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    Black Static #29 Horror Magazine
    Black Static #29 Horror Magazine
    Black Static #29 Horror Magazine
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    Black Static #29 Horror Magazine

    By TTA Press

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    Plus our TV reviewer Mike O'Driscoll runs his rule over Dexter and finds the 6th series wanting as compared with its earlier self.
    Internal hyperlinks have been added in the reviews sections and we would like to know if these are useful or helpful. Please let us know your thoughts. If readers consider them an improvement then we can continue the practice.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTTA Press
    Release dateSep 23, 2012
    ISBN9781301327478
    Black Static #29 Horror Magazine
    Author

    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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      Book preview

      Black Static #29 Horror Magazine - TTA Press

      BLACK STATIC

      #29

      A magazine of horror and dark fantasy.

      Cover:

      Trickster by Ben Baldwin.

      * * * * *

      Black Static

      Issue 29 (JUN – JUL 2012)

      Print edition ISSN 1753-0709 © 2012 Black Static and its contributors

      Published bimonthly by TTA Press

      TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, United Kingdom

      * * * * *

      Website: ttapress.com

      Email: blackstatic@ttapress.com

      * * * * *

      TTA Press on Smashwords: ISBN: 9781301327478

      First draft v2 Roy Gray

      * * * * *

      Editor: Andy Cox

      Contributing Editors: Peter Tennant, Tony Lee, Christopher Fowler, Stephen Volk, Mike O’Driscoll

      Podcast: Pete Bullock, transmissionsfrombeyond.com

      Twitter + Facebook: Marc-Anthony Taylor, facebook.com/TTAPress

      Events/Publicity/E editions: Roy Gray

      * * * * *

      Retail Distribution: Pineapple Media, pineapple-media.com; Central Books, centralbooks.com

      * * * * *

      Smashwords Edition License Notes

      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 are reading this magazine and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please go to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the contributors and editors

      * * * * *

      To obtain the print edition of Black Static in Europe or North America where your retailer may not stock it please ask them to order it for you, or buy it from one of several online mail order distributors...or better yet subscribe direct with us!

      Subscriptions: Print edition subscriptions available online at ttapress.com/shop

      Note we have some illustrations in this edition and you can also see these at http://ttapress.com/1351/black-static-29/0/5/

      Unsolicited submissions of short stories are always welcome. Please follow the contributors’ guidelines on the website.

      * * * * *

      CONTENTS

      EDITORIAL NOTES

      COMMENT/COLUMNS

      COFFINMAKER'S BLUES - by Stephen Volk

      INTERFERENCE - by Christopher Fowler

      FICTION

      SUNSHINE by Nina Allan

      illustrated by Ben Baldwin

      HORSEMAN by Renee Carter Hall

      illustrated by Rich Sampson

      CHODPA by Baph Tripp

      illustrated by Rik Rawling

      SHARK! SHARK! by Ray Cluley

      THE COUNTERWEIGHT by Tim Lees

      illustrated by Robert Dunn

      REVIEWS

      SILVER BULLETS - TV Reviews by Mike O'Driscoll

      CASE NOTES - book reviews by Peter Tennant

      BLOOD SPECTRUM - DVD/Blu-ray reviews by Tony Lee

      NOTES TO THE READER – links etc.

      BACKPAGE

      * * * * *

      Back Cover (Ben Baldwin)

      EDITORIAL NOTES –

      If you haven’t visited the website lately you’ve probably been wondering why this issue is late…

      Due to the recent changes at Royal Mail, it now makes much more sense to mail out print issue Black Static and Interzone at the same time rather than in alternate months. So what would have been the June–July issue has become the July–August issue, and Black Static will continue on this new schedule.

      We’ve made a few other changes to the print issue as well, and it’s possible that we can further increase the print page count (to 128) in the near future. We hope that these changes result in a better reading experience, and a print format that better suits the content.

      Most importantly, the Black Static fly is back (page 1), thanks to David Gentry (sixshards.co.uk).

      * *

      Another important development is TTA Novellas, works in the 20–40,000 word range, published as B Format paperbacks and available singly or on a cheaper subscription. Please note the special pre-publication offer elsewhere in this issue! E editions will appear eventually.

      * *

      This issue's cover Trickster by Ben Baldwin wraps around on the print edition and the back cover is here•

      * *

      E-Edition (An Apology): This E edition of Black Static 29 has been uploaded later than hoped as Black Static 30 (see below) should be out when this is uploaded. Hopefully we can do better henceforward. Please accept our apologies for delays. Keep checking Fictionwise, Smashwords or Amazon for new issues. This issue, #29, has been out in print since 13 July. This later date than usual is explained above. Thanks for your patience!

      * *

      Internal hyperlinks have been added in the reviews sections and we would like to know if these are useful or helpful. Please let us know your thoughts. If readers consider them an improvement then we can continue the practice.

      * *

      The next print issue, Black Static 30, dated October, is due out September as TTA are changing the schedule of the print issue. That will also affect the ebook dates as they cannot be prepared until the print issue files are complete. Black Static 30 will have stories from James Cooper; 'The Pig Farm', Carole Johnstone; 'Sometimes I Get A Good Feeling', Susan Kim; 'Recurrence', Daniel Mills; 'The Wayside Voices', David Kotok; 'The Orphan and the Bad, Bad Monkey' & Ray Cluley; 'All Change'.

      * *

      Submissions of short stories are always welcome, but please follow the guidelines on the website.

      * * * * *

      COFFINMAKER'S BLUES

      by Stephen Volk

      DO I KNOW YOU?

      I recently received notes from a network drama exec on a new proposal. My main character was too passive. Too reactive. Could he have more of a goal? Could he be more charismatic? Could he, I don’t know…play the violin? As my script editor responded with no small amount of sarcasm: I know. Let’s have him play the trombone!

      Aside from the stupidity of the exec’s suggestion, the obvious thing here is, he was talking about characterisation, not character. It made me realise even hardened readers and TV professionals have little or no idea what goes into making a character great. Or even interesting.

      In Homeland, Damian Lewis is reactive for episode after episode, and it’s gripping. Reacting is what most of us do in life all the time. Most of us aren’t actively seeking our goals – unless we are cops or investigators – which is maybe where this fallacy of active protagonist comes from.

      Another favourite is the demand to make characters likeable, which in my experience is never a useful instruction. In fact I’d ask the opposite: What’s wrong with this person? In many cases, the wrong is what makes them who they are; from Cushing’s Frankenstein, to Robbie Coltrane’s Cracker to the elusive protagonists of Drive or Point Blank. Jack Nicholson in The Shining or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is the wrong personified, as is Woody Harrelson’s dark cop in Rampart.

      What unlocked the wrong for me concerning a recent script were a few words in the fascinating book On Monsters by Professor of Philosophy Stephen T. Asma. Monsters, he says, are imaginative expressions of loss of control. The modern murderer, he goes on, is a luminal creature: like a griffin or hermaphrodite, emblematic of change from one state to another. A killer might feel his identity crushed, diminished, reduced, humiliated and slighted until the only escape is to flip to another state of being, that of rage and empowerment so that the culminating act of violence rebalances the unbearable situation. This captured the essence of the character I was writing. He wasn’t a psychopath. The problem wasn’t that he felt nothing, but that he felt too much. My crime story was a monster story after all.

      Perhaps our fascination with characters is no different from our fascination with people. Whether it’s a cop, a wizard or a Norwegian mass murderer like Anders Breivik, essentially we want the answer to the question: What makes people do things?

      I saw Baroness Susan Greenfield at the Bath Literary Festival recently, talking about the subject of her book You and Me: The Neuroscience of Identity. Shared identity, meaning cultural ethnicity, she opined is an oxymoron, since identity means individual uniqueness. Our faces are revealing, yes, but they are the result of, not the cause of, identity. For that we have to look at behaviour. Not the tics, actions or reactions, but the decisions we make based on where we’ve come from: our unique life stories. I think this is the nub of our need for fictional characters: "If I understand what makes them them, I just might understand what makes me me."

      I’ve long considered Horror is all about identity, or loss of it. After all, it’s the only genre in which death isn’t the worst that can happen.

      You can be trapped in a living death as a vampire or zombie, or go on living but not as yourself – taken over by an alien or demon, or simply go insane.

      The monstrous change to your own character might be due to apocalyptic forces (Take Shelter) or political upheaval, as in the chilling film set against the military coup in Chile in 1973, Post Mortem. The Walking Dead, like most zombie stories nowadays, is about the collapse of society, a mindless enemy. The question being, will I have the guts to aim a shotgun, to kill what looks like a person, or let my family’s brains get eaten?

      The idea of a brain eaten, but this time by a nasty regime, is at the core of Homeland, which incidentally is Horror too (or near as damn it). Not just because it blatantly name-checks the genre (Brody the hero in uniform from Jaws, Carrie the psychic maelstrom from Stephen King, even a CIA surveillance van with the name Ballard on the side of it) but because it’s about a monster in our midst. In the throat-tightening image of the All-American Hero strapping on a suicide bomber’s vest, or kneeling in Muslim prayer, it’s about our fear of The Other – but what if The Other looks like us? I can’t help but see Invasion of the Bodysnatchers and The Omen channelled here, as well as the paranoid thrillers of Ira Levin, where the ultimate terror is knowing the truth and everybody thinks you are crazy. In the old blues songs going home always means death, but in Homeland/Deathland, the series asks, who is really dishing out death? The terrorists on US soil or the American drones bombing Iraq?

      No secret to say, the key to the show’s success is its complex, flawed characters. Claire Danes’s (CIA agent) Carrie. She crosses lines. She sleeps around. She bursts into tears. She’s hiding a mental illness from her bosses… enthuses critic Stuart Heritage. Once the writers had decided to make her bipolar, co-creator Alex Gansa confirms in Written By magazine: We had ambiguity on both sides of the equation: an unreliable narrator and an ambiguous protagonist. Chillingly adding, If we’d done it at a broadcast network (instead of Showtime), we probably wouldn’t have been able to do that on either side of the story. So, good writing is good writing, but you need to be in a place that values and understands character.

      But do we even understand ourselves?

      Rachel Seiffert said that going to Germany made her realise how British she was, yet she was taxed by her preconceptions when writing about the Orange marches in Glasgow. Not a bad question to ask of your character, that. To what tribe do you belong? Where do your allegiances lie?

      In the excellent crime film, Animal Kingdom, there’s a key scene where Australian cop Guy Pearce questions a potential informer on the subject of his highly criminal family. Pearce describes the law of the jungle, and the fact the strong survive. He says once the people the young man lives with were strong, but now they’re weak. He asks him who he is going to side with now? The great thing here is it’s not a choice between good and evil, right or wrong, but appealing to the lad’s bestial sense of survival. No morality, just dirty grudges and greed.

      But all this guff about identity, what’s it got to do with mainstream Hollywood fare or the publishing of blockbuster novels, you may ask? Not much attention to character there.

      Well, I think you’re wrong.

      Gary Ross got the gig to direct The Hunger Games because he understood the real story was not about the fascistic Capitol, or the annual event in which a male and female from each District battle to the death, or even how the televised Games mirrored our voyeuristic society. He knew it was about A no-nonsense young woman forced to turn warrior, whose truly revolutionary act is that she learns to trust.

      Exhibit Two: Another genre director recently commented on Facebook, As Joss Whedon knows, it’s all about character.

      Which is why, when I’m watching Susan Greenfield on stage, Professor of Synaptic Pharmacology, Director of the Institute for the Future of the Mind, I’m asking myself, why is this mega-clever woman wearing a black leather biker jacket? Is it because, for all her brains, she wants to be seen as tough? For all her erudition, is she fragile deep down? Is the jacket her armour? Does the once geeky kid with glasses harbour a rock chick fantasy?

      It’s a neat contradiction. I’ll use it. Truth be told, I have used it. It’s perfect for a forensic psychiatrist I’m writing in the crime story above.

      Better, anyway, than her playing the violin.

      * * * * *

      Copyright © 2012 Stephen Volk

      * * * * *

      The Awakening (screenplay by Steve) came out on DVD and Blu-ray March 26th. For more information on Steve’s fiction, film and television work please visit his website at stephenvolk.net

      * * * * *

      INTERFERENCE

      by Christopher Fowler

      TALES OF THE INCREDIBLE

      In the previous issue my esteemed colleagues Mike O’Driscoll and Stephen Volk discussed Being Human and The Exorcist, and both touched on something that has long fascinated me. Believability is something all genre writers must grapple with. We write about the undead, vampires and ghosts, and are expected to provide plausible explanations for mankind’s oldest fears, which are really only the summation of one fear – the fear of death. The fact that we are irrational creatures should absolve us from providing explanations, but we also need satisfying outcomes to our stories. This creates a problem for the writer: how do we satisfy, yet make believable our tale by leaving part of it unknowable?

      As Mr Volk pointed out, The Exorcist managed to for an interesting reason. The film has a strong documentary feel in its opening scenes, and sets such a realistic tone that we believe everything that follows. But it’s also because the spirit of the age underpins both film and book; the suggestion is that Regan’s mother is a Godless actor, a single parent, foul-mouthed, ‘modern’, not part of a committed righteous family, and keeps questionable company, so evil is allowed into the moral vacuum she and her daughter inhabit.

      When the film was made, America was in turmoil – there was a powerful sense of loss and confusion, a feeling that the country had mislaid its moral compass. Charles Manson had committed appallingly senseless crimes, but it was the Watergate break-in just the year before, and the subsequent impeachment of Richard Nixon – an unthinkable event – that shattered the American psyche. Into that whirlpool of self-doubt The Exorcist intruded, subtly suggesting that where there was an absence of good, the Devil would find an entrance.

      And yet The Exorcist doesn’t feel reactionary or right wing. That’s the beauty of its structure – to suggest the prevailing subconscious sensibility without hammering it home. It’s human nature to try and put a face on guilt.

      The deeply reactionary Hostel films appeared at a time of retrenchment and suspicion of foreignness in America, and here the overt, unpalatable sentiment is that if you go beyond the safety of your backyard you’ll get into trouble, so it’s best to stay home. This time around, the message is so blunt and shrill that the films never gained mainstream popularity, because human nature tells us that the story is unlikely – foreigners aren’t out to ‘get’ naïve American tourists. This is a thematic cycle that always reappears every few years – in the 1920s Americans believed that white slave traffickers were lying in wait to kidnap them and drag them off to China.

      Films like Turistas and The Shrine give audiences what they don’t even realise they fear most. In the same way that the perfect Daily Mail story is one which confirms your unvoiced fears, horror films like to reflect the unspoken anxieties of the times.

      So the stories that work best are ones which reflect the current climate – no surprise there. But that brings me to my problem with Being Human. Try as I might, I can’t take it seriously at any level, because the far-fetched premise is a stumbling block. For all of the show’s efforts to tap into a youthful zeitgeist, it seems entirely disconnected from the world I inhabit.

      Horror, fantasy, edge and SF are still frowned upon by many of the snobbier ‘literary’ booksellers and critics, despite the long and illustrious careers of their writers, and it’s partly because of the issue of disbelief surrounding the supernatural.

      Unfortunately, a great many films set themselves up to be scoffed at. Every few years Dracula is rebuilt as a romantic hero, from Frank Langella’s seventies smoothie to the mopey drips of Twilight. But Dracula was intended as the embodiment of spiritual corruption, not a whey-faced, floppy-haired teen-swoon who can be ‘saved’ by the love of a good woman. This is where Let The Right One In and its superb remake Let Me In get it so right, by suggesting that while corruption can have innocent and alluring appeal, it’s merely a devil in disguise that will destroy you as surely as the young hero is doomed to become the latest in a long line of Renfields.

      Let The Right One In is an instant classic because it conforms to something we don’t even realise we feel deep inside – that we might be tricked by appearances,

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