Black Static #71 (September-October 2019)

By TTA Press

The September-October issue contains new cutting edge horror fiction by Stephen Hargadon, Sarah Read, Steven Sheil, Daniel Bennet, and Seán Padraic Birnie. The cover art is by Joachim Luetke, and interior illustrations are by Richard Wagner, Jim Burns, Warwick Fraser-Coombe and others. Regular features: Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore; Notes from the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker; Case Notes book reviews by Georgina Bruce, Laura Mauro, Andrew Hook, Daniel Carpenter, and David Surface (including Paul Tremblay interviewed by Laura Mauro); Blood Spectrum film reviews by Gary Couzens.

The cover art is 'Charles Dexter Ward' by Joachim Luetke

Fiction:

Dixon Parade by Stephen Hargadon
illustrated by Jim Burns

Diamond Saw by Sarah Read
illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe

Residue by Steven Sheil

A Pressed Red Flower in the Abandoned Archive by Daniel Bennett

Other Houses by Seán Padraic Birnie
illustrated by Richard Wagner

Features:

Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker
SOFT RAINS

Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore
ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET THE DENTIST

Reviews:

Case Notes: Book Reviews

Daniel Carpenter: The Grip of It by Jac Jemc • David Surface: One Good Story: The Good Husband by Nathan Ballingrud • Andrew Hook: Sing Your Sadness Deep by Laura Mauro • Laura Mauro: Growing Things by Paul Tremblay • Paul Tremblay Interviewed by Laura Mauro • Georgina Bruce: New Music For Old Rituals by Tracy Fahey

Blood Spectrum: Film Reviews by Gary Couzens

Bloody Terror: The Shocking Cinema of Norman J. Warren 1976–1987 • The House That Dripped Blood • Asylum • Lust for a Vampire • The Legacy • Cruising • Memory • Us • Under the Silver Lake • Dragged Across Concrete • Blood of a Poet • The Testament of Orpheus • The Chill Factor • Pet Sematary • The Hole in the Ground • Border • Lords of Chaos • Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile • Batman: Hush • The Mermaid: Lake of the Dead

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Sep 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463925744

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 71

SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 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]

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]

FILMS

Gary Couzens

[e-mail]

STORY PROOFREADER

Peter Tennant

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 71 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2019

TTA PRESS

COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2019

PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

CONTENTS

Carles Dexter Ward bw.tif

COVER ART

CHARLES DEXTER WARD

JOACHIM LUETKE

lyndarucker-contents.tif

SOFT RAINS

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

RalphRobertMoore-contents.tif

ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET THE DENTIST

INTO THE WOODS

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

Dixon Parade.tif

NOVELETTE ILLUSTRATED BY JIM BURNS

DIXON PARADE

STEPHEN HARGADON

diamond-saw-contents.tif

STORY ILLUSTRATED BY WARWICK FRASER-COOMBE

DIAMOND SAW

SARAH READ

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STORY

RESIDUE

STEVEN SHEIL

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STORY

A PRESSED RED FLOWER IN THE ABANDONED ARCHIVE

DANIEL BENNETT

other houses (a).tif

NOVELETTE ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD WAGNER

OTHER HOUSES

SEÁN PADRIAC BIRNIE

Growing Things contents.tif

BOOK REVIEWS

CASE NOTES

LAURA MAURO, ANDREW HOOK, DANIEL CARPENTER & OTHERS

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FILM REVIEWS

BLOOD SPECTRUM

GARY COUZENS

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

lyndarucker3supercropped.tif

SOFT RAINS

Is it just me, or does the world seem to be getting more cosmically horrifying than usual? Even though we, the humans, are the drivers of the current rate of climate change, something about the melting glaciers, the heat waves, the forest fires, the flooding, the super storms, all have the effect of reminding me just how insignificant we are, not just to the universe or the solar system at large but to the very planet we call home. It feels almost – almost – as though we’ve awakened the Old Ones, and they’re coming to boot our parasitic assess into extinction and reclaim what’s rightfully theirs.

There was an article in The Atlantic in August that bluntly informed readers via its title that The Anthropocene is a Joke (available online and recommended). The Anthropocene – the era of humans, or not even that, depending on who you ask. An era of only a few hundred years or just a few decades depending on whether you date it from the time we started to affect the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or the time our atomic activity began to spread across the planet. How very human and solipsist of us to cast ourselves as players in the scope of geological time, an affectation that the article reminds us is just that, as it details how easily any traces of our existence will be easily folded into the geographical strata and forgotten.

I find this all oddly comforting, which is probably why I write horror fiction and not, say, cosy mysteries or sassy chicklit. Not because I’m cheering on the demise of humanity – I hope we come to our senses, figure out how to live on Earth and even other planets and do all of the glorious art and science that humans are capable of when we’re at our best.

But if we don’t manage to do this – we actually won’t destroy much of anything, ultimately, but ourselves, when it comes to the scale of deep geologic time. This is at the core of H.P. Lovecraft’s work, this sense of the indifference of the cosmos to the human condition.

I had already planned to write this column about the cosmic horror of encroaching climate change when I ran across the Atlantic article, and then the topic came up again at the World Science Fiction Convention in Dublin in August. What surprised me was that in both cases it came up in connection with folk horror, first raised by Lisa Tuttle in a panel on the topic and brought up again later in a discussion of current trends in horror fiction by Stephen Jones, who hadn’t been at the earlier panel. The folk horror panelists were discussing what anxieties might be giving rise to the current popularity of the subgenre. Somehow I had never thought to connect our increasingly troubled relationship with our landscape with its popularity until Lisa pointed it out.

Of course, one way or another, the world has always been ending. When I was a kid, overpopulation and food shortages were going to do us in, a fear quickly superseded by the nuclear annihilation that seemed to surely await us in the 1980s. The 1990s were the only time in my life when the low-level sense of encroaching apocalypse declined, and that was both geographically specific (because it isn’t as though the globe was free of catastrophes that effectively ended the world for many people) and generally an anomaly as human experience goes. Most people whose lives span any significant length live through frightening times. I often think about my advisor for my MA in medieval literature who would point out that despite the turbulent times in which Julian of Norwich lived, encompassing both the Black Death and the Hundred Years’ War along with several less spectacular but no less traumatic upheavals, she was able to pen the lines all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. I used to wish I could find the same serenity that Julian did, but of course that would be impossible. As far as Julian was concerned, it was all part of a divine plan, which is about as far from the world is absurd and indifferent to human suffering as you can get. Julian had God; for the rest of us, there are disaster movies and horror stories.

Fear of what we are doing to our environment has been a staple of horror films since at least the mid-20th century, if we count mutant monster movies like Godzilla. It seems to have featured somewhat less prominently in fiction, by comparison (although aficionados of 1980s/early 1990s horror fiction will probably remember John Skipp and Craig Spector’s 1991 novel The Bridge, in which – based on my decades-old memory of reading it – toxic sludge gets sentient). In the folk horror panel, Lisa pointed out that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had been published in 1962 and that it was perhaps not a coincidence that as it slowly trickled down into mass consciousness, the so-called holy triumvirate of folk horror films appeared: Witchfinder General (1968), Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973). Far from a sign of nostalgia, today’s booming interest in folk horror seems to remind us that just as we were becoming very anxious about our relationship to the landscape then, we are doing so now as well.

Folk and cosmic horror do not always intersect, but when they do, they feel an awful lot like 2019. (And I haven’t even touched on one of the major horror films of 2019, Midsommar, mainly because I’ve yet to see it!) I rarely think of science fiction-horror hybrids as related to either folk or cosmic horror, but it seems to have a place there too in this roiling ball of anxious subtext about our place in the natural environment. Some people argue that Lovecraft, at least in some of his later stories, was at least as much a science fiction writer as he was a horror writer. Certainly he has for me always evoked a feeling similar to that of the Atlantic article: where the sheer vastness of time and space – the concept of which expanded exponentially in his lifetime, as Stephen Jones pointed out in a later panel – is in itself enough to provoke a sense that is perhaps not quite horror but might be, as they say now, horror-adjacent.

In all these musings of recent weeks, the image that has been in my head most often isn’t horror at all. It’s Jadis the White Witch (aka Lilith) in C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew, wandering about the planet at the end of time when the sun has grown huge and very orange in its death throes. I think this was the first truly vivid description I ever encountered of a dying Earth billions of years in the future, except of course it wasn’t Earth, as I was reminded when I checked back to make sure my reference was right – it was Charn, her own world, one in which she had destroyed every other living thing by uttering the Deplorable Word. In my memory, though, and I think in my perception when I read and reread the book as a child, it was always Earth, my planet’s ultimate fate reflected in the cautionary tale of Charn.

But the world isn’t dead. With or without us, life goes on, teeming in the most inhospitable of places: the bottom of the sea, under the earth’s crust. Life has returned to Chernobyl, even if you wouldn’t want to buy a house and move your family there. Life quickly overtakes abandoned human structures. The world doesn’t need us, might even be better off without us, and this is the fear at the centre of so much horror fiction, summed up in these lines from the Sara Teasdale poem that lent the title to Ray Bradbury’s own eco-horror piece: No one would mind, neither bird nor tree/If mankind perished utterly.

INTO THE WOODS

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

RalphRobertMoore-woods2.tif

ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET THE DENTIST

I love going to the dentist. The night before a dentist appointment, to me, is like…Christmas Eve. Except of course it isn’t. Nobody likes going to the dentist.

I remember as a kid I had to go to the dentist to get a tooth pulled. I’d wake up in the morning happy, feeling good about the homework I had done the night before, in particular my essay on the planets, which I was sure would impress the nun teaching my science class, who was young and who I had a schoolboy crush on, and then at some point, heading down the staircase in my pajamas, or sitting at the kitchen table redipping my spoon into the milk of my cereal, or taking another sip of my cold orange juice, I would suddenly remember. Fuuuuck! I have to get a tooth pulled out of my jaw next Tuesday.

It ruined that weekend before the visit for me. Absolutely ruined it. I just stared at the TV as the road runner outfoxed Wile E. Coyote once again. But because I was so worried about the upcoming dentist appointment, I don’t even remember what the plot was. That’s a horrible thing, to have a weekend ruined. It’s like losing the only copy of a black and white photograph of someone you love.

The day of the visit, I walked from my school across the sidewalks filled with the tallness of happy adults to my dentist’s office (which was in his home. They don’t do that as much anymore). I couldn’t focus on any of the stupid golf magazines in the waiting area. Kept swallowing. After a long wait, past the appointed time, one of his children came out and looking up at the ceiling told me her dad was ready.

Seated in the chair, that bright light shining down into my squinting eyes, he fussed around my gums with a bad-tasting cotton swab, then swung that big syringe full of novocaine up (and they always try to hide it from your nervous eyes until the last moment). This might sting a bit. No shit! You’re forcing a hard metal nail into my wet pink gums. Once I was numb, he raised this pair of pliers big enough to pull the broken-off tip of a sword out of someone’s stomach. Roughly positioned it on either side of the molar. Put his left hand against my forehead, yanking, twisting the pliers left, right.

And it didn’t work! He could only yank the tooth halfway out of my jawbone. Sweat on his cheekbones, wetting the bottoms of his black-framed eyeglasses. So he had me get out of the chair, blue bib still clipped across my shirt, and follow his white jacket to another room, where there was better light. Once the tooth at last was released from my jaw, he held it up in his blood-dripping forceps like a prize catch, proud of his work.

When it was finally over, I felt like a roomful of cops had taken turns beating me for an hour with thick telephone directories. And it was the greatest relief. It’s done. I can go back to happiness.

Bite down on this white cotton gauze, Bobby, and keep biting down until the bleeding stops. I’m in Heaven. It’s over. And on your way out, make an appointment for, oh, let’s say a month from now, to get two more of your molars extracted.

What?

I don’t remember the first sequel I ever saw. I was a kid at the time. I’m sure my reaction was, Oh, they’ve made another movie about that same story? It may have been Bride of Frankenstein. I do remember thinking, Didn’t they kill Frankenstein in the first movie? How could he marry? But of course Frankenstein was the doctor’s name so…I guess. But the monster was still played by Boris Karloff, who played the monster in the first film. He was killed in the Bride film too, but then he came back for Son of Frankenstein.

(My Uncle Jimmy, my mother’s brother, was shocked during one of my visits with him and his family at their home overlooking Long Island Sound that I had seen the Frankenstein movies. Children should not be exposed to horror films, and a whole bunch of other things, including the Rolling Stones, as it turned out, in later talks with him on his living room sofa.)

The same thing with other Universal movies, Dracula, the Wolf Man, and the Mummy (and decades later, the Creature From the Black Lagoon). Each movie kills the monster at the end, but then in the next sequel, guess what? They’re back.

And this keeps going on.

In the modern era, it’s gotten even worse. There have now been twelve Friday the 13th movies, nine Nightmare on Elm Street movies, eleven Halloween movies. How many times has Freddy been killed?