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    Black Static #45 Horror Magazine (Mar – Apr 2015)
    Black Static #45 Horror Magazine (Mar – Apr 2015)
    Black Static #45 Horror Magazine (Mar – Apr 2015)
    Ebook218 pages2 hours

    Black Static #45 Horror Magazine (Mar – Apr 2015)

    By TTA Press

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    About this ebook

    The March–April issue contains new dark fiction by Steve Rasnic Tem, S.P. Miskowski, Laura Mauro, Stephen Hargadon, Emily B. Cataneo, Andrew Hook, Cate Gardner, and Danny Rhodes. The cover art is by Richard Wagner, and interior illustrations are by Richard Wagner, and Ben Baldwin. The usual features are present, including the regular comment columns by Stephen Volk (Coffinmaker's Blues) and Lynda E. Rucker (Notes From the Borderland); Blood Spectrum by Tony Lee (DVD/Blu-ray/VoD reviews); Case Notes by Peter Tennant (book reviews), which includes an extensive interview with Helen Marshall.

    Fiction this issue
    The Second Floor by S.P. Miskowski
    The Grey Men by Laura Mauro
    The Visitors by Stephen Hargadon
    The Fishing Hut by Steve Rasnic Tem
    Hungry Ghosts by Emily B. Cataneo
    The Frequency of Existence by Andrew Hook
    The Drop of Light and the Rise of Dark by Cate Gardner
    The Cleansing by Danny Rhodes

    The issue's artists are
    Richard Wagner
    Ben Baldwin

    Non Fiction this issue;
    Notes From the Borderland - Lynda E. Rucker - columnist
    Coffinmaker's Blues - Stephen Volk - columnist
    Blood Spectrum - Tony Lee - DVDs/Blu-Ray reviews
    Case Notes - book reviews by Peter Tennant
    Interviewee - Helen Marshall

    Peter Tennant's Case Notes book and novella reviews this issue include
    OBLIQUE MANOEUVRES: HELEN MARSHALL: Hair Side, Flesh Side; Gifts for the One Who Comes After plus author interview
    SHORT, SCARY TALES PUBLICATIONS: Fade to Black by Jeff Mariotte, illustrated by Daniele Serra; Containment by Eric Red, illustrated by Nick Stakal; I Tell You It's Love by Joe R. Lansdale, illustrated by Daniele Serra; Rockabye Worm, written and illustrated by Glenn Chadbourne
    SWAN RIVER PRESS: Dreams of Shadow and Smoke edited by Jim Rockhill & Brian J. Showers; Reminiscences of a Bachelor by J.S. Le Fanu; Here With the Shadows by Steve Rasnic Tem; The Silver Voices by John Howard; The Dark Return of Time by R.B. Russell; The Green Book 3
    ELLEN DATLOW ANTHOLOGIES: The Cutting Room, Nightmare Carnival, Fearful Symmetries

    Tony Lee's DVD reviews this issue:
    The Guest; Dark House; Grace: The Possession; Jessabelle; The Babadook; The Calling; Annabelle; The Other; Clown; [REC] Apocalypse; Wolves; Horns; Zombie Resurrection; Doc of the Dead; Ninjas vs Monsters; Phobia; Hunting the Legend; Exists; Scar Tissue; A Haunting at Silver Falls; Kissing Darkness; Like Water for Chocolate; American Ghost Story; ABCs of Death 2

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTTA Press
    Release dateMar 7, 2015
    ISBN9781310182754
    Black Static #45 Horror Magazine (Mar – Apr 2015)
    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 #45 Horror Magazine (Mar – Apr 2015) - TTA Press

      BLACK STATIC ISSUE 45

      MAR–APR 2015

      © 2015 Black Static and its contributors

      PUBLISHER

      TTA Press

      5 Martins Lane

      Witcham

      Ely

      Cambs CB6 2LB

      UK

      ttapress.com

      EDITOR

      Andy Cox

      andy@ttapress.com

      BOOKS

      Peter Tennant

      whitenoise@ttapress.com

      FILMS

      Tony Lee

      tony@ttapress.com

      EVENTS

      Roy Gray

      e: roy@ttapress.com

      SUBMISSIONS

      Unsolicited submissions of short stories are always very welcome, but please follow the contributors’ guidelines

      logo bw-new_fmt

      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 45 MAR–APR 2015 

      TTA PRESS

      COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2015

      PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS. ISBN: 9781310182754

      CONTENTS

      COMMENT

      COFFINMAKER’S BLUES

      STEPHEN VOLK

      NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

      LYNDA E. RUCKER

      FICTION

      THE SECOND FLOOR

      S.P. MISKOWSKI

      illustrated by Richard Wagner

      THE GREY MEN

      LAURA MAURO

      illustrated by Ben Baldwin

      THE VISITORS

      STEPHEN HARGADON

      illustrated by Richard Wagner

      THE FISHING HUT

      STEVE RASNIC TEM

      HUNGRY GHOSTS

      EMILY B. CATANEO

      illustrated by Richard Wagner

      THE FREQUENCY OF EXISTENCE

      ANDREW HOOK

      THE DROP OF LIGHT AND THE RISE OF DARK

      CATE GARDNER

      THE CLEANSING

      DANNY RHODES

      REVIEWS

      BLOOD SPECTRUM

      TONY LEE

      DVD/Blu-rays

      CASE NOTES

      PETER TENNANT

      Books + interview with Helen Marshall

      COFFINMKER’S BLUES

      STEPHEN VOLK

      stephen-volk.tif

      ON THE SELLING OF SOULS, AND OTHER COMMODITIES

      In the final episode of Mad Men Season 6, Don Draper has a meeting with Hershey and pitches a sentimental story of a father giving chocolate to his son. Suddenly he stops in his tracks and, fatally, tells the truth – that he is actually an orphan, he never had that kind of moment with his own father, and the ad he just sold them was a complete lie. The clients’ jaws drop. Subsequently Don gets suspended for his irrational behaviour. More than merely one of the best scenes in a series unsurpassable for character writing and thematic brilliance, to me it was the encapsulation of the entire show: portraying the difference between selling them what they want and telling an uncomfortable truth.

      Wonderfully, Don got it wrong, but he got it right. Because in talking about his past for the first time he redeemed himself finally as a character, even though he blew his job. In the last shot of the episode he is seen taking his children to the house he grew up in – a brothel, hinting that he is finally ready to tell the truth after a brilliant career lying for a living.

      The pitch is a curious arena, and one all screenwriters nowadays have to learn. Like all skills it can be taught, but, as with all talents, some are gifted and some have to work at it. Being congenitally shy, and not a natural performer, I’m definitely in the latter camp.

      But I worked in advertising too, inheriting the very desk Salman Rushdie had just vacated at Ogilvy’s, and I always say I learnt many things during my time there as a copywriter: thinking concisely and visually; the discipline of problem-solving (coming up with five ideas by lunchtime); but most important of all, how to stand up and sell creative ideas, back them up, deflect criticism, and think on my feet – all of which stood me in very good stead when, later, I wanted to sell movie ideas I actually believed in.

      The great danger with pitching, however, is that we can get over-excited with its importance because it’s so damned easy compared to actual writing. We’ve all heard the immortal "Alien: Jaws in space or The Abyss: Alien underwater elevator pitches (indeed, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Danny DeVito – Twins is apparently not apocryphal), but if we aren’t careful we slip into ludicrous territory where an increasingly desperate Alan Partridge blathers ridiculous one-liners in an attempt to secure a TV commission. Monkey Tennis?"

      Yes, buyers have the attention span of gnats, but the idea isn’t all: and to pretend that a fledgling writer with no track record can pitch a TV series idea and get it made is not just deceitful and unjust, but cruel.

      Ideally, first make sure you have a good story, not just the logline. By that I don’t mean a fully-formed three-act structure – though that can work too. (I pitched from three index cards to Michael Douglas’s Stonebridge Productions once, and got a script deal out of it.)

      The real danger there is, of course, if you tell them everything in the pitch, the actual writing, when you come to it, is dead as a doornail. They’ve clapped till their hands bled and now you’re staring at the blank page, facing their eventual, inevitable disappointment.

      Personally I prefer to entice rather than describe. If you behave like Richard E. Grant in The Player (Open on prison gates; it’s raining…) you’re giving them nothing to contribute creatively. And everyone wants to contribute creatively.

      My technique, rather, is to let them into my private thought process, offering them the chance to get on this exciting train and watch it develop into something special. Thus I can counter awkward questions with an enthusiastic: I don’t know yet! If they like writers, they might just be honoured you shared with them something profound that drives you. Who wouldn’t be?

      "I was sitting in a cinema alone, thinking this is the most vulnerable place since the shower in Psycho: what if someone’s in the seat behind me?" The plot is almost insignificant if you get them with the hook. Or rather than a hook, by tickling the belly of the fish.

      But beware. If the pitch is half-baked or falls on unappreciative ears you can fall out of love with a perfectly good nascent gem.

      When I was in L.A. in the 80s, long before Jurassic Park was a twinkle in Michael Crichton’s eye, I pitched a film I called Monsterland, about a dinosaur theme park. The exec’s reaction was lacklustre and he suggested it would only work as a comedy. Downhearted, I shelved the idea forever.

      Then there’s the competitive pitch, for instance a book adaptation, in which the producers are talking to only a few other writers but you know it’s probably thousands.

      You tell them what you like, what you don’t like so much, what potential you see, how you’d approach it – all the while giving them free ideas of course. I pitched to write the US adaptation of Ringu, which I didn’t get (halfway through my 40-minute pitch I asked what the producer thought, only to be told by her minions she’d left the room to take a phone call. On another occasion a producer at Tri-Star literally took a phone call while I was pitching to him, gesturing me to carry on talking as he did so).

      Again in the 80s I pitched for the remake of Westworld, saying the robot should be Clint Eastwood: the baby exec’s eyes lit up with iridescent excitement, and thereafter I heard exactly nothing.

      Horror, as an additional burden, is uniquely difficult to sell, because at root it’s about the unacceptable truth. It never wants to play the game (as Stewart Lee calls it) and that’s always the antithesis of corporate thinking and marketing-led capitalism, which is about making people pay to feel good. Therefore, beginning with the pitch, you have to sell something uncomfortable and sometimes downright repugnant as something of pleasure and desire. Something that people will want.

      We live in an era when the Angel of the North is used as a bread advert, and we’re told: If you like Hannibal you’ll like The Fall. However Literature demands curiosity, empathy, wonder, imagination, trust, the suspension of cynicism… according to Man Booker Prizewinning novelist Eleanor Catton. "My loyalty to Levin in Anna Karenina is of an entirely different nature to my loyalty to, say, Paul Newman’s salad dressing…it is not a preference but an affinity."

      And yet we must sell. Even though, according to several industry bods I’ve talked to, our dear number-crunchers don’t want to read, or even hear, what your movie is about – they want to see it. So the paradigm for the future is, don’t waste time on a pitch, or even the script, instead produce a mood reel or fake trailer that dupes the fools into thinking your £50,000 sci-fi flick is going to look like Inception.

      Anyhow, the most vital thing about pitching – verbally or visually – and it’s often ignored, is not the how but the what. At the heart of your spiel (well-rehearsed or entirely off-the-cuff) should be your feelings for the subject of your story and why you want to tell it. No – have to tell it. Whether the listener gets on that train or not. You’re not asking their permission or approval. It’s burning a hole in your soul.

      Which is why the investment is always in you – not the idea. And why I always leave the insecure little boy from the Valleys outside the door before I go in, pretending I’m a confident and dynamic screenwriter who deserves his place at the table. Apart from anything, I always remember someone telling me that no producer wants a writer to be yet another problem. You need to exude: Relax. I can do this. What’s more, I’m the best person for the job.

      If you manage to sell that, especially to yourself, you’re halfway to writing Scene One. And getting paid for it.

      NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

      LYNDA E. RUCKER

      lyndarucker3supercropped.tif

      OUR BODIES, OURSELVES

      It turns out that women are more responsive to transfiguration — Mademoiselle, Martyrs

      Horror, if we speak of it as a part of storytelling as old as stories themselves, has not always been enacted upon female bodies, but if your only exposure to the genre was horror movies of the past few decades, you might think otherwise. As tiresome, lazy and misogynistic as the rape-torture-murder-of-women trifecta in film after film can be, women’s bodies are also in many ways an ideal site upon which to enact horror because they are uniquely vulnerable in ways that male bodies are not.

      At the World Science Fiction Convention in London last summer, I was chatting with two women friends when a conversation came up about books that had really scared us in our youth. All of us were horror fans and yet it was one volume we all agreed on as frightening us to our very core in a way that no other had: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

      Our biology can be one of our worst enemies. In America, it’s been barely fifty years since the birth control pill allowed women to be both sexually active and opt out of pregnancy, and women’s access to birth control, abortion and other forms of family planning and health care remain constantly under siege there. In Ireland, where I live now, access to birth control is an even more recent innovation, abortion has never been legal, and women have endured horrific medical abuses that continue to the present day. Less than three years ago, a woman suffering a miscarriage died horrifically of septicaemia over a period of days despite being hospitalised for the duration because doctors refused her the pregnancy termination that likely would have saved her life until it was too late.

      It’s as though we are never very far from a reminder that our bodies are not really our own; that our hard-won freedoms can be taken from us at any moment.

      Horror has both uncritically reflected and grappled with these ideas. In fact, it was recently rewatching a couple of old favourites tread this ground that sparked the idea for this column. I’ve seen Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives (both based on novels by Ira Levin) so many times that I can’t remember when it first struck me how infantalised by their husbands both of the female protagonists are, how complete their husbands’ ownership of them is well before that ownership of their bodies becomes literalised.

      Of the two couples, Guy and Rosemary Woodhouse have the more traditional marriage; Guy treats Rosemary like a child, and she complies like one. Eventually, everyone treats Rosemary like a child – the neighbours, doctors – everyone except for poor old Hutch, and see how well that turned out. In fact, it’s this very infantalisation that makes it possible to conspire against her – in a conspiracy that can only exist against a woman. Throughout the film, Rosemary’s body is never her own; it belongs to her husband; it belongs to Satan; it belongs to the coven; it belongs to her unborn child; it belongs to the medical establishment. It’s perhaps fitting that the woman at the centre of all this owning is so underdeveloped a character; only in her friendship with Hutch do we get any sense at all of the individual who may have existed prior to her becoming Mrs Woodhouse, wife and expectant mother.

      In The Stepford Wives, Walter and Joanna Eberhart have a more equitable relationship than the Woodhouses although it still looks old-fashioned by today’s standards – and it’s this more-equitable relationship that Walter comes to find so distasteful over the course of the film. Even so, Joanna’s bids for independence feel more akin to an adolescent stretching her wings than the autonomy of a grown woman, but her frustrations are valid – and the price she pays, of course, is a fatal one. In The Stepford Wives, Joanna is literally objectified as a collection of parts – eyes, hair, a voice – and possessed by her husband and the men in town to be remade into a more acceptable wife and mother.

      These movies may be coming up on fifty and forty years old, respectively, but their feminist subtexts still resonate decades later. In the years since, slasher films evolved into torture porn and women are still getting hacked up and victimised. But another thread has emerged post-millennial, one that interrogates this use and abuse of women’s bodies.

      Jennifer’s Body, in which the body in question turns into an instrument of revenge when its possession backfires, used its title to tip us off in case we missed the subtext, and while I felt the film was ultimately a failure, I also found enough there of interest to wonder what a director with a better handle on Diablo Cody’s screenplay might have done with the material. Plenty of people hailed Teeth as a feminist response to tired old tropes about rape and fear of female sexuality, but I’m not convinced we’re exactly moving forward with a film that has the concept of vagina dentata at its core. Lovely Molly was a well-acted, well-made, and scary film about a woman’s lack of autonomy over her own body and sexuality, but ultimately it didn’t deal with its themes effectively for me – and so I wanted to love it, and could not. American Mary, written and directed by Canadian twins Jen and Sylvia Soska, has a woman enacting bodily horrors upon others, albeit consensually, in performing illegal surgeries within the extreme body modification community. Well, mostly consensually. American Mary gives us a rape-revenge storyline that actually worked for me for a change, but as it went on its treatment of its themes grew increasingly murky and incoherent.

      But let’s back up a few years, because no discussion of women and bodily autonomy in horror can be complete without a mention of Pascal Laugier’s 2008 film Martyrs. Is this yet another entry in the woman-as-object-of-torture subgenre wearing a shiny gloss of philosophy to mask a ferocious misogyny, or is it an ingenious examination of all that has come before, of women’s bodies as sites of suffering and redemption, of the ways

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