Black Static Horror Magazine #1 Read online

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  TTA Press

  www.ttapress.com

  Copyright ©

  First published in 2007

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  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

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  BLACK STATIC

  HORROR

  ISSUE 1

  SEP-OCT 2007

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  PUBLICATION DATE September 2007 DESIGN/ARTWORK David Gentry DESIGN/TYPESETTING/EDITING Andy Cox ISSN 1753-0709 PUBLISHER TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, UK COPYRIGHT © 2007 Black Static and its contributors EMAIL [email protected] WEBSITE/FORUM ttapress.com SUBSCRIPTIONS The number on your mailing label refers to the final issue of your subscription. If it's due for renewal you'll see a reminder on the centre pages pullout. Please renew promptly! THANKS Edward Noon, Joachim Luetke, Pete Tennant, Paul Meloy

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  CONTENTS

  WHITE NOISE—Andy Cox

  ELECTRIC DARKNESS—Stephen Volk

  BURY THE CARNIVAL—Simon Avery

  NIGHT'S PLUTONIAN SHORE—Mike O'Driscoll

  PALE SAINTS AND DARK MADONNAS—Jamie Barras

  INTERFERENCE—Christopher Fowler

  ACTON UNDREAM—Daniel Bennett

  BLOOD SPECTRUM—Tony Lee

  VOTARY—M.K. Hobson

  JAPAN'S DARK LANTERNS—John Paul Catton

  MY STONE DESIRE—Joel Lane

  CASE NOTES—Peter Tennant

  LADY OF THE CROWS—Tim Casson

  CONTENTS

  WHITE NOISE

  ELECTRIC DARKNESS—Stephen Volk

  BURY THE CARNIVAL—Simon Avery

  NIGHT'S PLUTONIAN SHORE—Mike O'Driscoll

  PALE SAINTS AND DARK MADONNAS—Jamie Barras

  INTERFERENCE—Christopher Fowler

  ACTON UNDREAM—Daniel Bennett

  BLOOD SPECTRUM—Tony Lee

  VOTARY—M.K. Hobson

  JAPAN'S DARK LANTERNS—John Paul Catton

  MY STONE DESIRE—Joel Lane

  CASE NOTES—Peter Tennant

  LADY OF THE CROWS—Tim Casson

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  WHITE NOISE

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  WELCOME TO BLACK STATIC. For many of us this would have been the 43rd issue of The Third Alternative. And it should have been two years ago. I'm extremely sorry about that. I could point to more than a few snags that scuppered more than a few sets of plans, but that's no excuse really, and all things considered your patience and unwavering support during this protracted delay has been truly remarkable. Many thanks!

  Thanks also to David Gentry, who came along with some exciting, brave concepts that got this project back on track, resulting in Black Static as it was probably always meant to be ... although what you now hold in your hands isn't quite that, I'm afraid, as this is a reprint of the first issue. Some of the transparencies and filters used threw up some unexpected results (which we didn't catch until the issue was actually printed and delivered) so in preparing the files for a reprint as quickly as possible, and in order to avoid the same problems, we've had to compromise on some of those effects. Once we get going again I'm sure our luck will change.

  For the benefit of our newer readers, and readers of longer standing who might well have forgotten by now!—here's a brief summary of the reasons behind the changes we made: With the arrival of Interzone to this stable it made little sense to continue to compete with it for sf or fantasy, so we took the opportunity to tilt TTA fully towards its darker side, which had always been its more dominant side. The change in title is intended to emphasise this shift, leaving potential readers in no doubt about what it is we actually do, which was always a problem with the more nebulous ‘third alternative'.

  TTA readers will still feel at home with the fiction, and most of the old non-fiction is still here, with just a couple of tweaks and additions such as Tony Lee's DVD reviews and the welcome return of Christopher Fowler. Please visit the website and forum regularly for more announcements as we go along.

  I hope you like where we've gone and the impression you get of where we're yet to go, and that you'll come back for more—more from artist David Gentry, and more quality fiction from the likes of Melanie Fazi, Steve Rasnic Tem, Scott Nicholson, Lynda Rucker, Barry Fishler, Daniel Kaysen, Tony Richards, Trent Hergenrader, Matthew Holness, F. Brett Cox, Will McIntosh, Bruce Holland Rogers, Cody Goodfellow, Ian R. Faulkner and others. ANDY

  Copyright © 2007 Andy Cox

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  ELECTRIC DARKNESS—Stephen Volk

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  Steve is the writer of Gothic, Ghostwatch, and the multi-award-winning ITV series Afterlife. His short stories are collected in Dark Corners (Gray Friar Press).

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  TOO DARK

  At a recent script meeting a word was uttered and a cold claw of dread gripped my heart. I was with a television production company in London discussing a possible new drama series and the question came up: how can we make it more ‘heart-warming'? Apparently, I was told, this is what the broadcasters are all looking for at the moment. To which I said, if you want ‘heart-warming’ you can kiss my pimply white Welsh ass. Or words to that effect.

  I apologise if I'm over-sensitive to this issue, but it's one that's dogged me throughout my so-called career and the battle of fighting for the rights of dark fiction is becoming tedious.

  My TV series Afterlife took six years to get to the screen, stalled by comments from drama heads such as ‘too dark’ or ‘too much death'. (It's ghost stories for Christ's sake; if you can do ghost stories without death, hats off to you.)

  It's not just here. In America, too, I've encountered a real prejudice against the disturbing, the tragic, the even ever-so-slightly-down-beat. (Gosh, I was even told once that my feisty heroine swore too much—even though she was being attacked by aliens at the time.) But I shouldn't really be surprised. For all their talk of Democracy, Puritanism is what makes most Americans feel safe, and there, like here, it's left to striking, aberrant, individual film-makers to buck the trend—and the trend is more often than not to do with the buck.

  Recently I had the pleasure of re-watching Palindromes, directed by Todd Solondz (Happiness, Storytelling). I recommend it as a minor masterpiece of acid, pitch-black wit. One might think teenage pregnancy to be the ho-hum subject matter of soap operas or right-on documentaries, but take it from me there was no social worker in Palindromes script conferences, and it shows.

  Let me define my terms. By ‘dark’ I don't mean Miserablism. That's the British disease of ‘social realism’ where Mike Leigh and Ken Loach occupy the thrones of royalty. Frankly, I thought there was more social comment in Sin City than Vera Drake. And who wants to see a film set on a council estate? Certainly not the people who live on them.

  But commissioning editors in Britain feel comfortable churning out endless product like that because they think it's ‘real'. In fact, Leigh is as formulaic as Star Wars and Loach is making the same films he did in the 1970s.

  The fact is, dark drama, left to its own devices, can go where so-called ‘naturalistic’ drama fears to t
read. Once upon a time on TV we had Nigel Kneale's prophetic Year of the Sex Olympics, and David Rudkin's enigmatic and memorable Penda's Fen. Now we have the re-heated dung of Daktari (renamed Wild at Heart), and cuddly Stephen Fry in Kingdom.

  Television has become terminally ‘safe’ when, paradoxically, the outside world is anything but. That in itself makes me deeply uncomfortable. But then I like being made uncomfortable—by fiction, anyway.

  Which brings me back to Palindromes. There's a scene where a honest-to-goodness Christian Mom and Pop at a care home lead a chorus of disabled children (yes, real disabled children) in a spirited rendition of some raise-the-roof Gospel song. What was it about the scene that made me snigger at its awfulness? What about it made me think it was both sick and brilliant? I think, because the characters were utterly ridiculous in their blind optimism. There was no room for darkness in their lives. And that's scary. So scary you have to laugh or you'd cry.

  Dark stuff can warn. Hold up Caliban's mirror. Piss on somebody's Hush Puppies. Yell and scream that we can't take it any more. Will it be listened to? Responded to? Will it rattle cages? Will it get people angry?

  If we try hard enough, yes.

  An artist, writer, film-maker shouldn't have responsibility to politicians, or society, but only, I think, to portray his or her ideas honestly. However uncomfortable, however dark.

  A recent film that shook me up was Jindabyne directed by Ray Lawrence, in which three Australian fishermen find a dead body. The reactions and repercussions of those men and their society are so truthful, it breaks your heart. It's about hurt, and about racism at its core, and at times it's hard to watch. That's film-making.

  Harold Pinter got it dead-on: “You don't give the audience what they want: you force them to have what you want to give them.” That's the difference, or should be, between writers and commissioning editors. They are afraid of losing their jobs. We don't have a job in the first place.

  A film that declares ‘misogyny is bad’ in a preachy way is boring. But Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men shows us that subject through vivid characters and actions, and is ultimately cathartic because he shows us people more awful (hopefully) than we are. In Kissed, Lynne Stopkewich's topic is a woman's love for a dead man—literally: which is interesting, or disgusting, depending on your point of view. But challenging, most certainly.

  Take Jonathan Glazer's Birth. Misunderstood by some critics as an empty, and some said cold, mood piece, it is to me one of the most remarkable films of the last few years. Not just because of its intelligence and pitch-perfect control, but because I found it heart-rending and almost literally haunting. But it did mediocre box office in spite of Nicole Kidman in an Oscar-worthy performance in the lead. Why? I'd suggest because it didn't give the neat, expected answers. It got emotionally dirty and deep and restless, and left you there. Which I love. But reverse baseball-hatted Mid-Westerners clearly didn't.

  Similarly, when Frida Kahlo was asked to paint a portrait of the suicide victim Dorothy Hale, she outraged Hale's mother by depicting Dorothy's bloody and twisted body at the foot of the skyscraper from which she'd leapt. Not exactly what the grieving parent was expecting. But it was the truth.

  Julie Taymor, the clever director who made Frida based on the painter's tragic but ultimately heroic life, also adapted Shakespeare's ‘too dark’ Titus starring Anthony Hopkins: a big, bold, beautiful and grotesque film more awash with blood, horror and mutilation than Peter Jackson's Brain Dead.

  Also undoubtedly ‘too dark’ is Milos Forman's Goya's Ghosts. It's about detainment without trial, religion as power and the role of the artist under a totalitarian regime. Coming from where he does, Forman knows. It's about the Spanish Inquisition, but it's about us.

  In this age of anxiety, terrorism, threats to freedom of speech, darkness has a duty to look under the covers.

  And it's not negativity or pessimism or a gloomy nature that motivates dark fiction, but a kind of optimism. Because it always says, underneath, things are not as bad as they could be.

  Margaret Attwood, author of The Handmaid's Tale, says: “Literature is an uttering, or outering, of the human imagination. It lets the shadowy forms of thought and feeling—heaven, hell, monsters, angels and all—out into the light, where we can take a good look at them and perhaps come to a better understanding of who we are."

  Let's continue to celebrate our darker thoughts. Believe me, it's the sweetness and light I worry about.

  Copyright © 2007 Stephen Volk

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  BURY THE CARNIVAL—Simon Avery

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  Simon lives and works in Birmingham. He has had fiction published in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including the The Third Alternative, Crimewave (don't miss the superb novella ‘101 Ways to Leave Paris’ in the forthcoming Crimewave 10), Birmingham Noir and The Best British Mysteries IV. He is currently at work on two separate novels, and can be visited at myspace.com/simonavery

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  I discovered Charousek in the shadow of a lonely courtyard. He was chiselling at a block of wood until it resembled an arm. His front door was ajar. There were flowers in the dusty window, candles and oil lamps in others, turning the courtyard into a flickering gallery of empty views. Charousek's shadow was huge, omnipresent as I approached him. I said his name, breathed it perhaps. I couldn't be certain he'd heard for he didn't interrupt his work. While I hesitated, I studied his face. His skin was yellow (perhaps, I accepted, a product of the candlelight), and papery, stretched so tightly over the angles of his cheekbones and his jaw, that I thought it might tear if he as much as smiled. There was a white stubble on his chin, a hashish roll-up gripped between his teeth. I could smell its rich heady scent, even from some distance.

  Beside his feet and scattered about his stool was a freshly carved head, three hands, a torso and a tiny wooden heart, which he had painted a bright crimson. The whimsy of it gave me a sudden courage to persist.

  "Mr Charousek, I wondered if I may...?” I began.

  "You are a pretty one, to be sure,” Charousek said, finally. But still he continued to chisel away. His fingers were raw, calloused. When he finally did pause and turn to meet my gaze, he smiled until his face was a map of his years. “A pretty one, yes. Have we met before?"

  And then, while I searched for an appropriate response, he said, “Look, the procession."

  We heard it before it emerged between the frame of narrow houses leaning over the courtyard, so close their eaves almost touched. The sound of accordions and fiddles, of hurdy-gurdies and mandolins, of cow-bells and makeshift drums. Besides Charousek's hashish, I could smell their incense, like a pungent cloud that lingered about the town.

  And then, there they were. The celebrants. Weaving their way through the narrow cobble streets in brightly painted masks of suns and moons, and the faces of the dead. Buttons for eyes and zips for mouths and ruby red tears tattooed on cheeks. Constellations sewn into the hems of their coats, and on the brims of their hats. At their feet, flowers were flowing in thin rivers of piss and bathwater in the gutter. As they passed, lamps and candles were being lit in windows in reverence.

  It was our End of Darkness. A festival to celebrate the last days of night. Already I could sense the sun rising in the faint orange tint to the edges of the houses, in the soft, luminous glow to the mist that hung around the sulphur lamps. I fancied I could feel a warmth on my bare arms and face at some moments. A new day, finally. I could almost not remember the light, to be honest. My anticipation was mingled with fear.

  The cemeteries were filling with wreaths, colours rising on the graves of those who'd died during the darkness. Perfume in the air and burning leaves. The ceremony would continue until the light burned through the fog, until the new sun flared across the roofs and windows. At the final hour, the bridge that led away from the town would reveal itself to the communion, and it would be safe again to venture into the forest beyond. Wh
o knew what happened after that? I was young, not privy to that information. Who knew?

  Perhaps Charousek. He'd returned to the wooden limb: a crooked digit here, a veined arm, tendons corded on the back of the hand there. I fancied I could smell magic in the sawdust and in the oil in the creases of his fingers. There were figures in the interior of the house, a shape at the window. Something about it made me baulk and look away. Instead I looked at the back of my hand.

  "Mr Charousek,” I persisted.

  "Mr? Mmm, I like that,” he said, still diligently chiselling away. Then, quite abruptly, he stopped. Sighed through his nose. “I know. You've come to ask me questions, haven't you, pretty?"

  He drew deeply on his roll-up, blew the smoke away from me. His eyes were the pale, watery blue of a man who felt his age when it rained for too long, or when there wasn't enough coal to feed the fire. But still full of guile and defiance. “How would it help to know all the answers to life, my dear? To know? To really know them? Isn't it like holding on to mercury? Like knowing the formula to love? Or how art is made? The alchemy of it? There are no words or diagrams. There is only this—"

  Charousek held out his hands, palms upraised. He showed them to me. There was only dirt under his nails, linseed oil in the creases, in the whorls of his fingerprints.

  "I would never had thought to ask those questions...” I began, discovering the words as I stumbled over them. My fear made me unabashed, suddenly. “We heard that you were taken away by the Puritans, incarcerated for political activism..."

  The Puritans governed us. They controlled the country's political and economical climates with an almost despotic rule. And they policed us from the shadows with their Precisemen: rarely seen, but witnesses reported them as towering men in cruel masks and robes who would steal into people's homes while they slept, to spirit them away for incarceration or torture. From their seat of power they made the laws and set the taxes we abided by unquestioningly; from the pulpit, their priests sermonised about moral virtue and ‘the traditional order of things'.