Black Static #65 (September-October 2018)

By TTA Press

This issue contains new cutting edge horror fiction by Ian Muneshwar, Timothy Mudie, E. Catherine Tobler, Carole Johnstone & Chris Kelso, Kailee Pedersen, Matt Thompson, and Cody Goodfellow. The cover art is 'Dream On' by Joachim Luetke, and interior illustrations are by Richard Wagner, Joachim Luetke, Vincent Sammy, Dave Senecal, and Warwick Fraser-Coombe. Regular features: Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore; Notes from the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker; Case Notes book reviews by Nina Allan (includes interview with Catriona Ward), Georgina Bruce (includes interview with Carly Holmes), Mike O'Driscoll, Laura Mauro, Daniel Carpenter, and David Surface; Blood Spectrum film reviews by Gary Couzens.

Cover Art: 'Dream On' by Joachim Luetke

Fiction:

Impostor/Impostor by Ian Muneshwar
illustrated by Joachim Luetke

The End of the Tour by Timothy Mudie
illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe

Marrow by E. Catherine Tobler
illustrated by Vincent Sammy

In the Gallery of Silent Screams by Carole Johnstone & Chris Kelso
illustrated by Dave Senecal

The Pursuer by Kailee Pedersen

The Gramophone Man by Matt Thompson
illustrated by Richard Wagner

Squatters' Rights by Cody Goodfellow

Columns:

Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker
CLASS TIME

Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore
WHAT DO YOU THINK HE SAW

Reviews:

Case Notes: Book Reviews
Nina Allan: Litttle Eve by Catriona Ward (plus interview) • Laura Mauro: Lost Objects by Marian Womack • Mike O'Driscoll: The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay • Georgina Bruce: Figurehead by Carly Holmes (plus interview) • David Surface: One Good Story: The Two Sams by Glen Hirshberg • Daniel Carpenter: We Sold Our Souls by Grady Hendrix, Strange Ink by Gary Kemble

Blood Spectrum: Film Reviews by Gary Couzens
It Happened Here • La Belle et la Bête • Hammer Volume 3: Blood & Terror • Razorback • The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey • Tideland • The Changeling • Rare Chills • A Quiet Place • It Lives • Extinction • Death Line • Assault • Revenge • Miss Leslie's Dolls • Arcadia • Picnic at Hanging Rock (2018) • Doom Asylum • Victor Crowley • Apprentice to Murder • Proud Mary • Dark Crimes

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Sep 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463067413

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 65

SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2018

© 2018 Black Static and its contributors

PUBLISHER

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

website: ttapress.com

email: [e-mail]

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

EDITOR

Andy Cox

[e-mail]

FILMS

Gary Couzens

[e-mail]

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BLACK STATIC 65 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2018

TTA PRESS

COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2018

PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

CONTENTS

dream-on-luetke-bw.tif

COVER ART

DREAM ON

JOACHIM LUETKE

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CLASS TIME

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

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WHAT DO YOU THINK HE SAW

INTO THE WOODS

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

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STORY ILLUSTRATED BY JOACHIM LUETKE

IMPOSTOR/IMPOSTOR

IAN MUNESHWAR

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STORY ILLUSTRATED BY WARWICK FRASER-COOMBE

THE END OF THE TOUR

TIMOTHY MUDIE

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STORY ILLUSTRATED BY VINCENT SAMMY

MARROW

E. CATHERINE TOBLER

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STORY ILLUSTRATED BY DAVE SENECAL

IN THE GALLERY OF SILENT SCREAMS

CAROLE JOHNSTONE & CHRIS KELSO

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STORY

THE PURSUER

KAILEE PEDERSEN

gramophone man.tif

STORY ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD WAGNER

THE GRAMOPHONE MAN

MATT THOMPSON

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STORY

SQUATTERS’ RIGHTS

CODY GOODFELLOW

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BOOK REVIEWS & INTERVIEWS

CASE NOTES

NINA ALLAN, GEORGINA BRUCE, DAVID SURFACE, MIKE O’DRISCOLL & OTHERS

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FILM REVIEWS

BLOOD SPECTRUM

GARY COUZENS

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

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CLASS TIME

We don’t talk about class in America, so the conventional wisdom goes. We don’t have class in America – that’s another piece of so-called conventional wisdom, but pretty much everyone in America knows it’s bullshit. Of course class is everywhere; it’s embedded in our horror fiction, too. A grasp of the nuances of the English class system remains beyond me, but I think Clive Barker spoke for both sides of the pond and plenty of other countries too when he called zombies the liberal nightmare: Here you have the masses, whom you would love to love, appearing at your front door with their faces falling off; and you’re trying to be as humane as you possibly can, but they are, after all, eating the cat.

There’s awareness of class in our horror fiction, whether it’s there on the surface or not – even the existence of horror itself as a genre is mired in perceptions of class. I mean, for all the M.R. Jamesian-gentleman’s-club-tasteful-Victorian-ghost-stories out there, let’s not mince words: in the minds of most people, horror’s kind of, well, low-class, isn’t it? Because class, particularly in the USA, is not just about money, it’s about culture – and horror definitely falls into that low culture bracket.

After all, it’s why film industry people are falling over themselves to find new modifiers for horror: post-horror, elevated genre, horror-adjacent – it’s the equivalent of taking elocution lessons or just working really, really hard to shed that accent that marks you out to everyone as from an undesirable class. (As someone who worked to get rid of a Southern accent – something I now greatly regret but can’t really get back – I know all too much about this.) Of course, nothing about horror film has changed – if anything, a whole slew of them, and I’m thinking of those in the Conjuring/Insidious/Sinister vein – are throwbacks to the kind of horror that dominated the American horror mainstream in the 1970s and 1980s.

The formula went something like this: There is a nice young family. They are threatened by supernatural forces. They fight the supernatural forces and order is restored, or they are overcome by the supernatural forces and order is never restored. Don’t get me wrong; there is nothing inherently wrong with this construction, and a lot of brilliant films and books arose from it. If we stretch a little bit back to the end of the 1960s to allow Rosemary’s Baby in and then 1970s classics like Burnt Offerings and Harvest Home, and of course plenty of Stephen King novels, we’ve got a respectable selection of very good books. One of King’s gifts, of course, is that his characterizations were nearly always more complex than those of his imitators, so while he may never have intended Jack Torrance to be the Jack Nicholson of the opening scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, he was still an alcoholic who had broken his young son’s arm and got fired from his job as a teacher before the supernatural even got its claws into him. King understood what a lot of other writers of the time didn’t: that there’s nearly always a rot under the placid surface.

But by and large, according to films and books of the time, nice blameless American suburban families and affluent yuppie couples were under siege from the supernatural. If trends in horror can indeed be said to reflect the anxieties of their time, then the horror boom of the 1980s, the greed is good era, reflected something almost prescient in the American psyche. What we in America think of as the middle-class lifestyle, that post-war boom of affluence and security, was actually in its final days as feel-good Reaganomics took center stage. The children born in the 1980s and after would mature into a world where just getting the education to maintain that middle-class lifestyle would mean taking on literally a lifetime of debt, one where the idea of supporting an entire family on a single salary was almost unthinkable, where nobody could afford to buy a home and suddenly people were making less money than their parents had and it could all be wiped out anyway with one bad diagnosis because even health insurance wouldn’t be enough to save you from bankruptcy if you had a serious enough medical issue. Talk about your real horror.

As it turned out, it wasn’t demons or ghosts or ancient curses or monsters or anything else coming for all those nice families; it was just good old-fashioned capitalism.

The British have always been more willing to acknowledge class than Americans, so it’s probably no accident that two of the horror novels I’ve read in the past few years that confront class in the most head-on way are both by British authors, Adam Nevill’s No One Gets Out Alive and Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter. In both books, in fact, it is the protagonists’ economic circumstances that drive them to their doom. Nevill – who from his own account is no stranger to the kind of poverty and its dehumanizing effects that he conveys so perceptively – is particularly adept at writing stories about people who are on the verge of falling through the cracks, and I have to confess that reading No One Gets Out Alive during a particularly low point in my own life meant the horror of Stephanie’s financial situation was actually even more terrifying to me than the supernatural stuff. I kept having to put the book down less because it was making me worry about demons and more because it was making me worry about my bank balance – and not because Nevill pulled any punches on the supernatural side of things either. That same anxiety is present in other works by him as well, like The Ritual, where Luke’s relative poverty is the impetus for the scaled-down trip in the first place and drives tensions between the group – the rest of whom have settled into comfortably middle-class lives – and Apartment 16, with its contrast between the squalid details of Seth’s existence and the affluent lives of those in the building where he works as a porter.

In the Paver novel, it’s not just economic insecurity that drives Jack Miller’s commitment to his posting in the Arctic in the 1930s but his overwhelming desire for acceptance, to belong in that Oxford-educated circle of men where he is clearly the outsider. To prove himself to them, in that way the underclass is always forced to do while their betters are assumed to have those qualities to begin with.

I’ve said before, here and elsewhere, that I dislike the idea of horror as nothing more than allegory. My vampires are actually a metaphor for X is another one of those class moves, isn’t it? It’s a way of saying you don’t really truck with that kind of low culture; your purpose is a higher one, and you’re just using those trappings of the underclass to illuminate your ideas in ways that clearly those people never manage to do on their own. As if horror hasn’t always been imbued with rich subtext in the first place; as if you need new words to talk about it so people don’t get the idea that you actually like that sort of thing. But I wish we could talk about class more. I wish we could talk about in real life and I wish we could talk about it more in fiction.

I want stories that say, yeah, capitalism is choking you to death but so is that actual literal cannibal with its hands around your throat right now. It’s in the most disreputable art forms that we actually have the opportunity to be the most revolutionary, because nobody’s watching and nobody expects it. I want demons and monsters and retributive ghosts and a story that’s imbued with a sophistication about its underpinnings and rage toward the status quo – not a story that aims to reassure me and reestablish that status quo. Bring on the zombies; bring on the masses; show me the downtrodden and upset the order of things and just as you would do with any of the other horrors don’t let me look away.

INTO THE WOODS

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

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WHAT DO YOU THINK HE SAW

I was taught by nuns. Entering the classroom in black robes, tall stiff white bandeau across their wrinkled foreheads, above their small blue eyes, white coifs around their throats, white guimpe like a stiff half-length bib covering their breasts. My family was Catholic. I went to a Catholic grammar school, Catholic high school. In high school, a priest new to the parish, Father I Forget His Name, intense face, gave his first speech to all of us assembled in the school’s gym, for the purpose of meeting him, by reenacting Christ’s crucifixion, him playing the role of Christ, screaming in pain as his right hand mimed hammering an imaginary spike into his left palm, pinning the palm to the side arm of a large wooden imaginary cross, lifting his by now sweating face, mouth drooping open in agony. My God, my God, Why have you forsaken me? He disappeared a month later, amid rumors he had had a nervous breakdown. Like I said, intense.

In our sophomore year, all the boys were put on a bus, transported west across Connecticut, then north towards upper New York state, for a retreat. In Catholicism, a retreat means people brought to a place away from their daily routines, where they listen to talks (usually by priests), and spend time alone in prayer and introspection. Of course, boys being boys, the whispers soon spread through our ranks that all the food we were being served was spiked with saltpeter, so we wouldn’t be able to get erections, and hence couldn’t masturbate in our dormitory beds each night after our lectures in spirituality.

To get to the location of our retreat meant spending hours and hours on this bus. Teenage boys on a bus get impatient, so the priests used the same tactics all adult monitors do when kids have to endure long bus rides, whether it’s to transport kids to a summer camp or a Broadway musical. They had us sing popular long bus ride songs, such as ‘99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall’.

I learned the patience of making a Louisiana roux in Maine. In Louisiana, a roux is made with oil rather than butter, and that oil and flour mixture is stirred in a circle for a half hour or longer, until the mixture in the skillet is the color of mud, with a rich, nutty flavor. It’s hard to do. You stir it until it smells like popcorn, then lift the skillet from the flame long enough to prevent it from burning, slap it back down on the heat and stir some more. It becomes so hot it’s referred to as ‘Cajun napalm’. Get a drop of it on you while you’re stirring, and that combination of hot oil and sticky dark flour will burn an angry pink hole in your forearm deep as a recluse spider’s bite. But it tastes so good, it’s worth the risk.

A few months after we were established in Maine, I started writing again. And getting rejection letters again. So I decided to do something I had never tried before. I decided to tailor my writings for specific markets, rather than write what I really wanted to write.

Women’s confessional magazines were really big back then. So I bought a handful of those magazines at the supermarket and dropped them in our shopping cart with our artichokes and Campbell’s chicken broth and Maine shrimp, and when I got home to our apartment read them cover-to-cover, then wrote two stories I thought would fit in with what they published.

I saw David Bowie’s stage performances four times during his life. Once at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan, once in Connecticut, twice in California. I remember the Radio City Music Hall performance the most. After listening to his music on my turntable for so many years, at first in my parents’ home, and later in my own apartment, it was a thrill to be in the same room with him. Luther Vandross was the opening act. As Vandross finished his performance, I could see, because of my far left seat in the audience, Bowie behind the right side curtain, warming up, jumping up and down like a June bug, dancing frantically to himself, probably exorcizing whatever stage fright he felt, gearing himself up,