Black Static #62 (March-April 2018)

By TTA Press

The March-April issue contains new horror fiction by Michael Wehunt, E. Catherine Tobler, Jack Westlake, Kay Chronister, and David Martin. The cover art is by Jim Burns, and interior illustrations by Jim Burns, Ben Baldwin, and Richard Wagner. Regular features include Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore, Notes from the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker, Case Notes by Peter Tennant (book reviews, including an interview with Anna Tambour), Blood Spectrum by Gary Couzens (film reviews).

Cover Art: 'Sanguinary Scar' by Jim Burns

Fiction:

Sanguinary Scar by E. Catherine Tobler
illustrated by Jim Burns

Bury Me with Broken Light Bulbs, Bury Me in Shattered Glass by Jack Westlake

Things Behind the Sun by David Martin
illustrated by Ben Baldwin

Your Clothes a Sepulcher, Your Body a Grave by Kay Chronister

Caring for a Stray Dog (Metaphors) by Michael Wehunt
illustrated by Richard Wagner

Columns:

Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker
FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore
DISAPPOINTING GEORGE NEWS

Reviews:

Case Notes: Book Reviews by Peter Tennant

TWO FROM TARTARUS
Seven Strange Stories by Rebecca Lloyd; Holidays from Hell by Reggie Oliver

TWO NOVELS
Pseudotooth by Verity Holloway; Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant

TWO SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS WITH A DIFFERENCE
Exploring Dark Short Fiction #1: A Primer to Steve Rasnic Tem edited by Eric J. Guignard; The Ghost Club by William Meikle

MAGNIFICENT INSIGNIFICANTS WITH ANNA TAMBOUR
The Finest Ass in the Universe; Smoke Paper Mirrors; in-depth interview

Blood Spectrum: Film Reviews by Gary Couzens

Twin Peaks; Carrie; Thelma; When the Wind Blows; Witchhammer; The Witch Who Came from the Sea; Malatesta's Carnival of Blood; The Premonition; Mother!; A Ghost Story; The Ritual; Atomic Blonde; Annabelle: Creation; House (Hausu); Kills on Wheels; The Housemaid; Game of Thrones; Hounds of Love; and more

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Mar 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370088515

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 62

MARCH–APRIL 2018

© 2018 Black Static and its contributors

PUBLISHER

TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, UK

ttapress.com

Books and films for review are always welcome and should be sent to the above address

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 62 MARCH-APRIL 2018

TTA PRESS

COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2018

PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

CONTENTS

Sanguinary Scar cover bw.tif

COVER ART

SANGUINARY SCAR

JIM BURNS

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FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

faulkner-contents.tif

DISAPPOINTING GEORGE NEWS

INTO THE WOODS

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

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NOVELETTE ILLUSTRATED BY JIM BURNS

SANGUINARY SCAR

E. CATHERINE TOBLER

glass.tif

STORY

BURY ME WITH BROKEN LIGHT BULBS, BURY ME IN SHATTERED GLASS

JACK WESTLAKE

Things Behind The Sun.tif

NOVELETTE ILLUSTRATED BY BEN BALDWIN

THINGS BEHIND THE SUN

DAVID MARTIN

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STORY

YOUR CLOTHES A SEPULCHER, YOUR BODY A GRAVE

KAY CHRONISTER

caring stray dog (3c).tif

NOVELETTE ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD WAGNER

CARING FOR A STRAY DOG (METAPHORS)

MICHAEL WEHUNT

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FILM REVIEWS

BLOOD SPECTRUM

GARY COUZENS

Anna Tambour contents.tif

BOOK REVIEWS + INTERVIEW WITH ANNA TAMBOUR

CASE NOTES

PETER TENNANT

Notes from the Borderland

lynda e. rucker

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FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

What is the responsibility of the writer, the artist? What, if anything, does an artist owe an audience, or society at large?

When I was younger, the question of responsibility was an easy one for me to answer. I would have said that the artist’s responsibility was to the art, and nothing else. Then I grew up a little bit, and I thought, no, that’s too simplistic: obviously the stories that go out into the world reinforce or challenge the status quo, and it’s right to be mindful of that, it’s right to take some responsibility for the potential repercussions of our art.

But isn’t that, after all, the same thing? One part of being responsible to the art is conveying the subtext that you intend. That’s still a responsibility to the art itself, and not to society. But are there a set of community standards to which an artist should adhere? Much of the internet seems to think so.

For most of us, until the last couple of decades, authors were remote creatures. They wrote their stories and novels, and unless they were essayists as well we rarely heard from them. We might occasionally run across an interview and learn more about what they thought of things, but that tended to be a one-way street.

These days, all you need is a wifi connection to send a tweet to Joyce Carol Oates telling her she’s old and is going to die soon if she has expressed an opinion with which you disagree. (This is, I probably don’t need to tell you, a real-life example.)

There are plenty of reasons so many writers are on social media, ranging from pressure from publishers and agents and editors to have an online presence to a genuine desire to connect with like-minded people to good old-fashioned loneliness. Is this bad? Worried think pieces tell us we get little dopamine jolts from social media but that the overall effect is depressing, not uplifting us.

I won’t rehash the many alleged deleterious effects of too much internet here, from the shredding of our attention spans to our increasing polarization within communities and as a society.

But, mindful of the advantages of social media and our increasing connectiveness – of which there are many – I do wonder whether this constant pressure for authors to constantly be on is harmful to the creative spirit.

The problem is not just that they are expected to be on; they are also expected to always be right. And staying offline is no longer much of a defence; whether a person is online or not, if they are prominent enough, they are bound to be discussed and dissected there – not just their work, but who they are as a person, based either on what can be gleaned from their work or from what they themselves have done and said. And there is an immediacy, a rapidity and a reach to the internet that adds an element to this dynamic that has never before existed.

Those who create dark stories may be particularly vulnerable to ending up in the crosshairs because the line between depiction and endorsement is one on which reasonable people can and do disagree, all the time.

But an artist working in fear of crossing that line is going to be pulling her punches. We need to try to get it right, because we want to tell the stories we intend to tell, but if we get it wrong, it needs to be because of a lapse in skill and not a failure of courage, not an act of self-censorship.

Ultimately, these questions require more than a 1300-word column in a magazine, or a Twitter thread, or a Facebook argument, or a series of columns or threads or arguments to resolve. I’m not sure they can be resolved. Some questions don’t have any conclusive answers. Sometimes the answer is it depends.

But I will say this: I think greatness in art comes from an individual vision, not a crowdsourced idea of what a story should be to please a set of externally-imposed morals.

I have worked in mostly isolation as a writer, and I have worked as part of what feels like a community, and I prefer the latter. By and large, I like my fellow writers of dark and weird and horror fiction; they are smart and funny and thoughtful and interesting and supportive. I like that I can go online and chat with them at what feels like a virtual water cooler; I love when I get the opportunity to meet up with them in person.

Yet I also believe that most artists need a certain degree of privacy, a quietness of mind, in order to create. An artist needs the freedom to be unsure, to pursue unsavory trains of thought, to step back from that community and stand alone.

Artists today are expected, in some circles, to be not just exemplary in their art, but exemplary people as well, and to display that badge of exemplary thought and behavior to others.

There are good reasons for this instinct. Some artsts have used their power, in art and in life, to prey on the vulnerable, to harm and destroy others, to perpetuate inequality, to portray others as subhuman. I would argue that this instinct is also less benign than it initially appears. For one thing, the bar for exemplary keeps going extraordinarily higher, and I am not certain that it is one that any of us are capable of reaching.

I am also – and I know I will fall afoul of many of my peers with this admission – not particularly concerned with the personal morality of artists.

Is there art that offends me, that I wish had never been created? Of course there is. I’ve written in these very pages of my weariness of horror fiction and film that fetishizes the rape and abuse of women.

And yet I like or love plenty of stories that appear to do precisely that. Off the top of my head: Martyrs (which I’ve written about here in the past), Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, the films of Dario Argento. In the case of the first two, I would argue there is a lot more going on in these films than their critics would credit them with; in the latter, I would concede that Argento isn’t going to win any awards as a progressive feminist, but that zeroing in on that aspect of that work is probably the least interesting conversation we could have about his films. Some would add David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return to that list, a work that, on the contrary, I found inspiring to the point of being life-changing.

On the other hand, a number of my peers, whose opinions I respect, hold the novel by the late Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door, in high regard. I can’t agree with them; I think the book never transcends its subject matter, the painstaking depiction of the torture of a young girl with all the titillation of a misery memoir. Yet I would not want to be part of a community in which Ketchum felt unable to write the book or people felt unable to discuss their love of it without fear of being ostracized from that community. And that’s a very mild example; there’s a strain of horror that is rife with ugly, misogynistic abuse of women. I wish these books and films did not exist; I don’t think very highly of the people who make or consume them; if the trade-off in getting rid of them is to impose a greater degree of inhibition on artists, it is not a trade-off I’m willing to make.

Margaret Atwood, under attack herself in recent years, wrote in a piece not long ago, Fiction writers are particularly suspect because they write about human beings, and people are morally ambiguous. The aim of ideology is to eliminate ambiguity. I think an artist’s responsibility, in any genre, is this: to inhabit those ambiguous, uncomfortable spaces and tell the truest story she can tell, in spite of the consequences.

INTO THE WOODS

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

RalphRobertMoore-woods2.tif

DISAPPOINTING GEORGE NEWS

Everyone loves having a great story to tell.

I grew up in what was then known as (and perhaps still is) a mixed neighborhood, meaning different ethnicities, in my case Irish-American, Italian-American, African-American.

When I was a child, my best friend was a black kid named George. We were inseparable, as childhood pals often are, like the Edgar Allan Poe story ‘The Purloined Letter’, where two men are so comfortable in each other’s presence they can sit next to each other without the need to say anything. For one hour at least we had maintained a profound silence … For myself, however, I was mentally discussing certain topics which had formed matter for conversation between us at an earlier period of the evening. Makes you realize just how great a writer Poe could be, that he could see and convey that specific idea.

We’d go up into the woods behind George’s two-story house each mysterious Summer day, tickings in the trees, blindness in the sky, leaning against boulders, pulling off and eating wild blueberries from the bushes reaching towards us, fingerpads smudged purple, talking about everything, and isn’t it true that some of the most honest, most unguarded conversations you have in your life, you have as a child? You rarely find that honesty again as an adult, in others or yourself, except in special circumstances, such as when a couple breaks up late at night, black windows, naked legs, ice cubes in a tall glass, hurtful words, exhaustion.

George became my first writing collaborator. We were going to write a novel together called The Executive. We were twelve. The Executive was going to be about a young powerful man in the business world who got anything he wanted, including women, and never had any worries. Again, we were twelve. I have no idea where the handwritten pages of those first few chapters are now, although I would absolutely love to read them again, at the other side of my life, just to get a ‘you are there’ glimpse into who I thought I was way, way back then.

We’d go to Saturday matinees together each weekend, an island with palm trees after the long swim of a school week, always a B-horror film. One early evening we were sitting on the curb of a sidewalk, sneakers in the street, and George asked me if I was more afraid of Frankenstein (meaning Frankenstein’s monster) or Godzilla. A serious question, so I gave it serious thought. Godzilla. Because I could outrun Frankenstein, but I could never outrun Godzilla. George had a different answer. Frankenstein. If Frankenstein were chasing him, he could outrun him, but Frankenstein would keep coming, and eventually George would get tired, run out of breath, and wouldn’t have enough strength left to crawl away as Frankenstein lumbered up to him, bent over. But if it were Godzilla, that skyscraper-sized lizard would just crush him with its foot, and it’d be over with in a second.

As we grew up, as often happens, we drifted apart. Pals who saw each other less and less. I got a job in Manhattan, George got a job locally. A few years passed. When I was in my late teens, I was driving down Boston Post Road in Greenwich one afternoon, and off to my right, I saw George on the sidewalk. Honked to get his attention.

He ran over through traffic, swung open the passenger side door of my VW bug. He looked different. George, but bigger, less innocent. His eyes had changed. As had mine. Are you having sex with girls? Yeah. Do you like to get high? Sure. I agreed to stop by his family’s home later that evening.

I had known George’s family for most of my childhood. Watched TV in their living room, had dinner at their table, went to church with them a few Sundays. His mother, and his sisters with their weirdly-shaped eyeglasses, seemed happy to see me. George needs you now, Bobby.

Up in George’s room, door shut, we smoked pot. Listened to The Rolling Stones’ latest album, Let It Bleed, on his turntable. If you were guaranteed an absolutely dependable supply of heroin, at no cost to you, would you start shooting up heroin? I thought about his question, stoned. No. No!? But it’s an absolutely dependable supply! That night is the last time I ever saw George.

A few years later, I moved to California. Years and years after that, Mary and I were living in Texas, the Internet was a thing, and one evening, sitting in front of the monitor, I did what a lot of us do at some point: Googled friends from the past. Learned George had died from a heroin overdose in Harlem.

I felt really bad. George had finally run out of breath, Frankenstein’s monster following him, getting closer, too close, bending over as my childhood friend dropped to the sidewalk. White foam on his black lips. I posted a blog about our friendship, his death.

A few years after that, I got an email. From George. He didn’t die from a heroin overdose in Harlem. He was alive, living in Maine, with a wife, children, and grandchildren. So at the end, I lost my great George story.

In a 1956 interview with Paris Review, William Faulkner said, The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one … Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.

When Faulkner spoke about robbing his own mother, he was, of course, speaking metaphorically. We’re not going to literally knock out our poor, dear mother with a jaw punch and root through her old- fashioned, oversized purse, pulling out crumpled Kleenex looking for folded currency, but we are going to take aspects of her we’ve observed over the years, events and mannerisms, and use them in our stories in a way that might be considered cruel, if she were to ever recognize those aspects of herself in one of our characters. We do that with everyone we know.

No one in the vicinity of a writer is safe. Because a writer – a good writer – is willing to get to the truth of any character. And that embarrassment comes from all the people the writer knows, including – most importantly – the writer himself or herself. Because if a writer is not willing to write unflatteringly about themselves, to be that honest, they are not a writer.

I remember reading once in a newspaper about a woman who was doing her laundry at home, she opened the top lid of the washer to add another item of clothing while the drum was chugging, pushed it down into the swishing soapy water, and the strap of her