Black Static #77 (November-December 2020)

By TTA Press

Black Static #77 contains new modern horror fiction by Philip Fracassi, Steve Rasnic Tem, Françoise Harvey, David Martin, Shaenon K. Garrity, and Eric Schaller. The cover art is by Ben Baldwin, and interior illustrations are by Joachim Luetke and others. Regular features: Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore; Notes from the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker; Case Notes book reviews by Alexander Glass, Mike O'Driscoll, David Surface, Georgina Bruce, Andrew Hook, and Daniel Carpenter who also talks to Kate Reed Petty about her novel True Story; Blood Spectrum film reviews by Gary Couzens.

The cover art is 'The Proposition' by Ben Baldwin

Fiction:

The Guardian by Philip Fracassi

The Dead Outside My Door by Steve Rasnic Tem

The Rabbit: A Memory or a Dream by Françoise Harvey

Fossil Light by David Martin

The Bride by Shaenon K. Garrity

Hell and a Day by Eric Schaller
illustrated by Joachim Luetke

Columns:

Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker

Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore

Reviews:

Case Notes: Book Reviews

Alexander Glass: NVK by Temple Drake • Daniel Carpenter: The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson; True Story by Kate Reed Petty + author interview • David Surface: One Good Story: Slimikins by Charles Wilkinson • Andrew Hook: Ivory's Story by Eugen Bacon; Barking Circus by Douglas Thompson • Georgina Bruce: The Fountain Road Files by Richard MacLean Smith • Mike O'Driscoll: In the House in the Dark of the Woods by Laird Hunt

Blood Spectrum: Film Reviews by Gary Couzens

I’m Thinking of Ending Things • The Woman in Black • Dementia • The Man Who Laughs • Three Edgar Allan Poe Adaptations Starring Bela Lugosi • The Painted Bird • Gretel & Hansel • The Alejandro Jodorowsky Collection • Pitch Black• Circus of Horrors • I, Monster • Sleepwalkers • The Deeper You Dig • The Devil All the Time • #Alive • Relic • Two Heads Creek • The Comic • Psycho • The Last Wave • Fury from the Deep • and more

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Nov 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005795733

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 77

NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2020

© 2020 Black Static and its contributors

PUBLISHER

TTA Press

website: ttapress.com

email: [e-mail]

shop: shop.ttapress.com

Books and films for review are always welcome!

EDITOR

Andy Cox

[e-mail]

FILMS

Gary Couzens

[e-mail]

STORY PROOFREADER

Peter Tennant

SUBMISSIONS

Unsolicited submissions of short stories are always very welcome: tta.submittable.com/submit

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BLACK STATIC 77 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2020

TTA PRESS

COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2020

PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

CONTENTS

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COVER ART

THE PROPOSITION

BEN BALDWIN

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GHOST STORIES FOR CHRISTMAS

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

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INTO THE TREES BY TRAKE DYLAN

INTO THE WOODS

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

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NOVELETTE

THE GUARDIAN

PHILIP FRACASSI

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STORY

THE DEAD OUTSIDE MY DOOR

STEVE RASNIC TEM

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STORY

THE RABBIT: A MEMORY OR A DREAM

FRANÇOISE HARVEY

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STORY

FOSSIL LIGHT

DAVID MARTIN

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STORY

THE BRIDE

SHAENON K. GARRITY

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STORY ILLUSTRATED BY JOACHIM LUETKE

HELL AND A DAY

ERIC SCHALLER

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BOOK REVIEWS

CASE NOTES

KATE REED PETTY INTERVIEWED

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FILM REVIEWS

BLOOD SPECTRUM

GARY COUZENS

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

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GHOST STORIES FOR CHRISTMAS

The discovery of Christmas as a season of ghosts was something of a revelation for me as an adult. In America we also had A Christmas Carol, of course, but besides the three shades who visited Scrooge to warn him of the terrible consequences of his greedy ways, there was no particular sense of this time of year as one for spectres and hauntings. As far as I am aware, we did not have the Victorian tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas – we were perhaps too busy in the 19th century creating a frontier mythos and fighting a civil war – or if we did, it did not carry over in any serious way to contemporary times. I think it was surely the Anglophile in Henry James that led him to set the framing of The Turn of the Screw on Christmas Eve.

It wasn’t until sometime in the early 2000s that I was first introduced to one of the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas specials: ‘The Signalman’ – my first, and still my favourite, perhaps largely for that reason – screened at a Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, Oregon. I fell in love with it, and quickly found out afterwards about the series and how it was part of a longer tradition of ghost stories for the season in the UK. The series was impossible to come by in the US then, and eventually a friend procured bootleg copies of all the episodes plus the 1968 Jonathan Miller-directed ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad’ for me. If you are also American or from somewhere else in the world outside of the UK and are thus unaware of the programs, I urge you to get hold of them, now easily available through legitimate channels as a boxed set.

In retrospect, I wonder why it took my encountering the series to discover that Christmas is a time for ghosts. It is, after all, during the Christmas season that we experience the darkest day of the year, and what is Christmas after all for those of us of a more secular bent but a festival of lights, a time to hold the darkness at bay? On top of that, three of my favourite haunting books as a child were set during the Christmas season: The Ghosts by Antonia Barber; Mirror of Danger by Pamela Sykes (published in the UK as Come Back, Lucy); and of course that classic The Dark is Rising, which does not feature a ghost but feels suffused with them all the same: perhaps above all, the ghost of Britain-that-was, or Britain-that-might-have-been.

The first two are time slip stories and the third is not, technically, although it evokes a sense of the ageless, and does feature one episode of time travel. Alison Littlewood’s Christmas ghost story Mistletoe, published last December, delighted me because it felt like a grown-up version of those first two beloved titles, a tale of a past tragedy encroaching on a bleak Yorkshire farm where a bereaved and traumatised woman goes to try to rebuild her shattered life.

Woven throughout the Littlewood story and widely recognised is the fact that the most wonderful time of the year is in fact the most dreadful time of the year for so many. What better time for ghosts and their attendant emotions – sorrow, loneliness, regret – to pay a visit than a season ostensibly dedicated to good cheer and the love of family and friends? It is nearly impossible not to reflect on loss, to ignore the insistence of the season on remembrance of the way things used to be. And of course, if you do not celebrate Christmas at all, if it has no associations for you, its sheer relentlessness can be alienating.

Christmas itself is a ghost: an elusive vision of what-might-have-been, what-should-have-been, what-once-was, an elegiac time, days that melt into the frantic Bacchanalian rites of ringing in a New Year, a series of rituals against the dark.

***

As a religious festival, of course, Christmas also carries these connotations of hope in darkness: the birth of a saviour into a world blighted by sin and suffering. The Dark is Rising, part of a series steeped in Arthurian myth that blends the Christian and the pagan, posits a world of many saviours, but it is the story of one, Will Staton, born across the Twelve Days of Christmas into his true destiny as a warrior for the Light fighting the Dark. Yet even in a book for children, Susan Cooper sounds a warning: there are shadows even in the Light, which will use and discard people as needed in pursuit of its cosmic victory.

The Christmas ghost story has that same feel about it of something pagan and atavistic trailing in the wake of the more contemporary religion, and perhaps something sinister wrapped in the promise of light. Maybe it was just that famous Victorian morbidity that popularised the custom, but I like the idea that the telling of them is more ancient than that, that once they were akin to incantations.

There are, of course, some horror films and stories set at Christmas, although this is not exactly the same thing. For my money, the best Christmas horror movie is Bob Clark’s 1974 classic Black Christmas, but it’s a slasher film, not a ghost story. As a slasher, it’s one of the earliest and one of the best, but it’s a different beast from the supernatural Christmas ghost story. In 2017, the Canadian small press Spectacular Optical released the excellent essay collection Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television, edited by Kier-La Janisse and featuring an impressive list of contributors. It includes a piece on the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series as well as an examination of some folk horror, but its contents reveal an overall tendency in Christmas horror onscreen to opt for violent mayhem over moody shades; however, the short film written and directed by Sean Hogan to accompany the book’s release, ‘We Always Find Ourselves in the Sea’ (available online) is steeped in the melancholy of the season.

Perhaps my favourite classic Christmas ghost story is A.M. Burrage’s ‘Smee’, a genuinely creepy little tale first published in 1931, set on Christmas Eve and easily found online to read or to be read to you. But it is not a requirement that the Christmas ghost story be set at Christmas; M.R. James first shared many of his tales with a Christmas Eve audience. In fact, if you ever have the opportunity to attend a Christmas performance of James’s tales by the actor Robert Lloyd Parry, I urge you to take it. If you’re further north, in York, see if James Swanton is performing his annual (until the world went mad) Ghost Stories for Christmas show in the guise of Charles Dickens. Perhaps (in non-pandemic years) there’s something similar near you.

***

Maybe, as a horror writer, I just see ghosts everywhere. Maybe it’s odd that I think many of the American stop motion and animated Christmas specials made throughout the 1960s are suffused with the same moodiness as many of the best ghost stories, filled with characters who are orphaned or misfits, lost and searching. It would take no more than a few turns of the screw, I think, to make A Charlie Brown Christmas into a ghost story. Why on earth do the children sound so sad as they sing the song ‘Christmas Time is Here’? Happiness and cheer they intone in a melody that assures you it’s anything but. Maybe there aren’t any grown-ups in the Peanuts universe because they’re all dead.

2020 promises us a Christmas season in which gathering with loved ones, whether a real or chosen family, will be impossible for most. We’ll all be surrounded by ghosts. You might as well crack a good ghost story and make the best of it.

INTO THE WOODS

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

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INTO THE TREES BY TRAKE DYLAN

The ‘Author’s Warning’ preface to Paul Reiser’s 1994 collection of humorous essays about relationships, Couplehood, states, "You will notice in just a second that this book actually begins on page 145. Don’t be alarmed – this is not a mistake… It’s just that I know when I’m reading, I love being smack in the middle of the book… This way, you can read the book for two minutes, and if anybody asks you how far along you are you can say, ‘I’m on page 151. And it’s really flying.’"

I’m going to tell you something embarrassing about myself. When I was a young teenager, probably about thirteen, a great age for a future horror writer, eating acorns in front of the TV, I decided I needed a pen name for all the incredible stories I was going to write. A name that really stood out. Because I felt my actual name, Ralph Robert Moore, just wasn’t impressive enough.

I needed a nom de plume that was cooler than me.

So I rehearsed different names. One of them was H.R. Strangelove. ‘H.R.’ was a nod to ‘H.P. Lovecraft’, and ‘Strangelove’ was of course inspired by Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.

Another pen name I considered was Trake Dylan. I have no idea where ‘Trake’ came from, although I do like it. I picture someone with prominent black eyebrows and a square jaw. Trake, I sincerely apologize. Hands raised in the air, eyes looking down at the shattered clay pots of multicolored irises strewn across the kitchen’s checkerboard floor. I was out of line. It was that damn absinthe. ‘Dylan’, of course, came from Bob Dylan (which itself was a pseudonym for Robert Zimmerman).

I thought if I had a pen name, that would propel me forward into authorhood, so instead of being on page 1, I’d be on page 145.

There’s a tradition of people trying to pass under fake names. In the Cinemax series Banshee, we never learn the actual name of the man who assumes the identity of the new sheriff, Lucas Wood. Over the course of the seasons he whispers his actual name into the ear of one or two characters, but we never hear it. In Mad Men, the man we know as Don Draper is actually Dick Whitman, but very few people are aware of that. And of course there’s always the ‘double rumble’ of Humbert Humbert in Lolita, whose true name remains forever behind a mask.

The thing about a fake name is that it can allow you to have a fake life. Just like you made up your name, you can make up your experiences.

I remember when personal websites first became popular, back in the Nineties. And people would write blogs about how their life was going. And guess what? Their lives were going great! Everything was perfect. Sam had some friends over on a Saturday night, and in a moment of crazy inspiration he threw together some quinoa, cilantro leaves, minced pineapple, and fish sauce, and his guests, raising forks to mouths, eyebrows to foreheads, were like, Fuck, dude! How do you come up with these combinations??!!

That’s just natural. We meet someone new, and it doesn’t take that many sentences before we look up from our latte and say, Those cloud formations remind me a lot of the skies I saw while I was in Paris (or Tokyo, or Buenos Aires or Johannesburg, take your pick). And we all do it. We all drop what we think is a flattering fact about ourselves at some point into a conversation. We want to impress others. Hint that we’re superior to all the other monkeys dropping from the tree limbs to the grainy white sidewalk, begging for bananas. There’s that old joke: How do you know if someone is a vegan or an atheist? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you within five minutes of meeting you.

But it’s the rare bravery who tells you something unflattering about themselves. That’s not so easy to do. That requires an extraordinary degree of kindness. To let you know you’re not alone, that even though others won’t share something embarrassing about themselves, here’s you willing to do so, telling readers, It’s okay. We’re all flawed. None of us are