhouse.

Or the saddest, most disquieting moment: The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Miles comes back from exploring the hilly area surrounding the dark, dripping cavern where he and Becky are hiding from the pod people, lies on top of Becky, kisses her, so grateful they escaped being turned into pod people, and then the slow pull of his lips off Becky’s, looking down at her cold eyes, realizing only he escaped.

To love someone, and then realize that even though they’re still there, physically, they’re gone.

My mother had Alzheimer’s.

She had always been an anxious woman. Looking back at the telephone calls between me in Texas, her in Connecticut, once she had been diagnosed, I could see how her mind had been slowly slipping away. Apologizing about extraordinarily trivial offenses she thought she had committed decades prior.

After her competency hearing, after she had been court-ordered to a nursing home, I called her one night from our kitchen, nervous, Mary nearby, rubbing my back. It took a few minutes of confusion before she was put on the line a thousand miles away.

My father reassured me he went out several times a week to where she now lived, each time sliding his old hand under the curves of her body, to make sure the staff hadn’t left her lying in her own urine.

I didn’t expect her to recognize my voice, and indeed she didn’t. What