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    Black Static #30 Horror Magazine
    Black Static #30 Horror Magazine
    Black Static #30 Horror Magazine
    Ebook252 pages2 hours

    Black Static #30 Horror Magazine

    By TTA Press

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    About this ebook

    Black Static is the award winning bimonthly horror and dark fantasy short story magazine from TTA Press, publisher of Interzone and Crimewave. Black Static contains groundbreaking dark fiction by some of the world's best writers and most talented newcomers, plus hard-hitting features and innovative artwork. Many recognised authors and artists started their careers in TTA publications and new ones continue this tradition. However their more well known peers; Ramsey Campbell, Joel Lane, Nicholas Royle, Nina Allan continue to supply great stories.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTTA Press
    Release dateNov 8, 2012
    ISBN9781301239511
    Black Static #30 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 #30 Horror Magazine - TTA Press

      BLACK STATIC

      #30

      A magazine of horror and dark fantasy.

      Cover:

      The Ornithologist by Ben Baldwin.

      * * * * *

      Black Static

      Issue 30 (SEPT – OCT 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: 9781301239511

      First draft v4 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

      * * * * *

      Print issue 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/1398/black-static-30/0/5/

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

      * * * * *

      The page should break here.

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      EDITORIAL NOTES

      COMMENT/COLUMNS

      COFFINMAKER'S BLUES - by Stephen Volk

      INTERFERENCE - by Christopher Fowler

      FICTION

      THE PIG FARM by James Cooper

      illustrated by Rich Sampson

      ALL CHANGE by Ray Cluley

      illustrated by Vincent Sammy

      THE WAYSIDE VOICES by Daniel Mills

      illustrated by Ben Baldwin

      RECURRENCE by Susan Kim

      illustrated by Dave Senecal

      SOMETIMES I GET A GOOD FEELING by Carole Johnstone

      THE ORPHAN AND THE BAD, BAD MONKEY by David Kotok

      illustrated by Rik Rawling

      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

      The page should break here.

      EDITORIAL NOTES –

      The recent changes at Royal Mail make it sensible to mail out print issue Black Static and Interzone simultaneously rather than in alternate months. So what would have been the Aug–Sept issue has become the Sept–Oct issue and this is the second Black Static on this new schedule.

      We made most changes to the print issue with Black Static 29 and this printed issue has a title on the spine. These changes do not really affect the E book edition but you may be interested to try it at some future point.

      * *

      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! E editions will appear eventually.

      * *

      This issue's cover The Ornithologist by Ben Baldwin continues on the backpage.•

      * *

      E-Edition (An Apology): This E edition of Black Static 30 has been uploaded later than hoped as Black Static 31 (see below) may be out when this goes live on line. Hopefully we can do better henceforward. Please accept our apologies for delays. Keep checking Smashwords or Amazon for new issues. This issue, #30, has been on sale in print since 26 Sept.

      * *

      Internal hyperlinks are used in the reviews sections again. We would like to know if these are useful or helpful. Unfortunately they do seem to make the table of contents overlong and unwieldy and I have not found a way to counter this yet. Please let us know your thoughts on these. If readers consider them an improvement then we can continue the practice. If you think of other improvements that might be useful to readers please let us know.

      * *

      The next print issue, Black Static 31, will be dated December/January and includes Seán Padraic Birnie's story Sister and two other novelettes..

      Richard Wagner's cover and Vincent Sammy's interior for Sister in next issue.

      * *

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

      * * * * *

      The page should break here.

      COFFINMAKER'S BLUES

      by Stephen Volk

      THE GHOST THAT SPOOKED THE NATION

      On Sunday July 8th I was invited by David Baldwin, the young programmer of the ‘Shock and Awe’ Festival, to come to Birmingham’s Electric Cinema to present a screening of Ghostwatch in its 20th Anniversary year.

      The occasion was fantastic – Cobwebs! Bats! Skulls! – a really receptive crowd, a lively Q&A. Some of the audience told me that, even now, they found it difficult to think about Ghostwatch and ‘Pipes’ (our ghost) without getting deeply anxious, and one burly guy in a heavy metal T-shirt asked me to sign his DVD cover and write It’s only a TV show because that’s what he told himself when he was watching back in 1992: It’s only a TV show… It’s only a TV show…

      By happy synchronicity it was the last day of shooting our Ghostwatch: Behind the Curtains documentary, too, and an unexpected bonus to get footage of long-time fans with a sense of what they recollected about experiencing the show when it was first broadcast.

      Amazingly, David himself said he felt traumatised by the programme when he was a child, and had arranged this screening as something of a personal exorcism. As an adult twenty years later he confessed he was seriously worried about watching it, and the manager of The Electric, Sam Bishop, felt the same.

      They both used the word traumatised and though a lot of people do, nobody has yet come up to me with hate in their eyes and a meat cleaver in their hand. Mostly they come up (like David) and say thank you for putting them on the road to enjoying horror and even to making horror films themselves. Which raises an awful lot of questions about trauma and horror I feel ill equipped to answer.

      For those whose recollection of it is dim (or nonexistent) Ghostwatch was a TV programme broadcast live from Britain’s most haunted house, situated in an incongruous street in Northolt, transmitted on Hallowe’en night, Saturday 31st October 1992 on BBC1. Though it pretended to be real, and going out live, it was in fact an entirely scripted drama, written by myself and produced by the BBC Drama Department many months in advance of its transmission date.

      The next morning it was being called a hoax (a term we had never used in any of our own meetings or discussions): the tabloids were screaming Heads Must Roll at the BBC!; within days Sarah Greene had to appear on children’s TV to assure young viewers she hadn’t perished at the hands of Pipes in the glory hole under the stairs; vociferous viewers appeared on Sue Lawley’s Biteback and vented their collective spleens on Points of View; questions were eventually raised in Parliament, no less.

      So how did Ghostwatch happen, and why is it remembered so vividly by so many, twenty years on?

      It had always struck me that ghost stories in print spent an awful lot of time convincing you of the veracity of the first person narrative they are about to tell. For a long time I wondered, what is the television equivalent of that? And, of course, it is the camera showing someone’s face in Close Up, saying, You won’t believe me, but I’ll tell you what really, really happened…

      This immediately became exciting to me (and in 1988 struck me as potentially ground-breaking), the notion of telling a ghost story using documentary techniques, and when I pitched it to BBC producer Ruth Baumgarten she pounced on the audacity of the idea immediately.

      It would be fatuous to claim there wasn’t the possibility in both our minds of creating a television equivalent of Orson Welles’s famous War of the Worlds, but that wasn’t our raison d’être. Far from it. And it was made clear to us by the Powers That Be it wouldn’t be commissioned purely as a gag or prank: the Drama Department was not in the habit of spending its tight budget on a mere prank. They wanted (and I wanted, desperately) a play of dramatic form that simply used the language of studio and outside broadcast for its (hopefully chilling) effect.

      Put simply, my intention was twofold. Having grown up with the classic BBC TV Ghost Story for Christmas series of M.R. James and Dickens adaptations as well as brilliantly adventurous genre fare such as The Stone Tape by Nigel Quatermass Kneale, I simply wanted, on one level, to create my own good old fashioned ghost story for television. But my second, equally important, aim was to satirise television itself.

      Both Ruth and I had noticed the visual language of television changing in the late eighties and early nineties. Filmed drama shows like NYPD Blue were using hand-held documentary techniques, while entertainment shows like Rescue 999 and Crimewatch were using actors and music to recreate real events in techniques normally reserved for the Drama Department. This overlapping of previously distinct boundaries between fact and fiction (the foothills of what was to be called reality TV) was worrying to us. Most worrying of all was seeing music overlaid on news footage of the bombing of Baghdad on CNN during the first Gulf War.

      The elegance of Ghostwatch, I thought, was that both the ghost story and the satire played off the same theme: what do you believe? Who do you trust? Do you trust the expert? Do you trust BBC television? Do you trust the information you are given? Can you even trust your eyes?

      As in all screen ghost stories the problem was How much do we show, and when? The premise seemed to beg for a moment where I would make the audience go: Hang on! Did I see that? Or am I going mad? (The very hesitation that Todorov defines as the essence of the Fantastic or, one could say, the uncanny.) This occurred, after a deliberately slow start to the proceedings, when an image is replayed and Michael Parkinson, as anchorman, says I don’t see anything, do you? – when in fact something had appeared on screen against the curtains of the girls’ bedroom.

      I also wanted to have nothing happen for as long as possible. I always argued that if this were real, you wouldn’t get a ghost appearing immediately and even if we did, what would we do then? It had to be a slow build up, but the Head of Drama didn’t understand that. He was petrified all the way through that the thing wouldn’t be scary enough. It was certainly a tough call, because unlike most scary movies we couldn’t use a music soundtrack or even edit sequences in a traditionally suspenseful way. The director instead enlisted David Lean’s sound designer to create changes of tone using effects such as the cat noises.

      In order to write it I had to quickly un-learn any Robert McKee ideas of act structure or carefully hiding clunky exposition. Exposition here had to be on the nose in order to properly convince. People simply told their stories to camera, seemingly off the cuff. In fact, anything that betrayed it was written had to go. To convey back story I had to rely on such visually banal devices as studio interviews, satellite link-ups to America, phone-ins, and even a stupid comedian out on the street to talk to the public.

      As well as trying to solve these intrinsic stylistic problems, I steeped myself in research about poltergeists, the most famous of which in Britain was the Enfield case. I tried to put words in the mouth of my expert, the fictional Dr Lyn Pascoe, that I’d heard from real psychical investigators or read and thought made theoretical and psychological sense.

      As a Cassandra figure, though, the drama demanded she be undermined, because in horror everything has to be undermined. Everything we rely on for security must be dutifully ripped away. Faith, family, the surrogate family of TV people, scientific expertise, father figures, help of any kind.

      Most of all, we had to undermine people’s trust in the BBC itself. And that was when the shit hit the fan…

      * * * * *

      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

      * * * * *

      The page should break here.

      INTERFERENCE

      by Christopher Fowler

      THE DEATH OF THE FILMED FAIRY TALE

      One thing we seem to be missing in horror films these days is a palpable sense of evil. Our vampires are drippy lovelorn teenagers, our werewolves and ghosts are misunderstood special effects in search of human emotions. I get frustrated with films like the Twilight series because they feel like reactionary Mills & Boon romances, but then I’m a middle-aged man writing about a teenaged female phenomenon. Unfortunately, expressing this opinion got me into a heap of trouble recently. And all because of a fairy tale.

      There are two ways you can go with fairy tales on film: you can make them camp and primary-coloured like Mirror, Mirror or, to paraphrase Monty Python, you can cover them in shit. Snow White and the Huntsman was of the latter type, where the villagers squelch about in mud and fleas, and even the Queen’s castle looks like it needs a jetwash. However, director Rupert Sanders injected some heart and danger into the familiar story, so that Snow White’s entrance into the Dark Wood felt quite magical. And there was a nod to Hayao Miyazaki with the fungus-encrusted tortoises that come to life under Snow White’s touch.

      This realistic approach had a downside, though, as it turned the all-star dwarves into filthy grunting tramps barely distinguishable from each other. Even huntsman Chris Hemsworth’s perfect features were buried behind a beard, matted hair, mud and a dodgy accent that was Groundskeeper Willie mixed with someone dragging a block of granite across a gravel floor.

      Then there was Kristen Stewart, whose frozen face and inability to PLACE the RIGHT emphasis on HER words wrecked the film. The unsmiling, flat-faced, dead-eyed Twilight star shows less animation than the Dark Wood’s scary trees, and her big troop-rallying speech was less an urgent call to arms than the needy whining of a teen who’d had her mobile tariff capped. Even when she was crowned (not exactly a spoiler) she only managed a superior smirk that suggested she might make a much worse ruler than Theron.

      There were sections of glacial pacing and Theron was too abruptly dispatched, but I thought it was a fairly well-directed film designed to appeal to Twilight fans.

      That was when the fun began.

      Who knew there were quite so many fans of Kristen Stewart, or that they would be ready to scream ‘Hater!’ without having seen the film under discussion? It’s depressing that this garnered the biggest response I’d ever had, much of it inarticulate to the point of derangement. Apparently we should never voice opinions about minor celebrities who make children’s films.

      The internet has made us terrified of voicing opinions. As we grow and our experience of the world deepens, we are entitled to discuss anything from paedophilia to terrorism in any way we choose – it’s called free comment, and Socratic debate is a dialectic method of stimulating critical thinking and illuminating ideas. Although not, it seems, when it involves fans of Snow White or vampires.

      Did I miss the meeting when it was decided that youth culture should push out everything else? That consensus-threats should overpower considered opinion? A common bully-tactic I got in this intellectually weighty discussion of a magical queen and seven little men was along these lines: If you don’t withdraw your remarks about Kristen we’ll start an online boycott against your books, and then you’ll suffer. Frankly, this does feel like the last refuge of the knowingly disempowered, and makes me sad.

      I didn’t particularly ‘hate’ the film. It was beyond consequence of any kind, a capricious piece of extremely undemanding entertainment designed to extract a bit more cash from Twilighters, worthy of a nanosecond’s thought. The thing that puzzled me was this: as a ‘realistic’ take on the fairy tale in which the empowered Snow White dons armour and inspires a vast army into undertaking a life or death battle, passion and inspiration is essential. Henry V wouldn’t have lasted two minutes if he’d just been drippy. Luckily Snow White has an army of rabid, inarticulate teenaged girls, so she doesn’t need anyone who can actually fight. Perhaps this was final proof that the fairy tale sub-genre doesn’t work on film unless it has songs in.

      * *

      THE RETURN OF THE SCARY HOUSE

      I’ve identified a rising sub-genre: the return of Scary House stories. In recent months we’ve had The Woman in Black, The Innkeepers, Penumbra, Dream House and Intruders, to name just a few.

      I can see why The Woman in Black is a success. Every possible Victorian ghost story trope is laid on with a trowel: a secluded mansion, a bereaved husband, dead children, dimly lit rooms, creaking doors, creepy old toys, rolling mists, a veiled woman, rhubarbing locals who warn the hero away; it’s a sort of greatest hits package, an elegant throwback which was beyond parody even in the 1950s, and a very efficient one which appealed to newbies in such numbers that it became a huge US hit for Hammer, which is music to my heart.

      But what the film does lack is any real resonance, anything oblique, off-kilter or unresolved. It’s solid, safe and neat, not helped by a script as flat as its landscape from the proficient, ubiquitous Jane Goldman. However, Goldman

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