Black Static #66 (November-December 2018)

By TTA Press

This issue contains new cutting edge horror fiction by Ralph Robert Moore (novelette), Steven Sheil, Joanna Parypinski, Giselle Leeb, and Nicholas Kaufmann (novelette). The cover art is 'Take Death' by Joachim Luetke, and interior illustrations are by Joachim Luetke, Vincent Sammy, and Ben Baldwin. Regular features: Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore; Notes from the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker; Case Notes book reviews by Georgina Bruce (includes interview with Kerry Hadley-Pryce), Mike O'Driscoll, Laura Mauro, Daniel Carpenter, Philip Fracassi, and David Surface; Blood Spectrum film reviews by Gary Couzens.

Cover Art: 'Take Death' by Joachim Luetke

Fiction:

China by Ralph Robert Moore
illustrated by Vincent Sammy

Cora by Steven Sheil

The House of Y by Joanna Parypinski

Everybody Knows That Place by Giselle Leeb
illustrated by Joachim Luetke

The Fifth Horseman by Nicholas Kaufmann
illustrated by Ben Baldwin

Columns:

Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker
GOOD FOR YOU

Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore
A MASK FOR THE BONES BENEATH

Reviews:

Case Notes: Book Reviews

Daniel Carpenter: New Fears 2 edited by Mark Morris • Laura Mauro: Hell Ship by Benedict J. Jones, A World of Horror edited by Eric J. Guignard • David Surface: One Good Story (True Crime by M Rickert) • Georgina Bruce: Gamble by Kerry Hadley-Pryce (plus author interview) • Mike O'Driscoll: The Dark Masters Trilogy by Stephen Volk • Philip Fracassi: Sleazeland by Cody Goodfellow

Blood Spectrum: Film Reviews by Gary Couzens

Night of the Demon • The Fog • Prince of Darkness • They Live • Monkey Shines • Candyman • Troll: The Complete Collection • Night of the Creeps • Schlock • Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds • Deadbeat at Dawn • City of the Living Dead • Incident in a Ghostland • The Dark • The Monster • The Hatred • Down a Dark Hall • The Innocents • Iceman • Lake Placid: Legacy

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Nov 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463538432

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 66

NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 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]

shop: shop.ttapress.com

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

EDITOR

Andy Cox

[e-mail]

STORY PROOFREADER

Peter Tennant

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 66 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2018

TTA PRESS

COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2018

PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

CONTENTS

Take Death bw.tif

COVER ART

TAKE DEATH

JOACHIM LUETKE

jungle.tif

GOOD FOR YOU

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

Phantom.tif

A MASK FOR THE BONES BENEATH

INTO THE WOODS

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

CHINA artwork.tif

NOVELETTE ILLUSTRATED BY VINCENT SAMMY

CHINA

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

hole-wall-3.tif

STORY

CORA

STEVEN SHEIL

house-of-y-3-all.tif

STORY

THE HOUSE OF Y

JOANNA PARYPINSKI

Everybody knows.tif

STORY ILLUSTRATED BY JOACHIM LUETKE

EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT PLACE

GISELLE LEEB

The Fifth Horseman.tif

NOVELETTE ILLUSTRATED BY BEN BALDWIN

THE FIFTH HORSEMAN

NICHOLAS KAUFMANN

UsAndThem 8 contents.tif

FILM REVIEWS

BLOOD SPECTRUM

GARY COUZENS

world-of-horror-contents.tif

BOOK REVIEWS

CASE NOTES

PHILIP FRACASSI, LAURA MAURO, MIKE O’DRISCOLL, GEORGINA BRUCE & OTHERS

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

lyndarucker3supercropped.tif

GOOD FOR YOU

Someone, or more than one person, said something to the effect of I write to find out what I know – the internet credits Flannery O’Connor, Joan Didion, and even Stephen King with some variation of it. Maybe all of them did.

Yet stories illuminate without always concluding – or, at least, I think, the first is their job, and the latter is not, necessarily. What I mean by that is not that stories shouldn’t have conclusive endings (although they don’t have to!), but that they don’t always need to tell us what to think. They can present ambiguities, ambivalences, even cognitive dissonances; they can show without endorsing. They can’t ever be as messy and contradictory as life itself, but they are not the blunt tools that slogans or hot takes are, or even essays like this one. Or rather, they can be – Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle led to reforms in the meatpacking industry; the effect of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the 19th century abolitionist movement cannot be overestimated; and so on – but by and large, most novels and short stories and films do not set out with such a didactic primary purpose.

That said, societies go through spasms where they demand didacticism. Art becomes judged less on is it good than is it good for you, or good for society as a whole, and whether it is good for you or society – and therefore, good art, by those standards – changes according to the time and place. The Puritans wanted their Pilgrim’s Progress and Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. The Soviet Union embraced socialist realism.

The modern Anglophone West is far too fragmented in its concerns and beliefs to enforce such stringent terms on its artists – and whatever sells wins, in the end – but we are having a lot of conversations in genre circles that amount to something similar: What messages should the art we make carry? Should it not only be good for us, but also made by good people? Who decides whether they – the stories and the people – are good or not, and what standards should be used to decide that, and what responsibility do artists have to call others to account?

There is an essential dilemma for the horror writer in the face of trying to write something that is good for people, and it is that horror probably isn’t good for you. I want to be a decent person in my life. I am not sure I want to be decent in my art. Some people say these are the same thing but I do not agree. In fact, I am not sure that they are even compatible. It’s a cliché that even in the most appalling of circumstances a writer is always gathering material because it’s true. This alone is not the sort of thing a decent person does.

I think we may need to be willing, in art, and in horror in particular, to travel down dark mindsets and paths we would not allow ourselves to traverse in real life, even to give voice to mindsets we might find on a spectrum from unpleasant to reprehensible.

Of course, art is real life. Of course it is; what else is there? And of course it is not. We should always, and never, confuse the two. (You see? Cognitive dissonance; contradiction.)

Sometimes we talk about art, we talk about horror, in terms of the why. As though there must be a reason, one we can articulate, for why we create in the first place, and why we create nightmares in the second place. We study our contemporaries and those who have gone before us and we look at our own creations and we come up with justifications – we work backward from them, maybe, sometimes, we talk about catharsis, we talk about how horror helps us deal with things. We talk about the ways it is good for us.

Maybe there isn’t any reason. Maybe we make art because it is there, and we make horror because it is there. Art in general and horror in particular arise from atavistic urges.

But if you aren’t careful, you can start to feel like art needs theory instead of the other way around. You can start to forget that long before there was any theory there was art. There were paintings on the walls of caves and stories passed down orally, there was music, almost every bit of it lost forever.

Their art, back then, did they do it to keep the dark out or did they do it to let the dark in?

I do, actually, think that horror, and art, if not necessarily good for us, sustains us. There’s an exhilaration that accompanies finding a piece of art that genuinely speaks to us, even when the work itself is unremittingly bleak. I write exhilaration, but when connecting with art in that intense way, it’s really a feeling that can’t be put into words – a funny thing to say, perhaps, about novels and stories, which are made of words, but words are just symbols, after all, and when stories cut deep into your gut and your heart and your mind they work on a nonverbal level, one that can’t be easily classified or contained or critiqued.

To a greater or lesser degree, all art reinforces or challenges norms. Being aware of that, examining that, and the assumptions on which our stories are built, makes us better writers and readers. And horror fiction is arguably rooted in the upending of norms. It rests on a foundation of displacement. Sometimes the protagonist is destabilized by placement in an unfamiliar environment. In other cases, the displacement happens because someplace that ought to be safe is not – a home, of course, in the classic haunted house tale, but other places too. A town, a relationship, an office building. You might say that in horror stories, the familiar becomes sinister and the unfamiliar becomes even more unfamiliar.

This renders horror fiction potent terrain for examining those ambiguities and ambivalences, those contradictions and cognitive dissonances. And those ambiguities, those contradictions – they don’t lend themselves well to the hot take, whether it’s someone’s quick social media status or a longer review or think-piece for a publication that is nevertheless subject to a short deadline and the necessity of wrapping everything up into a tidy conclusion.

I don’t think great stories make for tidy conclusions, and I think in order to tell great stories, and to read them properly, we have to be able step outside the chatter for a little while and shut the door behind us.

For me, the best stories, and thus the best horror stories, are rooted in an understanding of humanity. With a few extreme exceptions, I don’t think humans are particularly good or bad but rather very much a mix of both depending on context – and that’s where stories can start to get really interesting, and important, and insightful. And there is often more to stories than meets the eye; as we change, how we read stories does as well – I reread Jane Eyre every five or ten years and I swear it is a different story every single time.

Like the best stories, I don’t have a tidy conclusion here. I only want to say that writing to find out what we think is a far richer and more challenging and more hazardous enterprise than setting out to write something that explains how we should think. It’s scary to write those words in a world that feels increasingly extreme, in which words have real-life consequences and in which it is irresponsible to not acknowledge those consequences. But at the same time, I think this is why stories have a job to do that is not the same as slogans or speeches. If we didn’t need nuance, if we didn’t need to explore contradictions, if we knew what we know – those would be our tools. Fiction allows us to come at ideas in uncertain and oblique ways, and to tell stories that raise as many questions as they answer, and that matters.

INTO THE WOODS

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

RalphRobertMoore-woods2.tif

A MASK FOR THE BONES BENEATH

I know this has happened to you.

You’re finally back in your home, after having to deal with people for all those brightly-lit work hours, front door shut and locked at the end of the long day, wanting to relax, the time when you can finally do whatever you want to do, not what other people want you to do, and in your happy loneliness you’re watching a movie. Isn’t watching a movie, in some ways, like listening to our parents when we’re still really young, crawling across carpet?

And there’s a scene in that movie where one of the actors is wearing a T-shirt. The T-shirt has a message printed across the front, but because of the camera angle, or an additional article of clothing the actor is wearing over the T-shirt, a dress shirt, a jacket, you can only read part of the message. And as the scene progresses, exchanges of dialogue, the lighting up or stubbing out of a cigarette, the passing of a rubber-banded bundle of money from one hand to another, you see that actor from different angles, and all you’re paying attention to now is trying to read the full message on his or her T-shirt. But you can only catch glimpses of the words. Eventually you realize the message, whatever it says, is printed in three lines across the actor’s chest. But what does the complete message say?

And often you sense the director is playing with you, letting you see the top line, the first two words on the left of the middle line, but still deliberately withholding a reveal of the entire phrase. Sometimes, in the final shot, you do at last get to read the entire phrase. But sometimes, you’re never shown all the words, and what was written on that character’s T-shirt in that scene is forever a mystery, never revealed.

A lot of evenings, during Summer, during my orange childhood, night sky filled with the white iridescent spread of stars, I’d eat at my maternal grandparents. Since they lived on the ocean, and my grandfather would routinely go out in his rowboat, dinner would often be fish. One time he rowed back to his grey dock having trouble swinging the oars, because he had snagged his fish hook into his right palm. Once he secured the row boat to the dock, climbed out with the awkwardness of old age, flounders flapping in the bottom of his tin pail, he stood on the dock, in front of me, reached into his sagging left trouser pocket, pulled out a small pocket knife, unfolded it, matter-of-factly cut its sharp blade tip down into his palm, red blood pooling out, to yank out the barbed curve of that hook. Nowadays, that would be an expensive outpatient surgery, but back then, amid the sour death smell of the ocean, below the huge blue darkening sky, it was just him blowing against his palm, pressing his left thumb’s upper pad against the wound.

The freshness of the fish on our dinner plates was a mask for the bones beneath, so when we ate fish at my grandparents’, my grandmother would place a small plate of sliced white bread on the dining room table, next to all the ashtrays, in case someone swallowed a fish bone. The idea was if a thin fish bone got stuck down in your throat, the swallow of a piece of bread would dislodge it.

My favorite horror movies are the ones where the monster is only gradually revealed. The glimpses of the monster, a shadow against a white wall, an evocative rattling sound, are its mask. This helps explain the long tradition of masks and unmasking scenes in horror films. Masks represent what is being shown to us as artifice; the unmasking reveals the truth behind the artifice. It’s only at the end of Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera that he finally removes his mask. This trope of lifting the mask has become more sophisticated over the decades. In Alien, the monster keeps changing shape, so that there is a continuous unmasking. In The Thing, the monster changes shape so many times you eventually realize you’ll never be able to see its actual face, no matter how many masks it lifts, because perhaps there is no original face; it exists only in imitations of other faces. There’s an excellent parody of this process of unmasking in Predator, where the monster is initially invisible, then unmasked as a wide-headed creature with dreadlocks, then unmasked again near the end of the film as its helmet hisses open and we see its true face underneath, then unmasked a final time as its fangs open in an aggressive display, mouth widens, and we see the inwards of its maw.

When Mary and I first moved to Maine, we rented an apartment on the top floor of a multi-family house on a side street of Portland. Our landlady, Mrs Littlefield, such a Maine name, representing the property manager who owned multi-family houses throughout Portland, was a short, elderly lady who smiled a lot. Kind eyes. Wrinkles radiating outwards from her twinkling blue gaze. Her mask. One Saturday morning several months into our rental, Mary and I lying on the white sheet of our bed, so glad it was the weekend, top sheet pushed by our feet down to the bottom of the bed, smoking, starting to think about eggs, we heard, rising up through the stairwell outside our front door, Mrs Littlefield talking about us with a neighbor on the first floor.

Well, they’re not at all friendly. No. They seem a bit stand-offish?

To this day, I don’t know if Mrs Littlefield thought the conversation she was having with a first-floor tenant was unheard by anyone else, or if she was passive-aggressively letting us know what she thought of us, removing her kindly landlady mask.

I don’t know who I am. That is my mask coming off. And if you’re willing to remove your mask, and admit it, you don’t know who you are. We know who we want to be, who we pretend to be, present ourselves as being, but we don’t know who we truly are. I wrote once that we are born into two mysteries: the mystery of life and the mystery of ourselves, and we don’t get to solve either mystery in the short gaming time we’re given.

When I was a child I would sometimes wear cowboy gear. A beige shirt with brown leather shoulders, a cowboy hat with thin leather straps tied under my small chin. Gun strap cinched around my waist, holstering a green water pistol.

One time, when I was still a child, wearing my cowboy hat but old enough to know my grandmother was the kindest person I had ever known, I went down the front steps of her white porch, and my grandmother asked me to come back inside, because lunch was ready.

And do you know what I did?

I looked up at her from the bottom step, I pulled my water pistol out of my holster, and taking aim, I shot her.

The lowering arc of water squirted against the front of her flowered dress, below her breasts.

She raised her old, loving face on that white front porch, so many deaths ago. Surprised, disappointed. Don’t do that again, Bobby! It’s not nice!

I shot her because it was hard for me to believe anyone would be that forgiving. I was sure her kindness must be a mask. I grew up like any kid where you feel you aren’t understood, aren’t being treated fairly, everyone is against you, parents, teachers, friends, pedestrians, librarians, and this was the one time