Black Static #72 (November-December 2019)

By TTA Press

The November-December issue contains new cutting edge horror fiction by Matt Thompson, Emily B. Cataneo, Sarah Read, Jack Westlake, S. Qiouyi Lu, and Tim Lees. The cover art is by Joachim Luetke, and interior illustrations are by Richard Wagner, Ben Baldwin and others. Regular features: Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore; Notes from the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker; Case Notes book reviews by Laura Mauro, Andy Hedgecock, Daniel Carpenter, Sadie Hartmann, Mike O'Driscoll, Gary Couzens, and David Surface; Blood Spectrum film reviews by Gary Couzens.

The cover art is 'SETI' by Joachim Luetke

Fiction:

The String People by Matt Thompson
illustrated by Ben Baldwin

The Longest Night by Emily B. Cataneo
illustrated by Richard Wagner

The Hope Chest by Sarah Read

Don't Come Looking by Jack Westlake

As Dark as Hunger by S. Qiouyi Lu
illustrated by Richard Wagner

Watching by Tim Lees

Features:

Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker
I CAN'T HELP FALLING IN LOVE WITH YOU: THE COMFORTS OF HORROR?

Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore
BE PREPARED

Reviews:

Case Notes: Book Reviews

Mike O'Driscoll: Catfish Lullaby by A.C. Wise • Daniel Carpenter: Mistletoe by Alison Littlewood • David Surface: One Good Story: The Little Mermaid by Douglas Clegg • Gary Couzens: Coffinmaker's Blues by Stephen Volk, Tommy by Kit Power, Sight Unseen by Brian Howell • Andy Hedgecock: The Uneasy by Andrew Hook, The Forest of Dead Children by Andrew Hook, The Bone Weaver's Orchard by Sarah Read • Sadie Hartmann: Out of Water by Sarah Read • Laura Mauro: And the House Lights Dim by Tim Major

Blood Spectrum: Film Reviews by Gary Couzens

Rabid (1977) • Rabid (2019) • Suspiria (2018) • Child's Play (2019) • The Banana Splits Movie • Critters Attack! • The Dark Half • The Stand • Nightbreed • An American Werewolf in London • Legend of the Witches • Secret Rites • And Soon the Darkness (1970) • The Invitation • The Dead Center • Marianne • The Curse of La Llorona • Skinner • Double Date • American Horror Story: Apocalypse • Harpoon • The Wind • The Furies • Isabelle

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Nov 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463039557

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 72

NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 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

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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 72 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2019

TTA PRESS

COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2019

PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

CONTENTS

SETI-bw.tif

COVER ART

SETI

JOACHIM LUETKE

annihilation.tif

I CAN’T HELP FALLING IN LOVE WITH YOU: THE COMFORTS OF HORROR?

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

invasion2.tif

BE PREPARED

INTO THE WOODS

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

The String People.tif

STORY ILLUSTRATED BY BEN BALDWIN

THE STRING PEOPLE

MATT THOMPSON

the longest night (3).tif

STORY ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD WAGNER

THE LONGEST NIGHT

EMILY B. CATANEO

hand.tif

STORY

THE HOPE CHEST

SARAH READ

door3.tif

STORY

DON’T COME LOOKING

JACK WESTLAKE

as dark as hunger (1a).tif

STORY ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD WAGNER

AS DARK AS HUNGER

S. QIOUYI LU

watching-complete.tif

STORY

WATCHING

TIM LEES

Tommy-index.tif

BOOK REVIEWS

CASE NOTES

MIKE O’DRISCOLL, DAVID SURFACE, ANDY HEDGECOCK & OTHERS

Skinner-contents.tif

FILM REVIEWS

BLOOD SPECTRUM

GARY COUZENS

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

I CAN’T HELP FALLING IN LOVE WITH YOU: THE COMFORTS OF HORROR?

annihilation.tif

Maybe it’s the autumn weather – almost surely it is in part, the crisp cool feel of the air, the mellowing light and colors, the nights drawing in – but I’ve sort of found myself falling in love with horror again. Not that I ever fell out of love, of course, but falling in love again in that long-term relationship sense, one of those times when you look at the person you’ve been with for a while and feel that same heady burst you did in the early days.

Maybe it’s still coasting a little bit, even two months later, on the high of what felt like – to me – a largely successful track of horror programming at the World Science Fiction convention in Dublin; maybe it’s having read an awful lot of good dark fiction earlier in the year as a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards. I’m sure it’s a little bit of all of those things.

Just like any other genre, horror can sometimes provide comfort reading and viewing, which sounds like an oxymoron, or maybe it doesn’t. There’s been a considerable backlash about the second part of the adaptation of Stephen King’s It, which opens with a brutal homophobic murder, taken straight from the book. If you don’t want to see horror, don’t go to a horror movie, said half the internet, while the other half argued that horror is meant to be scary fun (I remember reading those exact words somewhere) that helps us work out those emotions rather than exacerbates them.

The latter argument strikes me as wrongheaded as a wrongheaded thing can be, except when it isn’t. I haven’t seen the film – I’m usually not a fan of King adaptations, about which more in a minute – but from viewing the first half, I think it’s safe to say that for all the blood and child murder, It the film is positioning itself as a fairly conventional, mainstream horror film, one that comes down more on the comfort than challenge side of the equation. It’s entirely possible that including the scene, or filming it the way it was filmed, was an artistic error, overshadowing what came after and marring the horror that’s safely in the realm of the fantastic with real-life horror.

On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that it fits perfectly and was the right choice. I couldn’t say because (astonishing in this internet age of everyone having an opinion, I know) I generally don’t form opinions about books and films without seeing them. But if the scene doesn’t belong, that’s the reason it doesn’t belong – not because the job of horror movies is to make us feel better, about ourselves or anything else.

I mean, I get it. I’ve been putting off watching Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible for, what, seventeen years now, because although it is a film I want to have seen, it’s not one I necessarily want to see, and there has yet to be a night when I’m sitting around and suddenly think You know, I really want to watch Monica Bellucci savaged in an interminable rape scene. Some things are just too viscerally painful to sit through, particularly if it is all too easy to see ourselves in the victim.

But horror, as much fun as it can be – and it can be so very much fun – isn’t here to comfort us, or keep is safe. That’s not its role – that’s not the role of any form of art. I would argue that the supreme role of any narrative form of art is to tell its story in the best and truest way possible. (And maybe you think the best and truest way is the way that doesn’t upset me, but – you’d be wrong.)

***

When I talk about comfort reading and viewing, sometimes it is not so much subject matter as familiarity: I’m not sure how much is truly comfortable about Shirley Jackson, or H.P. Lovecraft, or M.R. James, or Oliver Onions, or Stephen King, or Arthur Machen, but it is all beloved familiar territory for me, and that feels comfortable.

What lies beneath it, though, generally isn’t. This struck me recently while rewatching a few films. One was the 1979 U.S. television adaptation of Salem’s Lot, written by Paul Monash and directed by Tobe Hooper. As I mentioned above, I generally don’t get on with King adaptations, but this one is very good indeed, despite its occasional moments of silliness and 1970s TV-movie cheesiness. Monash’s screenplay captures what King does so well, and what made me fall in love with his writing as a kid: it gives you that sense of the characters being real people, with lives that exist outside the parameters of the story. There’s a very brief exchange in the film that I find heartrending, that strikes to core of that. It’s between Mark, the ultimate monster kid, and his dad, in which his father is asking him essentially, why all this monster stuff and how will you ever get a job? And Mark says something confidently to the effect of I’ll get a job.

That encapsulated for me one of the great horrors of many good stories in our genre – that of the truncated possibility of a life. All in a moment, I saw the life Mark should have had: as a special effects wizard for horror movies, his life unblemished by evil. This is when horror as metaphor becomes genuinely powerful, when the metaphor serves not to distance us from the horror but to drive it home so utterly, the thought of all the lives and dreams cut short, not because of vampires but because of illness or war or murder or an accident or despair or simply a world that makes it impossible for that particular person in that particular place and time to carry on as they should be able to.

This is why parts of the discussion about that scene in It missed the mark so thoroughly for me, because so much of horror touches on this, and it is the opposite of scary fun.

I also recently rewatched Alex Garland’s Annihilation, from the first novel in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. I can’t speak to the book, which I haven’t read (an omission I plan to remedy), but I was struck by a number of resonances, whether intended or not, as I watched the film for a second time. In the early scene in Area X where they discover the very different blossoms bursting abundantly from the same stem, I could hear Cotgrave from Machen’s The White People opine about sin and horror: And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning? By the end we are in the territory of pure cosmic horror, call it the Old Ones or call it something else, but once again, this is stark terror – if mingled here with awe – echoing the old stories that comfort me but reminding me that what underpins them all is anything but comforting.

Too often, I feel like contemporary conversations about art veer too closely to the old Radiohead song ‘Fitter, Healthier’.

I don’t think the primary aim of any one piece of art, and of horror storytelling, is to make us better. I balk at the idea of embedding the American ideal – a very capitalist idea – of constant self-improvement to the stories we tell. I don’t know why horror sometimes comforts me and sometimes challenges me and sometimes does both at the same time; I don’t know why I love it so fiercely. That idea, that there are things unknowable, unreachable, unspeakable both in the world and in ourselves, is the core of horror, and to seek safety amid that uncertainty is to misunderstand horror utterly.

INTO THE WOODS

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

BE PREPARED

invasion2.tif

You’ve received this latest issue of Black Static, found a time that’s perfect to sit down with a lit lamp to the left of your shoulders, relax with the issue, open its cover, like unenveloping a long blue-inked letter from a friend, the day’s work done, start reading another excellent issue. At some point you’re reading this Into the Woods column by me and you hear a noise coming from your closet. Stand up, put the issue’s wingspread of text down on your side table, paragraphs above wood grain, walk over to the closet door, twist the brass knob, and a jabbering thing with two heads stumbles out.

You’re reading this Into the Woods column by me, absentmindedly scratching the side of your neck, and your fingertips feel a lump. Under your jaw. Stop reading, because you shouldn’t have a lump there, so you’re trying to figure out with your probing fingertips what that lump might be.

Which scenario is scarier?

I’m not too concerned Godzilla is going to crush our house with its gigantic hind paws while Mary and I are inside, standing in our pajamas, flipping eggs, frying bacon. Godzilla is not something I wake up worrying about. It’s not like I’m listening for thunderous thumps approaching from miles away. But I do have some back of the brain worry burglars might break into our home, with bad intentions. Because that’s more likely to occur. Things that could happen are scarier than things that are unlikely to happen.

If I die because I was crushed by Godzilla’s feet, I really have no control over that. It’s an act of nature, like being one of hundreds drowning, arms waving above their heads, mouths opening, during a flood. But to die during a home invasion? I should have been better prepared. Set up an alarm system. Bought a gun. Learned martial arts instead of binging episodes of The Office on Netflix.

And that’s a dividing line in genre fiction. There’s horror as nostalgia, where we read a story, watch a movie, that evokes tropes we enjoyed as a child, first exploring mainstream horror. Frankenstein, Dracula, the gothic castle high on a hill. Or contemporized, the young family moving into a new home, all those smiling white teeth, the family almost always including a small child and a teenage girl, the child acquires an imaginary friend who seems okay at first, but soon it’s urging the child to do terrible things, there’s often a corner of the white ceiling, or the meshed screen of a second-story window, covered with flies, I have no idea why, maybe flies are considered to be fear-evoking in Hollywood, and we usually get a few shots of the teenage daughter taking a shower with a soapy pink or yellow sponge. It is horror, it’s within that genre, and I don’t disagree, but it isn’t really that scary. It’s evoking nostalgia rather than dread.

True horror isn’t a corpse rising out of its grave. True horror is your partner of twelve years sucking in their breath for courage, lifting their shoulders, lowering their coffee cup back down onto its white saucer, looking into your eyes, and with a sadness they’ve come to terms with saying, I don’t love you anymore.

The greatest horror of Night of the Living Dead was that a middle-aged, overweight, balding, cowardly white man was arguing the group should barricade themselves in the farmhouse’s basement, and the young, brave, courageous black man was saying No, we should battle to remain on the first floor, where we have a choice of exits if we need them, which makes perfect sense to me, but then it turned out the heroic black guy was wrong, dead wrong, and the cowardly white guy was right. The young brave black guy eventually chooses the white guy’s cowardly option, and is saved from being eaten by the dead as a result, but then in a twist he’s killed by a sheriff’s posse, mistaken for a zombie. Our hero was wrong. The villain had a better grasp of the situation, but even hadn’t anticipated posses that no longer took the time to vet who they were shooting. Sometimes, no matter what you do, no matter how hard you struggle, you still die.

When I was a boy, one Sunday while I was walking the mile down the business district of Greenwich Avenue to my grandparents’ home on Steamboat Road, I saw that the large black parking lot across the street from the Greenwich train station was filled with metallic, above-ground models of fall-out shelters. This was back in the early Sixties, when burying a fall-out shelter in your backyard was a popular preparation in case the Soviet Union dropped an atomic bomb on us (much like Godzilla’s paw).

Because it was Sunday, the shelters were empty. No salesman anywhere. I spent a couple of hours lowering myself down