Black Static Horror Magazine #2 Read online

  There are some weak stories. ‘The Spider Kiss’ doesn't have much going for it other than the surprise ending, and this is a premise so out of left field even Fowler can't make it convincing. In ‘Forcibly Bewitched’ a magician attempts revenge on the woman who spurned his advances, only to have the tables turned on him in a particularly nasty manner. The story comes with a little too much freight for what is essentially nothing more than a comeuppance story, and seems unable to decide if it is seriously intended or comedic, albeit leaning heavily towards the latter.

  Fowler isn't all about clever plotting and black comedy though. Some of his best stories show a rare sensitivity, an understanding of human failings and why we do the strangest things. In the brief but insightful ‘The Luxury of Harm’ a man is reunited with the idol of his schooldays at a horror convention, only to see how far he has departed from the once cherished aesthetic of rebellion. The story carries a powerful subtext, that for some to become ordinary is to become a victim. ‘Starless’ is another story about identity, with two very different men using the King's Cross bombs as the pretext to embark on new lives, the protagonist's sense of alienation in his own life conveyed with genuine empathy, so that what should be a terrible disaster to him instead becomes a window of opportunity. The short ‘Red Torch’ has a young boy gaining his first sexual experience with the usherette at his local cinema, only to find that the dark can hide many things, the boy's adolescent lust portrayed convincingly, and also the sense of betrayal, that reality all too seldom lives up to what's on the packet, and in this case falls further away than most. ‘All Packed’ finds Fowler in a quiet and reflective mood, with a moving account of a man dying of AIDS and letting go of his life.

  There are seven more stories of varying merit in this collection, but let's end this review with consideration of one of the very best. ‘Invulnerable', almost certainly an allusion to M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable, has a young women returning to the ruined corner shop which was the scene of a traumatic incident in her childhood. And as she remembers the past she also reflects on her fascination with superhero comics and the realisation that as role models they don't really work, even Bruce Willis sans vest has feet of clay, and the only realistic option is to bid goodbye to the past and become the hero of your own life. It's powerful stuff, the story one of both horror and redemption. It's Fowler, doing what he does best, telling the stories we need to hear.

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  THE WORDS OF THEIR ROARING by MATTHEW SMITH

  (Abaddon Books paperback, 339pp, 6.99 pounds)

  After a prologue in which a British deserter in WWI encounters German zombies, we skip forward to the present day when, thanks to British experiments in developing a zombie weapon, the country has been overrun by the living dead. Order has broken down, with central government's authority undermined and crime barons such as. Harry Flowers looking to fill the power vacuum. Gabe, one of Flowers’ lieutenants, is compromised and to save his own skin must turn against his master, but things go badly wrong for him. Years later Flowers has succeeded in his aim and rules London with an iron fist, commanding both the living and the dead, but the prize has been won at the cost of his own humanity. Gabe, who is now a zombie but an intelligent one, prepares for a final confrontation with his former employer.

  The second volume in Abaddon's Tomes of the Dead series of novels, this book picks up on themes and ideas explored by George Romero in Land of the Dead, primarily that of the intelligent zombie. And, while hardly a radical departure from the zombie archetype, the book does have a lot of fun with the old tropes of this subgenre, offering a read that holds the attention and engages the imagination.

  Smith knows how to tell a story. The characters are all well drawn, have a depth and motives for their actions which we can understand, if not always empathise with. Gabe, whose back story we are given in full, is the quintessential man of action with a conscience, treading the thin line between the expediency demanded by circumstance and outright amorality, though his relationship with Flowers’ daughter, the initial cause of antipathy between the two men, does have more about it of plot convenience than not. The spread of the zombie plague, the way in which the dead can so quickly overpower the living, is depicted in a way that engages the attention and seems entirely credible, and the same can be said for the rationale behind the various zombie societies that emerge in the wake of this disaster. The battle scenes are an especial strength, vivid and colourful, with plenty of bang for our buck and conflicts that could go either way. All things considered The Words of Their Roaring is well worth a few hours of any zombie aficionado's time.

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  SHARP TEETH by TOBY BARLOW

  (William Heinemann hardback, 321pp, 12.99 pounds)

  Set in Southern California, this novel masquerading as a prose poem concerns the rivalry between several packs of werewolves. Lark Tennant keeps his pack low profile, planning for the long term, but he is deposed by a rival pack that engages in criminal activity, acting as enforcers for a drug lord. Lark builds up another pack to challenge his rivals, but matters are complicated by the existence of yet a third pack, while the drug lord has his own agenda, as does a police detective who is being used by these parties. Another major strand involves Anthony, who works as a dogcatcher, and his love affair with the woman Lark sends to him as part of a plan to infiltrate the pound, and her willingness to do absolutely anything to protect the man she has come to care about so much.

  First up, don't be put off by the prose poem tag. It is, as Barlow himself made clear in an interview, not much more than a matter of how the words are laid out on the page, an attempt to get away from the rectangular blocks of text that are our default setting, and on that score it does inject a note of novelty into the proceedings, bringing to mind earlier fictional templates, such as The Iliad and Icelandic Sagas. And there are moments where you get the kind of sharpening of effect that poetry seems best suited to, a condensation of emotions and thoughts, with the one bleeding into the other, phrases that sing off the page and delight the reader with their rightness, which is not to say Barlow's prose is slack or ineffective elsewhere. This is, make no bones about it, a beautifully crafted work of fiction, worth reading simply for the quality of the prose.

  But of course there's more to it than that. The plot is marvellously complicated, with a wealth of back story my précis does not touch upon, and if some of this is a bit far fetched (such as a plan to wrest control of LA from the humans put forward by one of Lark's rivals) the overall pattern holds up well, the rivalry of LA street gangs echoed in the turf wars between the various packs, each of which is given its own distinctive rationale and modus operandi. The language is moving, vivid, capturing perfectly the feel of being an animal (mostly large dogs, not wolves, it needs to be said) and how that carefree existence might appeal to many humans, while complementing this is a nice vein of humour, with incidents in which the fearsome ‘werewolf’ finds himself reduced to the level of pampered house pet, or addicted to the lifestyle of a card sharp. Barlow doesn't spare the action either, with plenty of betrayals and turns of fortune, the whole culminating in a pitched battle between the rival factions and the few humans who have strayed into their territory, the story speckled with more than enough gore and grisly set pieces to satisfy the most jaded of horror aficionados. And at the centre of this remarkable book is a love affair, the unlikely relationship between dogcatcher Anthony and the never named woman come werewolf who has been sent to spy on him, two fractured people who need each other to be complete, the events between them described in moving detail, every subtle nuance of the emotional landscape captured on the page, making us care what happens to them and root for that happy ending.

  Poetry or not, novel or not, this is an original and enthralling work of fiction, one that makes much genre fiction seem staid and painfully accepting of its limitations in comparison. Sharp Teeth is not just for dog lovers and werewolf boosters. It deserves to reach a wide r
eadership.

  Copyright © 2007 Peter Tennant

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  INTERFERENCE—Christopher Fowler

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  J.G. Ballard

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  Chris is currently writing the award-winning Bryant & May books, dark tales of death and detection set in London. The latest volumes, White Corridor and Ten Second Staircase are out now from Transworld Books. His latest collection of short stories, Old Devil Moon, is out at Christmas from Serpent's Tail and reviewed by Pete Tennant in this issue.

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  What's The Big Idea?

  Once upon a time, in books, in cinema and on television, everything was fiction.

  Crime, horror, SF, romance, comedy, adventure, social comment, you bought books and stuck them on shelves next to each other, or watched filmed stories that just happened to fall into different categories. A book or film with a wartime background presented as many ideas about life and love as, say, a comedy. When our leisure time increased, fiction subdivided into genres. Some of these were more outré than others, and were labelled cult, arthouse, slipstream, experimental, fringe. They were soon dumped by the big companies anxious to maximise profit, and were produced instead by small independents, which further reduced their following.

  So, despite the fact that your local home entertainment store is divided into dozens of little pockets, it has just one category: the mainstream. This system is quickly being adopted in every other part of our lives.

  I imagine most Black Static readers are on the side of the independent, the cult, the quirky, the fringe. But the magpie mainstream, ever on the search for other people's ideas with which to feather its nest, now steals wholesale from the fringe. So shows like Lost rework the kind of stories that only appeared in Fortean Times, comics steal from mythology and fairy tales, paperbacks recycle old pulps, films borrow from comics, and advertising people swipe everything—all of which leaves the fringe with an increasingly empty bag of tricks.

  At which point, J.G. Ballard has noticed an interesting phenomenon; the mainstream itself has been forced to behave like a gigantic independent, because there is so much choice within it that the concept of the ‘faceless corporation’ is breaking down. The chicanery of Enron and a thousand movies featuring evil companies called the Tyrell Corporation or The Company is so familiar that the old model could no longer be trusted.

  What happens next is intriguing. London's Brunswick Centre, for two generations a rundown gangland of crumbling flats and reeking takeaways in Bloomsbury, was given a facelift. The flats were restored and a dozen chains replaced the little shops. Outrage! cried people who had never ventured there. Save Our Street! Signatures were sought and petitions signed. To no avail; the corporations moved in. They bred better choice in a clean, safe environment, which in turn bred farmers’ markets and open days in all the area's previously sealed buildings. Although the whole place looks a little like the ‘perfect’ societies of Logan's Run and Gattaca, no one misses the betting shops and chicken huts. So, in microcosm, this is where the mainstream starts to improve on the independent.

  A handful of small stores still exist nearby, though, and while rushing late to work I passed a bookshop. It was 9:25am, and the owner was pottering about with a coffee. I asked for a book and was told to bugger off until the shop ‘officially’ opened. The owner drank his coffee and finally opened half an hour late, by which time he'd lost a dozen sales. And I'm supposed to sign a petition for this?

  Independents are nice when they sell cakes, but at the cinema they're usually nothing of the kind. In the UK we can't see a good selection of foreign films at all, because a ‘foreign film', to an independent, is a nice bourgeois French drama or a Chinese historical epic that will bring in white middle-class punters. But Europe makes mainstream films just like Hollywood—the difference is that you can't see them in Britain. So it's okay for Brice De Nice or Le Coeur Des Hommes or Crimen Ferpecto to please French and Spanish crowds, but they don't fit the ‘indie arthouse’ demographic they'd be forced into here.

  So it is with art. As the grim roll-call of rich, bored and boring artists trot through the Sunday papers—whose turn is it this week, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst or Gilbert & George?—we are lured into thinking that this is choice. It's not, of course, because choice is finding a 19-year-old art student's web page and wanting to see more.

  Which brings us, with a heavy heart, to books. A Simpsons episode once featured a bookstore called King ‘N’ Koontz, and it was as likely to have been an independent as a major chain, because the problem starts with the publishing house readers who keep in mind a strange idea of the ideal customer: a mum enjoying a well-earned respite after putting the kids to bed; a feisty teenager who falls in love with the printed page in a summer park—this is what a female friend of mine refers to, disparagingly, as Ladyscience, an emotional inexactitude that keeps rigorous, original, unformulaic books out of the stores, and the small press can sometimes be just as guilty as anyone else.

  Luckily we have the net, an appropriate term for something that stops stuff from falling through and being lost forever. But why is it that the rare and wonderful books are mostly old? Tartarus Press is one of the few companies brave enough to publish modern literary experiments, although you need deep pockets to buy them. Small houses like PS and Telos are great but unrepresented in stores. Borders still stocks most of my mystery novels under ‘Horror’ because of a computer glitch their staff aren't qualified to rectify. And yet, I want to believe in the idea of the Indie Corporation, and there are reasons to be cheerful. Waterstones encourage their staff to share knowledge and form relationships with readers and writers. The Brunswick Centre is now a place to sit and read, rather than somewhere to run through fearfully. And Ballard encourages us to embrace the new corporate world, although he issues a health warning with the edict.

  The losers here are still writers, because he who controls the media controls everything, and that means—at least in the West—the USA, which might explain why there's no adult horror or SF any more. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy films like, say, 30 Days Of Night, but the CGI and digital step-framing used to make them are now so commonplace that we need the back-to-basics originality one finds every day in the dark corners of YouTube. Music videos from bands like Justice and Beirut present more ideas and moods in two minutes than most films can deliver in two hours. The unspoken key word in this column is the idea. For, while the new corporate culture gives us choice, comfort and safety it removes anything as subversive and dangerous as a brain-hurting idea, and the currency of ideas are what we writers trade in.

  Ideas appear to cost nothing. They don't, of course, but that doesn't stop producers from picking the brains of writers and giving nothing back. Go into almost any bar in London and you'll hear people discussing ideas for films, books, websites, art that they want to create—the British are, by nature, creators. But we happily surrender our best ideas because we have no outlets, and because we have no money. Magazines like this (and Strange Attractor, which I urge you to seek out) consist of nothing but ideas. Does that makes us the enemy of the new corporate world? No, it makes us friends because friends are always easier to rob. And our creative community is the constant repeat-victim of idea larceny from those with the outlets and the finance. Thinking this through, if we make friends with the new corporate culture instead of hating it so much, we might be able to make ourselves seen and heard. Revenge appeasement? Now that would be a good idea.

  Copyright © 2007 Christopher Fowler

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  MUST SEE TO APPRECIATE—Scott Nicholson

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  Scott is the author of six thrillers, five screenplays, numerous short stories and writing articles. He
's also a freelance editor and award-winning journalist, which means he pretty much lives off words. Hobbies include raising goats, tending an organic garden, swimming, ghost hunting, and playing guitar, but his favourite activity is writing love letters in invisible ink. He is vice president of the Horror Writers Association and is currently adapting his latest book They Hunger as a graphic novel. His carefully disheveled Internet persona is found at hauntedcomputer.com

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  This was the part that Reynolds hated the most.

  The deal was so close he could almost smell it. The fish was nibbling, practically had the worm between his nubby gums. Reynolds had wowed the mark with the double bay windows, the parquet flooring, the loft bedroom with skylight, and the view of the Appalachian Mountains stretching a blue hundred miles in the distance. Custom cabinets and a cherry stair railing hadn't hurt, either, and the deck was wide enough to field a baseball game. Surely that was enough to convince anybody that this twenty-acre piece of real estate and 7,200-square-foot floor plan was the steal of a lifetime, especially at the sacrificial price of four hundred grand.

  But the mark wanted to see the basement. They always wanted to see the basement. It figured. Reynolds was stuck handling the only haunted house on the local market, and these idiot buyers didn't make the job any easier.

  "The bulb's burned out in the basement, David,” Reynolds said. “Had the caretaker up here the other day, and said he'd get around to changing it. You'd think he'd carry one in his truck, you know? Good help is hard to find around these parts, David."