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    Black Static #63 (May-June 2018)
    Black Static #63 (May-June 2018)
    Black Static #63 (May-June 2018)
    Ebook230 pages2 hours

    Black Static #63 (May-June 2018)

    By TTA Press

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    About this ebook

    The May-June issue contains new horror fiction by Steven J. Dines (novella), Kristi DeMeester, J.S. Breukelaar, Matt Thompson, and Nicholas Kaufmann. The cover art is by Richard Wagner, and interior illustrations are by Ben Baldwin, Vincent Sammy, and Richard Wagner. Regular features include Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore, Notes from the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker, Case Notes by Peter Tennant (book reviews, including an in-depth interview with Priya Sharma), Blood Spectrum by Gary Couzens (film reviews).

    Cover art by Richard Wagner

    Fiction:

    The Harder it Gets the Softer We Sing by Steven J. Dines (novella)
    illustrated by Vincent Sammy

    Raining Street by J.S. Breukelaar

    Bones of Flightless Birds by Matt Thompson
    illustrated by Richard Wagner

    Pyralidae by Kristi DeMeester

    The Fire and the Stag by Nicholas Kaufmann
    illustrated by Ben Baldwin

    Columns:

    Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker
    ON BEING INVISIBLE

    Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore
    THIS IS THE PART WHERE YOU START TO SAY GOODBYE
    Reviews:

    Case Notes: Book Reviews by Peter Tennant

    BLOOD ON THE PAGE: PRIYA SHARMA
    All the Fabulous Beasts plus in-depth author interview

    THREE OF THE BEST: JOHN LLEWELLYN PROBERT
    Dead Shift
    The Lovecraft Squad: All Hallows Horror
    Made for the Dark

    THE DIFFICULT THIRD COLLECTION: JAMES COOPER
    Human Pieces

    THREE THRILLERS
    Find Me by J.S. Monroe
    The Black Sheep by Sophie McKenzie
    Final Girls by Riley Sager

    Blood Spectrum: Film Reviews by Gary Couzens

    Night of the Living Dead, Hammer Volume Two: Criminal Intent, Annihilation, Requiem, Govan Ghost Story, Imitation Girl, Fashionista, Images, Cure, Legend of the Mountain, Pyewacket, Keep Watching, Terrifier

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTTA Press
    Release dateMay 16, 2018
    ISBN9780463497005
    Black Static #63 (May-June 2018)
    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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      Black Static #63 (May-June 2018) - TTA Press

      BLACK STATIC 63

      MAY–JUNE 2018

      © 2018 Black Static and its contributors

      PUBLISHER

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

      ttapress.com

      Books and films for review are always welcome and should be sent to the above address

      EDITOR

      Andy Cox

      andy@ttapress.com

      BOOKS

      Peter Tennant

      whitenoise@ttapress.com

      FILMS

      Gary Couzens

      gary@ttapress.com

      SUBMISSIONS

      Unsolicited submissions of short stories are always very welcome, but please follow the guidelines: tta.submittable.com/submit

      SMASHWORDS REQUESTS THAT WE ADD THE FOLLOWING:

      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 63 MAY-JUNE 2018

      TTA PRESS

      COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2018

      PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

      CONTENTS

      bs63 cover art bw.tif

      COVER ART

      UNTITLED

      RICHARD WAGNER

      EudoraWelty2.tif

      ON BEING INVISIBLE

      NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

      LYNDA E. RUCKER

      more-notes.tif

      THIS IS THE PART WHERE YOU START TO SAY GOODBYE

      INTO THE WOODS

      RALPH ROBERT MOORE

      The Harder It Gets the Softer We Sing artwork.tif

      NOVELLA ILLUSTRATED BY VINCENT SAMMY

      THE HARDER IT GETS THE SOFTER WE SING

      STEVEN J. DINES

      raining-street-3.tif

      STORY

      RAINING STREET

      J.S. BREUKELAAR

      bones flightless birds (rev).tif

      STORY ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD WAGNER

      BONES OF FLIGHTLESS BIRDS

      MATT THOMPSON

      moth-threshold.tif

      STORY

      PYRALIDAE

      KRISTI DeMEESTER

      The Fire and the Stag.tif

      STORY ILLUSTRATED BY BEN BALDWIN

      THE FIRE AND THE STAG

      NICHOLAS KAUFMANN

      IG_DESERT-contents.tif

      FILM REVIEWS

      BLOOD SPECTRUM

      GARY COUZENS

      Priya Sharma contents.tif

      BOOK REVIEWS + PRIYA SHARMA INTERVIEW

      CASE NOTES

      PETER TENNANT

      NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

      LYNDA E. RUCKER

      lyndarucker3supercropped.tif

      ON BEING INVISIBLE

      A writer’s work should be everything — Eudora Welty

      I don’t like becoming a part of things… What I’d like to be is invisible. I’d like to be able to move around without having to explain anything — Liz in Billy Liar

      I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman — Virginia Woolf

      The oldest stories left to us are anonymous ones. Would it help us to know the authorship of Gilgamesh or Beowulf? Would it enrich our reading of The Illiad and The Odyssey if we knew what kind of a person Homer was, what his position was on the issues of his day, whether or not he was actually a she? I’m not asking these questions rhetorically – I really do wonder.

      Last issue I wrote about whether a writer has any responsibilities, in art and in life, and if so, what those responsibilities are. But I think there’s a larger question about whether what we know about a writer helps or impedes our appreciation of that writer’s work. For a few decades in the 20th century, one of the dominant schools of literary criticism argued for the absence of both the author and the author’s intent, first via New Criticism and later in what theorist Roland Barthes called the death of the author. I am fairly certain that it does not particularly enhance the experience of most readers or writers to delve too far down the academic rabbit hole of structuralism and its offshoots. But as much as we assume, at least here toward the pop cultural end of the spectrum, that biographical knowledge inevitably will inform our interpretation of art, I wonder whether it actually inhibits our understanding or our experience of a piece of art to attempt to tie it too closely to the psychology of the creator – something we have reconstructed through what will always be a woefully incomplete portrait of a person’s state of mind and their life.

      It’s impossible not to acknowledge the elephant in the room – the likelihood that the prompt for this column is one of the many endless iterations of conversations about H.P. Lovecraft, but that actually isn’t the case at all. In fact, the prompt was twofold: a Paris Review interview with Eudora Welty I read recently, and the 2016 Ruth Franklin biography Shirley Jackson: A Very Haunted Life that I’ve been reading. In the interview, Welty was asked if she thought a biography of herself ought to be written. She recoiled at the idea: …your private life should be kept private…They’d have a hard time trying to find something about me. I think I’d better burn everything up. It’s best to burn letters, but at least I’ve never kept diaries or journals.

      The Welty response resonated with me because I thought something very similar, years ago, on reading Julie Phillips’ biography James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon. A biography is, by its very nature, a nosy and intrusive document, but the Tiptree biography felt to me particularly so, perhaps in part because she was an intensely private person but also because I disagreed with some of the psychological observations that Phillips made, or thought there was insufficient evidence to make them. (Based on reviews at the time, I was vastly in the minority on this point.) Above all, although I enjoyed the book, I thought I wouldn’t ever want anyone to write something this intimate about me.

      The Jackson biography has struck me somewhat differently – still uncomfortably intimate, as any biography is bound to be, but Franklin comes across almost as a kind of advocate for Jackson. I’m indignant at the way her mother, Geraldine, constantly undermines her and criticizes her appearance; resentful at the way her husband, Stanley Hyman, hounds her about bringing in more money from her writing and the attention he lavishes on everyone except his family. I’ve no idea what Jackson herself might have made of it – all those angry private letters penned and never sent to Geraldine and Stanley were never meant for public consumption but I can’t help thinking she might appreciate the idea that she got the final word in the end.

      But I also find myself wondering why I, and others, are so interested in the lives of writers in the first place. There’s kind of a running joke that you shouldn’t meet your writing heroes, that writers themselves are a disappointment next to their work. It’s not really true unless you think writers are gods, and then every one you meet will be inevitably, disappointingly human. But I do think there’s something to the idea that the messy, contradictory humans that we are do not always live up to the art that we create. Making art is one of the finest things we humans are capable of doing; I am perpetually fascinated by ancient pieces of art, paintings on cave walls, Ice Age figurines, things made by people who lived so long ago they are genuinely almost unimaginable. I often think that we create art out of the finest pieces of ourselves, that if there is in fact anything divine in the universe, this is one way in which it finds expression. Our creations are larger and grander than we are.

      It’s a vast generalization, but on the scale of people who produce things for the entertainment of others, fiction writers are generally less savvy about or desirous of attention that is focused on them instead of the work than many other creative professionals. I mostly find it paralyzing myself; like Julie Christie’s Liz in Billy Liar, I want to move about without having to explain myself to people. In that sense, social media produces a kind of worst-case scenario, a real-time process of engagement and reacting and responding with no time to ruminate – and rumination is at the core of producing good fiction. Yet even letters and journals can mislead, produced in the moment for an audience of one or none, often – particularly in the case of journals – a lopsided account of a fleeting emotional state. Meanwhile, intent is assigned to authors while being taken away at the exact same time, in that writers are simultaneously held responsible for the interpretation of their work regardless of intent while also having their intent interpreted through their expressions in other media.

      How would our reception of the work we love change if we did as Welty suggests, and allowed the work to be everything? If we didn’t know Jackson loathed her small-minded New England neighbors and eventually became agoraphobic; if we didn’t associate Edgar Allan Poe with alcoholism and a child bride; if we didn’t know that Sylvia Plath committed suicide? Does any of this matter? Should it matter? Does it rise to the level of moral obligation, as seems to be the case in the anxious caveat that accompanies nearly every mention of Lovecraft’s name now in which the speaker or writer acknowledges he was a racist (as though everyone might think the speaker or writer was as well were it not said – would they?). Can our interpretation of fiction become lazy and one-note if we fall back on these biographical truisms? Can the work just be? Are the anonymous works we do have less great, are our readings of them poorer, because it is impossible to access these details, or is art greater than the sum of its creator’s parts?

      At the core of these questions is, I think, a single one: why do we read and write in the first place? I said at the beginning of this column that these aren’t rhetorical questions I’m using to guide you toward a predetermined conclusion. I don’t know the answers. But invisibility has become shorthand for exclusion, yet there are other ways to be invisible and advantages to doing so – especially for writers, who often benefit from being observers rather than participants. I can’t speak for other writers, but I know for myself that the older I get, the more I think Welty was right. I’d better burn everything up.

      INTO THE WOODS

      RALPH ROBERT MOORE

      RalphRobertMoore-woods2.tif

      THIS IS THE PART WHERE YOU START TO SAY GOODBYE

      I love stories about the end of the world. They are all stories about Heaven. Even if they don’t want to be. A hard Heaven. But nonetheless, a Heaven where we are truly free.

      A life where we no longer have eight to five jobs, or rent, or periodic dental cleanings. Every day is Saturday. A new world where we are free to do whatever we want, even steal, and go wherever we want, feeding ourselves with cans of food stuffed into our pockets. (And really, the endurance of canned food is so central to apocalyptic fiction, I wonder if the whole genre of end-of-the-world stories isn’t secretly sponsored by the canned food industry. Canned peas. When the world goes to Hell in a handbasket, it’s good to know you’ve got a reliable source of vitamin K in your back pack.)

      After all we know collapses, the world will still be littered with canned food.

      When I was a kid I used to walk down Greenwich Avenue each day during Summer recess, about a mile, to my grandparents’ home, located on the charmingly-named Steamboat Road, with its evocations of Popeye and early America, on Long Island Sound. Their house backed-up on the Atlantic Ocean, weathered boat dock at the bottom of their backyard extending out into the swishing green ocean water. At low tide they had their own sandy beach, and at even lower tide a stretch of black mud where you could throw down a heavy rock, watching for upward squirts of water from the black ooze that told a young boy where clams were hiding, burrowed just under the sludgy surface, ready to be dug out, washed under a steel faucet, hard gray curves tilted left and right, spilling off grit, then steamed, eaten.

      I wake up in the middle of the night next to Mary’s warmth, her exhales, and an idea squirts up in my mind. We all know the tragedy of not writing down an inspiration as soon as it occurs to us, so I lean over the edge of the bed, not really wanting to, because I’m tired and lazy, get out my yellow legal pad, my pen, and in the darkness of two a.m. try to write out the crucial phrases very clearly, but barely able to see them. The next morning, waking up, remembering, I lean back over and lift the legal pad, to see if what I wrote is legible, but a lot of times, it isn’t. And that inspiration is gone forever. Which makes me so sad. Blame my right hand.

      My grandmother was the kindest person I ever knew. Isn’t that often the case?

      My grandfather was the worst sort of Irish. Angry, violent drunk. Dressed each day in the same black suit, shock of white hair above his thin, ruddy face, black and white sneakers. Flask of whiskey in his back pants pocket, which he sipped from throughout the day.

      When I walked down to my grandparents’ each day, it was to help them out. Cook their meals, mow the lawn, carry out the garbage, weed their tomato garden, assist with other physical tasks they could no longer manage. My grandmother had Parkinson’s, so it was difficult for her to do anything. She needed an aluminum walker to get from one room to another. The hand tremors from her disease prevented her from accomplishing anything that required any degree of dexterity, such as flipping a hamburger in a skillet.

      Once my grandmother faltered and failed, and died, my grandfather was left alone in their quiet house on the ocean. Woke up alone, cooked and ate alone, took a swig from his back-pocket flask alone, went to sleep in his bed alone.

      He took to thumb-tacking slips of paper around the house. Whenever I visited him after my grandmother’s death, and I didn’t visit often, and I wouldn’t stay for dinner, and if you ever met my grandfather, and sat on his sofa as a young boy staring fixedly at the quiz show on the black and white TV trying not to show any reaction to his violent, self-pitying tirades, you’d understand, I’d see these yellowing paper squares tacked to the bottoms of the kitchen cabinets, to the white-painted sides of the rear windows overlooking the ocean, the walls of the hallway. Whenever he staggered outside to make sure no one was driving too fast on Steamboat Road, I’d get up off the sofa and read as many of them as I could. They all were about what he wanted done after he died. The telephone number of the lawyer who had drawn up his will. Name of the funeral parlor he wanted to handle his burial. People to call, to notify them he had passed. Where the key was to his boathouse in the backyard. His bank account numbers.

      Years and years later, when I was an adult, deciding to become a writer, I would write brief notes myself, about writing ideas I had, each note about the same word length as one of my grandfather’s tacked-up squares of paper. So that’s something I inherited from him. The need to document. And it helped me. So he wasn’t all bad. People rarely are. When Mary and I first got together, we of course shared stories of our past, as all lovers do. One night in bed, the two of us lying next to each other away from the wet spot, I started talking about my grandmother, the kindest person I ever knew, and she was surprised my grandmother meant that much to me. When I asked why, she said, Because up to this point, all you’ve talked about is your grandfather. And isn’t that true? We talk not about the ones who loved us, but the ones who challenged us. That old saying, Love the ones you hate, because they are the ones who changed you.

      I’d write my story notes on a turned upside-down legal pad. Each time I’d scribble down a small inspiration for a story, and be able to decipher it later, after the rush of blue ink across yellow paper, I’d tear off the strip of paper from the pad, add it to the other torn-off strips for that story, clasped together by the circular whorls of a big paperclip, metal thighs clamped around a happy face.

      My mother had a key to my grandfather’s house. Found him dead on his bed in his upstairs bedroom. Old eyes staring straight up at his uninteresting white ceiling. All those tacked-up notes of his, which the family found weird at the time, actually came in handy.

      Sometimes squatting down beside a newly-lit orange campfire deep in the dark woods of your latest fiction you realize the words you’ve been walking through, stopping each night to rest, just aren’t going to work out. The trees are no longer interesting. And you say goodbye to that forest rising around you, that could-have-been story.

      And even when your notes do lead to a successful story, a story you’re proud of, feel sure will sell, there is that mixed feeling as your typing fingers march closer and closer to the final line, and you realize this writing session, a few more taps on the Enter key to start a new paragraph, you’re going to march right to the end of things, bumping your forehead, and it is rather painful, against that final period, that end of all things.

      I’m not my grandfather. I hope. But just as his little scraps of paper told people what to do for him after his death, my little scraps of paper, my story notes, which birthed stories, tell people what I want them to do for me after I die. Keep reading me. My grandfather tried to control the future. So am I. I don’t want to be a beautiful tomato plant that flourishes one season under the sun, and then falters, fails, and dies.

      I want what every writer wants. Endurance. I want to be canned food.

      THE HARDER

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