Black Static #80/#81 Double Issue

By TTA Press

New modern horror fiction: The Humdinger by Rhonda Pressley Veit (novella), Fish Scales by Steve Rasnic Tem, Adaptation by Claire Rudy Foster, Traps by Françoise Harvey, Elizabeth Frankenstein is the Saddest Girl on Earth by Jolie Toomajan, Stolen Property by Sarah Lamparelli, Pervert Blood by Mike O'Driscoll (novella). Cover art by Richard Wagner, with story illustrations by Jim Burns, Vincent Sammy, Ben Baldwin, Joachim Luetke and others. Book reviews, Christopher Golden interview by Gareth Jelley. Film reviews by Gary Couzens. The usual columns by Lynda E. Rucker and Ralph Robert Moore.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Feb 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005458393

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.

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BLACK STATIC 80/81

DOUBLE ISSUE

© 2021 Black Static and its contributors

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BLACK STATIC 80-81 2021

TTA PRESS

COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2021

PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

CONTENTS

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COVER ART

UNTITLED

RICHARD WAGNER

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‘DID THEY GET YOU TO TRADE?’

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

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BOE UIFSF BSF OP TVCUJUMFT

INTO THE WOODS

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

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NOVELLA ILLUSTRATED BY JIM BURNS

THE HUMDINGER

RHONDA PRESSLEY VEIT

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STORY ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD WAGNER

FISH SCALES

STEVE RASNIC TEM

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NOVELETTE ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD WAGNER

ADAPTATION

CLAIRE RUDY FOSTER

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STORY

STOLEN PROPERTY

SARAH LAMPARELLI

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STORY ILLUSTRATED BY JOACHIM LUETKE

TRAPS

FRANÇOISE HARVEY

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STORY ILLUSTRATED BY VINCENT SAMMY

ELIZABETH FRANKENSTEIN IS THE SADDEST GIRL ON EARTH

JOLIE TOOMAJAN

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NOVELLA ILLUSTRATED BY BEN BALDWIN

PERVERT BLOOD

MIKE O’DRISCOLL

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BOOKS/CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN INTERVIEW

CASE NOTES

GARETH JELLEY

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FILMS

BLOOD SPECTRUM

GARY COUZENS

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

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‘DID THEY GET YOU TO TRADE?’

His name was Cody Lennox, and he was coming back to England to die, or maybe just to forget, and after all it’s about the same in the long run.

‘At First Just Ghostly’, Karl Edward Wagner

To be a writer is to be haunted by the dead. You become a writer because first you fall in love with books, and most of the books in the world are written by people who are now dead. Reading a book is such an intimate act of communion with another mind, and to be able to do so when someone who has not been alive in decades or hundreds or even thousands of years is staggering.

For the last year, I’ve been haunted by the writer Karl Edward Wagner. Maybe I’ve been haunted by him for the twenty-seven years since he died – I’ll get to that in a moment – but in the last year, he’s been at the forefront of my thoughts even more frequently than usual, sparked by a viewing of the documentary film The Last Wolf near the end of 2020.

Wagner was the American author of short horror fiction and a series of sword and sorcery novels and story collections that read far more like horror than fantasy. Tennessee-born and later a longtime resident of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he was a dear friend to the legendary Manly Wade Wellman, Wagner famously looked far more like a biker than a writer.

The Last Wolf is a labour-of-love documentary on his life available for rental or purchase on Vimeo. Directors/producers Brandon D. Lunsford and Brian M. McKnight talked to his siblings and nephews, his ex-wife Barbara Mott, old high school pals, his friends and colleagues from the horror world: Dennis Etchison, Stephen Jones, Ramsey Campbell, Peter Straub and many more. That it’s an absolute love letter to Wagner does not mean that it shies away from the darker aspects of his life and personality, and that section of the documentary is frankly hard to watch: I knew things were bad in the final years of his life and that his death was terrible, but I did not realize that they were quite that bad and that it was quite that terrible. He was only forty-eight years old. His friends knew something was up when they saw him at the British Fantasy Convention days before his death, but he resisted all their efforts to get help.

I reread several Wagner stories in a single sitting in preparation for writing this column, and the night that followed brought fitful dreams of unpleasant and endless parties gone sinister round the edges, forever repeating that moment when genuine laughter becomes shrill, the high of the coke turns into the crash, the MDMA is replaced by meth. This is the feeling of ‘Neither Brute Nor Human’, the story of two genre writers, Trevor Nordgren and Damon Harrington, who first meet up at a WorldCon when Harrington’s career is in its nascence. What struck me about this story is how little has changed about the voracious nature of success, the extent to which fans seek to consume the creators they say they love. I think of this as a social media phenomenon, and yet while certainly social media has intensified it, it was ever thus, the building up and tearing down and, eventually, utter obliteration of idols. Some of the short fiction written in the final years of Wagner’s life is almost – almost – unreadable, not because it isn’t brilliant, but because it is so raw, uncomfortably autobiographical, howls of unbearable pain in prose form, but ‘Neither Brute Nor Human’ is from the early 1980s and reminds us that things were probably already going wrong for him much earlier. Trying to plot the points of a writer’s biography onto his fiction is a dangerous game, but with these stories and what we know of Wagner’s life, it’s difficult not to.

***

The haunting: Like, I imagine, a lot of people, I first encountered Wagner through the much-anthologised ‘Sticks’, his tale inspired by artist Lee Brown Coye’s alarmingly similar experience with cryptic figures in a wood. Around the same time I discovered the The Year’s Best Horror Stories anthologies that he edited and not long after, his other short horror fiction. As a Southerner myself, I loved how he captured the rural South and Appalachia: in my mind’s eye, his story ‘In the Pines’ was always set at the cabin in the mountains of Northeast Georgia that belonged to my grandparents. Selfishly, I’ve always felt cheated by his death: I’m sad that I never met, say, Ray Bradbury before he died, but it’s not as though Bradbury and I would have ever, you know, hung out together. Wagner, on the other hand – we all ought to have still been sitting on panels with him at British Fantasy Conventions over the past decade and drinking with him later in the bar. In that perfect alternate world, where the alcohol didn’t take him and obliterate him entirely. Every one of Karl’s old friends that I have ever known has told me a story about him that involves his prodigious capacity for alcohol: it seems like every story starts out light or funny and doesn’t stay there.

After I watched The Last Wolf I made a few unsuccessful stabs at writing about him and what his work had meant to me. For me, more than most writers, Wagner the person looms especially large in the work itself, perhaps because so much of it feels autobiographical. Then, a few weeks ago, Procul Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ lodged itself in my head, not because of any particular affinity for the song but because of the single line that Wagner took from it to title one of his most memorable stories, ‘At First Just Ghostly’. He liked music, and often borrowed lines or titles for his own titles – a second reference to ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ comes in one of the story’s subheadings, ‘As I Wander Through My Playing Cards’, along with the ominous Blue Oyster Cult’s warning ‘This Ain’t the Summer of Love’ and more. I couldn’t dislodge the song from my head until I reread the story, in which the amoral, immortal swordsman Kane rocks up in London’s Soho in the 1980s to possibly save or maybe destroy writer Cody Lennox before he destroys himself. Like Lennox, Wagner’s marriage had ended and he was already drinking himself to death amid the helpless concern of his friends. In the end, even Kane couldn’t save Cody Lennox or Karl Edward Wagner, who died before he could complete the novel that ‘At First Just Ghostly’ would have been the opening for.

There’s a propulsive rage to these stories, but in ‘The Last Wolf’, after which the documentary is titled, that rage is shot through with a melancholy defiance, as the last writer in the world is invited by the protagonist of all the unwritten and forgotten stories to join them:

No. He shook his head and politely disengaged her hand. No, I’m not quite ready for limbo. Not now. Not ever.

For these stories in particular, I think it is that very quality, that rage, that is the most meaningful to me. With his alter-ego Kane and all the versions of himself that he writes into his stories, there is an exhilarating but all-consuming Dionysian retort to what is, let’s face it, the largely middle-class and respectable world of writing. It says: You don’t have to have a death wish to be a great writer, but it helps. The problem is that it always catches you in the end, and like Trevor Nordgren’s fans, like the despair gripping Cody Lennox, it devours you. The tragedy is that Wagner couldn’t figure out how to keep ahead of it, and for that, we are all much poorer.

INTO THE WOODS

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

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BOE UIFSF BSF OP TVCUJUMFT

One of the many things I love about the TV show Debra, about a woman who works in law enforcement in Miami, with a large Cuban immigrant population, whose stepbrother turns out to be a serial killer, is that there are no subtitles when a character speaks Spanish.

Because that’s how it is in real life. If you’re among people speaking a language you don’t understand, you don’t know what they’re saying. You can sometimes guess a general sense of the conversation based on their emotions, where their eyes swivel, but that’s about it. We’re left with questions that will never be answered. Which is good. Because that’s how it is in real life.

One of the great powers of art is that it conjures a situation without providing a fully satisfactory explanation of that situation. You have to come up with your own interpretation. Which may be wrong. Or which may be right, without you ever knowing for certain that it is in fact right.

Art is not based on logic. Art is based on intuition. And that has to be said, because unfortunately, today more and more readers are looking for a rational explanation of everything that occurs in a story, and that ‘logical’ approach to art has always baffled me.

In his interview with Truffaut, Hitchcock called people who obsess over realism in art ‘The Implausibles’. They want every fiction movie to be a documentary. In the TV show The Simpsons, this literal-minded approach to art is parodied when a character says Episode 2F09 when Itchy plays Scratchy’s skeleton like a xylophone, he strikes the same rib twice in succession, yet he produces two clearly different tones. I mean, what are we to believe, that this is some sort of a magic xylophone or something?

It’s like asking, Why doesn’t sleeping beauty have bed sores? I mean come on, she slept for one hundred years before a prince, during a hunting expedition, finds the castle where she’s sleeping, and kisses her on the lips, thereby waking her. The Implausibles would argue, why doesn’t the fairy tale say anything about the bed sores she would logically have? I would say, I think I hear your mom calling you.

Not too long ago a mathematician hearing that a woman was raising money on an online kickstarter for her ill son, and would knit a blanket for everyone who gave $50, smugly calculated it would take four months for her to raise enough money, given the time he estimated she would need to complete each blanket. It never, ever occurred to him people might give more money than she requested for a blanket, or donate money without receiving a blanket. Four months to raise the money? She raised the money to save her son in three hours.

So much for math. So much for logic.

My novel As Dead As Me, a first person account of the zombie apocalypse from its beginning to its end, did really well in sales and reviews. But a couple of reviewers objected to the book because at one point in the novel a pilot teaches the narrator how to operate a helicopter over the course of an afternoon. Really? You have no problem accepting a novel in which the dead abruptly rise up against the living, and an elephant suddenly appears out of an airplane hangar and tramples a survivor to death, but the idea someone, in those circumstances, might quickly learn basic helicopter navigation is impossible?

Much of horror is based not on the unknown, but on the unknowable. And isn’t that so much more frightening?

I’ve always believed the greatest driver in horror is unfairness.

A group of kids go to a camp on a lake and two by two they’re slaughtered by Jason while they’re having sex. For no real reason except they happen to be at that location. And they’re making love. They’re not bad people. They’re kids, just starting out in life. Some of them actually care for each other. But still they get their heads lopped off, or a knife crunched down through the bones of their ribcage. Because there are no rules. There is no logic.

A woman watches a video on her TV of random images, then a young girl with long dark hair hanging in front of her, hiding her face, crawls out from the TV screen, into the woman’s living room. The one room where you’re supposed to be able to relax! Is that fair? Do we ever get an explanation why people who randomly watch this video should die? Of course not. Because these horror movies are reflecting our real lives. And our real lives are filled with horror.

One of my aunts was preparing dinner for her husband, bustling around the kitchen, listening to the radio, didn’t realize the turned-on gas burner in the oven hadn’t lit, set the two place settings on the kitchen table for when her husband came home, plates and silverware, fell over sideways, and died.

One of the guys I went to high school with was constantly bullied by a boy much shorter than him. And sometimes the guy, who had freckles on his forehead, would fight back, getting the shorter boy in a headlock, not doing anything more than that, because he was basically a good guy and didn’t want to hurt the little bully, just get him to stop saying mean things about him, but the shorter bully, in the headlock, knew exactly where to hit up at the bigger boy’s ears, until after they both disengaged, the little bully would be no worse off, but his victim, with the freckled forehead, would no longer be able to hear out of his left ear. Forever. And that taller boy, who was a victim, a few years after graduation crashed into a supporting post on a bridge leading from New York to New Jersey, totally fucking up his face, to where it looked like a horror mask, and a year or so after that I was driving around with the girl I was currently dating, pulled into a gas station, and lo and behold here was this guy with the forehead freckles and the fucked-up face, and he said, Hey, Rob! and I said, after looking up at him from my driver’s seat for a few moments, Hey, Andrew! I didn’t recognize you. And immediately regretted my stupid words.

In Howard Hawks’ 1951 movie The Thing From Another World, adapted from the John Campbell story ‘Who Goes There?’, as the thing prepares to attack the group, holding a length of wood in its hand, the scientist in the group runs forward, standing in front of the creature. Look at me and know what I’m trying to tell you! I’m a scientist.

And the thing brutally knocks the stupid scientist to one side. Horror doesn’t need to be told anything.

There’s a great science fiction story, and unfortunately, to my embarrassment, I don’t remember the title of the story, I don’t remember the author. But the plot is that different races from around the universe travel to this entity who has full knowledge. And each arrival asks the entity a question that has been puzzling them. One set of visitors asks, Why is it that whenever there are six of us in a group, a seventh suddenly appears? And the entity answers, You’re asking the wrong question.

Because the truth is, In order to ask the right question, you already have to know most of the answer. And we never know most of the answer. Often, we know next to nothing about the answer, and never will. And that’s the core of horror.

Our lives are terrifying. We live in a world surrounded by sounds that mean something, but sounds we don’t understand. Never will.

And there are no subtitles.

THE HUMDINGER

RHONDA PRESSLEY VEIT

illustrated by Jim Burns

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The weatherman on the Toccoa channel says the first snow of the season will come early, a few days before Christmas. Accumulation, he warns, particularly in the mountains, will be significant. Nell, who has seasoned firewood, a generator, and bread and milk, watches with calm interest.

The weatherman’s Italian name marks him as not from around here, but his voice isn’t identifiably Italian, or Southern or Yankee or Midwestern, for that matter. He has no trace of an accent; he could be from anywhere, from nowhere. Significant! he repeats, his finger circling a frozen purple thrombus at the top of the weather map. Frank Consonni is an alarmist; Nell finds it difficult to take him seriously. He’s too excitable, too emotionally invested in disastrous outcomes. He gets positively horny about black ice. It’s not unheard of to get an occasional December dusting in the gap. But this is north Georgia. A genuine snowstorm, the kind that closes schools and cuts the power, is a January or February event. Consonni declares the storm a doozy before the first flake falls.

After the 5:00 news, Nell dons coveralls and gloves and goes out to the barn with Kurt, her beloved old dog. The barn is T-shaped: the short side a tall pole barn that houses hay, equipment, and the chicken coop; the long side a modest but functional center aisle horse barn, with more stall space than she needs. At one time there’d been extras: not just ponies for her boys but boarders, owned by anxious people with implacable demands about horse feed and fly sheets. At one time she’d owned guineas, which ate insects, like everyone said, but they were also vocal birds, alarmists like the weatherman, and insufferably loud. For a while she’d owned a few pea fowl (if Nell was honest, inspired by a postcard of Flannery O’Connor with hers), and they were beautiful – the peacocks’ tails, especially, had a certain curb appeal – but they roosted in the barn rafters, shit everywhere, and screamed without provocation. Nell learned from these mistakes, eventually got back to basics. Things have changed.

Now there are eight gentle chickens, two aging geldings, and a large standard donkey named Ben who does whatever it takes to keep predators off the property, which he regards as his own. Ben is first in the barn at feeding time. The horses respect his space, come trotting into the paddock behind him. Nell dumps grain in their individual stalls and then shuts the Dutch stall doors behind them so they’re locked up. It’s probably unnecessary – all three of them are smart enough to stay in during a storm – but it keeps Nell from waking and wondering in the middle of the night.

The hens cluck and murmur as she puts feed in the coop, then happily pile in. The coop is a simple structure, made of pressure-treated lumber and chicken wire, tight as a drum and out of the elements. It has roosting poles and plywood nesting boxes. Stacked bales of hay adjacent to the coop provide a solid, insulating wind-block. The chickens subscribe to a clinching pecking order, so the feed must be divided and placed accordingly, to give them all a shot at their fair share. They jockey for position around pans of feed. Nell freshens their water and counts. Here is Sonya, friendly as a house cat; here is Mavis, the boss. Here is Vivian, a bit of a bully, unhappy with her station in life and constantly pecking someone, above or beneath her. Four here, four there, all are well.

Nell leaves the hoses dripping, just so, and closes the barn doors. Even under the blank gray sky, with a biting breeze and the smell of snow in her nostrils, she doesn’t really believe a doozy will arrive in the gap three days before Christmas. Kurt runs ahead of her to the house. He’s cold; he looks back shivering. A gust of wind pushes hard against her, so strong she has to lean into it. It’s gone as suddenly as it arrives. She hears Ben bray, once, from inside the barn, which stops her. Why would he bray? The thing Nell loves about equids – the thing movies always get wrong – is their efficiency of communication. Unlike, say, guineas, they’re generally quiet. She looks back at the barn, as she left it. The horseshoe wreath her farrier made, adorned with jute ribbon, pine cuttings, and cotoneaster berries, hangs on the gable above the closed front doors. The ribbon and pine needles flutter. Cast from steel horseshoes, the wreath is very heavy, but the wind lifts the circle of shoes and bumps it against the barn’s wood siding. It thunks away like a door knocker, hollow and unanswered. The cotoneaster berries are blue-black, the color of the night sky. The barn’s metal roof has some rust here and there but it’s a good roof, leakproof, its panels motionless in the wind. On the paddock side of the barn, Ben cranes over the closed lower door of his stall, his dramatic ears pointed expectantly at Nell.

What are you worked up about? she says.

The wind gusts again and Ben pulls his head back into the stall. She dimly sees him return to the hay rack. He looks back at her once, as if in rebuke. Has she forgotten something? Nell has reached what she considers the age of forgetfulness, so she goes through the list in her mind. They have grain, hay, water, salt blocks. They have fresh shavings to bed down in. They are blanketed, even that donkey, and it had been a hell of a task to find a horse blanket to fit his not-quite-horse-like body. The barn doors are shut, the stall doors, the chicken coop. The hoses are dripping so the pipes don’t freeze. She has done everything to prepare for the storm she doesn’t really believe is coming.

But the weatherman, bless his heart, is right. The storm howls in at two in the morning, pressing hard against the panes of Nell’s bedroom window. Its sounds, its huffing and scraping, wake her from a deep sleep. She lies there listening. The wind sings scales around the house. Nell finds herself glad the window is across the room and not by her head. The snow is icy, scratching at the glass like claws. It wants in, Nell thinks. Kurt, curled behind her legs, wakes, looks at the window, then rests his chin on her knee. The nightstand clock ticks quietly, its faint yellow glow the only light in the room. Scritch, scritch. Kurt stares at the window, whines. It wants in, Nell thinks again. It’s an irrational thought, unbidden, but at that hour nothing is on the level. Nothing. Minutes later, both she and the dog fall asleep.

***

When she wakes at dawn, the house is cold.

Ordinarily, if Nell doesn’t wake early to put wood on the fire, Jamie, her second husband and the better of the two, does it himself. They’re both minor insomniacs, for one reason or another. But Jamie’s in Florida visiting his sister Melissa, a divorcée and inveterate man-hater who nevertheless summons Jamie to Florida two or three times a year to catch up and have family time, by which she means: replace the water intake valve on her washing machine, evict the armadillo living under her lanai, or fire the lawn boy who killed the goddamn Gerbera daisies. Jamie is a good man who indulges both Melissa’s demands and Nell’s desire to avoid them. He usually makes the Florida trip alone.