Black Static #67 (January-February 2019)

By TTA Press

This Jan-Feb issue contains new cutting edge horror fiction by Ralph Robert Moore (novelette), Mike O'Driscoll (novelette), Kristi DeMeester, Michelle Ann King, and Eric Schaller (novelette). The cover art is 'Threshold' by Ben Baldwin, and interior illustrations are by Joachim Luetke, Dave Senecal, 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, Peter Tennant, Mike O'Driscoll, Laura Mauro, Daniel Carpenter, Philip Fracassi, and David Surface; Blood Spectrum film reviews by Gary Couzens.

Cover Art: Threshold by Ben Baldwin

Fiction:

Do Not Pet by Ralph Robert Moore
illustrated by Ben Baldwin

Shore Leave by Mike O'Driscoll
illustrated by Joachim Luetke

The Silence of Prayer by Kristi DeMeester
illustrated by Dave Senecal

In the Fog, There's Nothing But Grey by Michelle Ann King

All We Inherit by Eric Schaller

Columns:

Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker
THAT UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore
AS COMFORTABLE AS A PAIR OF PAJAMAS

Reviews:

Case Notes: Book Reviews

Peter Tennant: Flight or Fright edited by Stephen King & Bev Vincent; The Green Face by Gustav Meyrink • Mike O'Driscoll: Sleeping With the Lights On by Darryl Jones; The Failing Heart by Eoghan Smith • Daniel Carpenter: Elevation by Stephen King • Lauro Mauro: Wolf's Hill by Simon Bestwick; The Rust Maidens by Gwendolyn Kiste • Georgina Bruce: Halcyon by Rio Youers • Philip Fracassi: The Mouth of the Dark by Tim Waggoner • David Surface: One Good Story: Miserere by Robert Stone

Blood Spectrum: Film Reviews by Gary Couzens

William Castle at Columbia, Volume One • Quatermass and the Pit (BBC) • Mandy • The Nun • The Secret of Marrowbone • Lost Gully Road • Next of Kin • The Chain Reaction • Long Weekend • Escape From New York • Opera • The Case of the Bloody Iris • Cam • I Think We're Alone Now • Solis • Patgient Zero

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Jan 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463345610

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 67

JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2019

© 2019 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]

STORY PROOFREADER

Peter Tennant

FILMS

Gary Couzens

[e-mail]

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BLACK STATIC 67 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2019

TTA PRESS

COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2019

PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

CONTENTS

Threshold-bw.tif

COVER ART

THRESHOLD

BEN BALDWIN

lyndarucker-contents.tif

THAT UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

RalphRobertMoore-contents.tif

AS COMFORTABLE AS A PAIR OF PAJAMAS

INTO THE WOODS

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

Do Not Pet.tif

NOVELETTE ILLUSTRATED BY BEN BALDWIN

DO NOT PET

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

Shore Leave.tif

NOVELETTE ILLUSTRATED BY JOACHIM LUETKE

SHORE LEAVE

MIKE O’DRISCOLL

Silence_bw-fullpage.tif

STORY ILLUSTRATED BY DAVE SENECAL

THE SILENCE OF PRAYER

KRISTI DeMEESTER

fog1.tif

STORY

IN THE FOG, THERE’S NOTHING BUT GREY

MICHELLE ANN KING

all-we-inhert-new.tif

NOVELETTE

ALL WE INHERIT

ERIC SCHALLER

sleeping-with-the-lights-on-contents.tif

BOOK REVIEWS

CASE NOTES

PETER TENNANT, LAURA MAURO, PHILIP FRACASSI, GEORGINA BRUCE & OTHERS

cam-contents.tif

FILM REVIEWS

BLOOD SPECTRUM

GARY COUZENS

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

lyndarucker3supercropped.tif

THAT UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

Horror fiction is the fiction of loss. Our first experience of the world is that of loss, the safety and satiety of the womb gone forever. Loss is perhaps the single universal human experience; not everyone has the opportunity to ever experience love in any incarnation, but loss is inevitable.

The most incredible thing about loss is that when it is one that is terrible enough, it feels as though the world has been rent apart. And yet it is not. Except in horror fiction, and this is one of the great strengths of storytelling that’s not afraid to let the fantastical in: loss – and its constant companion, death – doesn’t feel like a soft-focus montage of happier moments. It doesn’t feel like stark, realistic prose either. True loss is breathtaking, unspeakable in its rapaciousness, unrelenting in its horror. It is Pennywise the Clown; it is a maniac in a hockey mask with a machete who won’t die; it is a house that consumes everyone who dares to cross its threshold if they do not get out in time. It is the Great Old Ones, the realization that no one is in control and that the universe does not care what happens to you. It feels unendurable.

It isn’t, of course.

Life finds a way, as Jurassic Park taught us, and people tend to endure even when they would rather not. H.P. Lovecraft said it was the most merciful thing in the world when he referred to the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents, a moment of acute psychological insight from a writer not necessarily known for that quality. Horror fiction makes the unthinkable thinkable.

It’s a cliché to opine that what really scares me is real-life horror, but it is astonishing how frequently horror fiction falls short of capturing the indignity and suffering that can be visited upon the body and mind – and here I’m not even thinking of what humans can do to one another but what the body can do to itself. Over a decade ago, my father died of Parkinson’s disease; in the present, my brother is dying of cancer. The torments these diseases inflict upon their victims – and their caregivers, in a kind of nightmarish proxy – is astonishing. It is, truly, beyond imagining, even as it is happening – here is where that human mind helpfully falters, as Lovecraft reminded us.

Of course, not all horror fiction aims to explore the limits of human endurance – nor should it – but what I find interesting is how often horror fiction and film that sets out to do so falls short, and I think it’s because too many creators take their mission too literally. Horrific things that happen to the human body are horrific because we aren’t just bags of flesh and bones. We are creatures of mind and spirit – I don’t mean spirit in a sense of necessarily something that survives beyond death, but that essence that makes us who we are and not someone else.

The horror is not in the bodily degradation itself but in the loss – the loss of physical control, but also the loss of humanity, when we become reduced to that instance of suffering. In this way, the extremes of physical suffering are no different from the extremes of mental suffering. In both cases, it is the moment that we lose ourselves – or see the same loss of self happening to our loved one – that is so devastating. Where is the spirit then? Is there any spirit? It is terrifying to contemplate.

I don’t think horror fiction needs to have a fantastical element to succeed, but I think in order to achieve these extreme ends using physical means, for truly effective body horror, it needs either the fantastic – David Cronenberg, or John Carpenter’s The Thing – or it needs to be hyperreal, metaphor made (literal) flesh as in Julie Ducournau’s 2016 film Raw. In fact, Raw is an excellent example of how to use body horror and gore in surely that most disreputable sub-genre of a disreputable genre, the cannibal film, to examine whether we are any more than the flesh that contains us, and its associated urges.

Loss – even the loss of another person – is always about the loss of self in some way. We are, ultimately, solipsistic creatures; we can feel empathy, sometimes to extreme degrees, but we are nevertheless still always encased in our own feelings, our own experiences. Even empathy is only feeling what we imagine others feel. And when we lose a loved one, we lose parts of ourselves that are entwined with them.

I think that all of this is why, for me, the most effective horror in film and fiction is that which disorients me. We say that shock or trauma feels like a nightmare, meaning that our sense of reality can no longer be trusted – the same effect achieved, or at least reached for, in stories by Robert Aickman, or the cinema of David Lynch. We are destabilized, we lose ourselves. It’s the unmoored territory of madness or dementia.

It is astonishing, when you really think about it, how thoroughly the human mind refuses to correlate its contents. It is shocking that we lose, and we lose, and we lose, and we keep going – often by telling ourselves stories, creating narratives about our lives and our relationships and the things that happened to us that create some kind of structure around the chaos of it all. It is shocking that it is all so mundane, this loss, that all around us people are losing lovers and friends and spouses and parents and siblings and children and that we don’t just carry on, we function; we even thrive.

My brother, not a horror fan in particular (although the last time I saw him we talked about Stephen King’s 11/22/63, and he did buy and read my first collection and ask me to sign it), is facing the prospect of his own death with an enviable amount of dignity and equanimity – an attitude that he’d rather not, just yet, but if he must, he’s curious about what lies ahead. There’s little doubt in my mind that if I’m ever afforded the same early warning, I am not going to be remotely as sanguine about the whole business.

But there’s nothing unique about any of this. The inevitability and the universality of human suffering forms the basis of the major world religions. From that standpoint, it’s little wonder that in a world where religion has lost its power, horror serves as a catharsis for many. And some science fiction imagines a time when our life spans twice as long, or in which there is no need to die at all, even if it’s only a matter of transferring our consciousness from one vessel to another, but what are we without death? Vampires aren’t monsters because they feed on blood, can’t go out in the daytime, and can’t be seen in mirrors; they are monsters because they can’t die. Immortality is so often written about as though it would leave everything the same except nothing has to end, but what could be further from the truth?

Horror stories are a canvas on which to explore the human condition in extremis. But so many skirt the surface of what that means; and so few have the insight into loss and death to produce something as shattering as Nicolas Roeg’s adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s ‘Don’t Look Now’, or Georgina Bruce’s British Fantasy Award-award winning story ‘White Rabbit’ (that appeared here in the pages of Black Static), or Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, or Steve Rasnic Tem’s elegiac collection Here With the Shadows. They are the antithesis of the machismo-fueled school of horror, the one that asks how much can you take?, that prides itself on being invulnerable when horror is all about vulnerability, and the inevitable nature of the one experience that unites us all.

INTO THE WOODS

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

RalphRobertMoore-woods2.tif

AS COMFORTABLE AS A PAIR OF PAJAMAS

High above the city, beautiful cobalt sky. Cheerful yellow sun warming the pointed tops of skyscrapers. Early spring in Dallas, fresh, nostril-filling scent of green flower buds spreading open in the April breezes.

Our car pulled into the parking lot at Parkland Memorial Hospital, rolled down the rows of license plates to an empty slot. Parkland was where President John F. Kennedy was rushed, blue eyes staring straight up at the ambulance’s ceiling, after he was shot in the head.

The three of us, having parked, opened the side doors of the car, getting out, stretching after the long drive, bending back into the car to retrieve our paperwork, walking side by side behind the tall hugeness of the hospital to the wide building at its rear. Me, and the salesman for this client, also named Rob, and Karen, the client rep, who would handle the day-to-day communications.

I was the head of the legal department where I worked. I took care of compliance issues on a state and federal level, and negotiated our contracts. Sitting down at a conference table across from the parties representing a prospective client, usually senior vice presidents and attorneys, making sure my company received favorable terms. That was my job. To close the deal.

When I was a teenager in Connecticut back in the Sixties I spent a lot of time up in my second story bedroom in my parents’ home, listening to vinyl record albums. ‘Father, I want to kill you.’ I knew at some point I’d have to get a job, because I wanted to be living in my own apartment, my own peephole and messy kitchen, bathroom where I could leave the door open, and I knew instinctively that I would not be able to support myself by being who I was, a writer. I would have to be something else during the week, then only be myself in the early morning or late evening, the weekend. But I could never imagine myself in a business suit. Ever. I was a long-haired, jeans and T-shirt guy who wanted to rewrite the same sentence ten times. The concept of working in an office just seemed so completely alien to who I was, the in-tray and out-tray of it, surrounded by people walking by my cubicle repeating jokes they heard on TV last night. ‘Infiltrated business cesspools, hating through our sleeves.’ Yet here I was, decades later, two thousand miles away, in Dallas, where business suits felt as comfortable on me as pajamas.

The client we were visiting was a behavioral health center located behind Parkland Memorial Hospital.

Once we were inside the center, I stopped someone in the main hall who introduced themselves as a nurse, asking them directions to the HR department, where our contract negotiation was going to take place. He pointed down the corridor we were in, his lifted, snaking hand giving left, right directions. Down a third hallway, I smiled at someone who shook my hand, said, Dr Conway in response to me giving my name, to make sure we were headed in the right direction. She aimed her finger at a door near the end of that corridor.

Finally reaching Human Resources, handshakes in a back conference room with empty chairs, comments about the weather, telling an unusually tall man how we liked our coffee, the woman I would be negotiating with across the table asked if we had any trouble finding their offices. I named the nurse and doctor who directed us here, and she smiled. Actually, those are some of our mental/nervous patients. They’re not severe, so we let them out of their rooms for a few hours each day. They like to pretend they’re staff. I suppose so they don’t feel embarrassed when they introduce themselves to strangers.

I raised my eyebrows, like we all do when we’re about to make a joke. Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether. Looked around at the different seated parties, papers fanned in front of them, pens poised, anticipating a laugh.

Not one person sitting at that table had any idea what I was referencing.

One of the most enduring tropes of horror is someone we know turning out to be someone we don’t know. A substitute. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The Thing. Don Draper. Terry O’Quinn in The Stepfather (1987), turning away from the wall phone: Wait a minute… Who am I here?

When I drove three thousand miles across America in the early Seventies, once I arrived in California I started eating a lot of oranges, borrowing all of Philip K. Dick’s books from the local library, because there was a Rolling Stone magazine article on the stands about him. You know that feeling, don’t you? When you discover a writer, and start going through their oeuvre? He was my hero!

Years and years later, decades, after amassing quite the Philip K. Dick collection in my home library in Texas, pale blonde shelves laddering up to the HVAC vents just below the white ceiling of my study, I bought Lawrence Sutin’s biography of Dick, Divine Invasions. I was taken by Dick’s relationship with Tessa, later in his life. Tessa was significantly younger than Dick, but the two of them seemed to have an idyllic life together, living on love in a Southern California apartment, having to be careful how they spent their limited money, both of them writing, discussing their work with each other, Dick listening to German operas on his beloved stereo system. He seemed to finally be happy, and content. And Tessa, dear dark-haired Tessa, seemed like his perfect partner. But then there’s this passage from the biography (page 199 of the Harmony Books first edition): Unfortunately, Phil did more, at times, than snap his fingers. There were episodes of physical violence that left Tessa bruised and emotionally shaken. Linda Levy, herself the victim of an assault by Phil, writes that, early on in the relationship, ‘Tessa showed up at my apartment one day, covered with bruises, crying and very upset. She described a situation in which, she said, Phil locked the front door, turned up the stereo, turned on the air conditioning, and started to beat her.’

The Philip K. Dick I loved from his writings was not the Philip K. Dick who produced those writings. It turned out I didn’t know him at all.

When the Internet first started getting popular, back in the late Nineties, a lot of us created our own websites. I did too. ralphrobertmoore.com. I posted quite a few of