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Black Static Issue 27
Black Static is the successor to The Third Alternative magazine, which was founded in 1994. When TTA Press acquired Interzone in 2005 it was no longer necessary to publish science fiction and fantasy in The Third Alternative. So its replacement was retitled Black Static and now its contents are original horror/dark fantasy fiction and illustrations plus related news and reviews of books, movies and DVDs. It is not celebrity oriented. This edition has the text of the print edition but some illustrations, graphics and advertisements are not present.
The title and strapline reference 'electronic voice phenomenon' (EVP), the noise found on recordings which some people interpret as the voices of ghosts. The film White Noise, starring Michael Keaton, could more accurately be called Black Static. What makes the title even more suitable is that 'Black Static' is also Paul Meloy's British Fantasy Award winning story from The Third Alternative.
The Third Alternative was never afraid to push the envelope, and nothing has changed in that regard. Black Static has earned much praise for its style, bravery, editorial and fiction content. Its stories are innovative and daring, never afraid to shock or disturb, yet always entertain.
The magazine publishes some of the finest Horror writers working today: Christopher Fowler, Afterlife creator/writer Stephen Volk, Lisa Tuttle, Nicholas Royle, Conrad Williams, Tony Richards, Scott Nicholson, Steve Rasnic Tem, Cody Goodfellow, Mélanie Fazi, Matthew Holness (creator and star of TV’s Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace), Michael Marshall Smith, Simon Clark, Graham Joyce, Gary McMahon, Alexander Glass, Joel Lane, to name just a few. Alongside these is a dazzling array of new talent such as Aliette de Bodard, Daniel Kaysen, Shannon Page, Roz Clarke, Ray Cluley, Sarah Totton, James Cooper, Nina Allan, Eric Gregory and many more.
A unique fiction magazine requires unique presentation and Black Static delivers on this front too, thanks to the extraordinary original artwork of artist like David Gentry and Ben Baldwin along with a design that delights in breaking rules.
Every issue contains a striking news feature called White Noise, compiled by Peter Tennant. Pete also supplies all the magazine's book reviews in his Case Notes column which runs to at least fourteen pages and includes interviews, sidebars and factoids. Tony Lee reviews the latest DVD/Blu-ray releases in his Blood Spectrum Column. Christopher Fowler, Stephen Volk and Mike O'Driscoll supply thought-provoking comment columns, and every issue gives away lots of free stuff.
Black Static is published bimonthly, in alternate months to Interzone (we offer a discounted joint subscription to both print magazines). You can subscribe to the print version using the TTA Press website's shop.
The title and strapline reference 'electronic voice phenomenon' (EVP), the noise found on recordings which some people interpret as the voices of ghosts. The film White Noise, starring Michael Keaton, could more accurately be called Black Static. What makes the title even more suitable is that 'Black Static' is also Paul Meloy's British Fantasy Award winning story from The Third Alternative.
The Third Alternative was never afraid to push the envelope, and nothing has changed in that regard. Black Static has earned much praise for its style, bravery, editorial and fiction content. Its stories are innovative and daring, never afraid to shock or disturb, yet always entertain.
The magazine publishes some of the finest Horror writers working today: Christopher Fowler, Afterlife creator/writer Stephen Volk, Lisa Tuttle, Nicholas Royle, Conrad Williams, Tony Richards, Scott Nicholson, Steve Rasnic Tem, Cody Goodfellow, Mélanie Fazi, Matthew Holness (creator and star of TV’s Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace), Michael Marshall Smith, Simon Clark, Graham Joyce, Gary McMahon, Alexander Glass, Joel Lane, to name just a few. Alongside these is a dazzling array of new talent such as Aliette de Bodard, Daniel Kaysen, Shannon Page, Roz Clarke, Ray Cluley, Sarah Totton, James Cooper, Nina Allan, Eric Gregory and many more.
A unique fiction magazine requires unique presentation and Black Static delivers on this front too, thanks to the extraordinary original artwork of artist like David Gentry and Ben Baldwin along with a design that delights in breaking rules.
Every issue contains a striking news feature called White Noise, compiled by Peter Tennant. Pete also supplies all the magazine's book reviews in his Case Notes column which runs to at least fourteen pages and includes interviews, sidebars and factoids. Tony Lee reviews the latest DVD/Blu-ray releases in his Blood Spectrum Column. Christopher Fowler, Stephen Volk and Mike O'Driscoll supply thought-provoking comment columns, and every issue gives away lots of free stuff.
Black Static is published bimonthly, in alternate months to Interzone (we offer a discounted joint subscription to both print magazines). You can subscribe to the print version using the TTA Press website's shop.
64 pages, Magazine
First published February 9, 2012
9 people want to read
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 17, 2021
Empty of Words, the Page – Gord Sellar
“Whitney breathed again…” — “February’s bristling winds had come,…”
An accessibly but cumulatively sophisticated story about obsessional love for one of one’s students – an unrequited obsession utterly felt by the reader as well as by the literature-teacher protagonist himself via the skill of the writing – the story’s writing, his own writing. And the real-life-mingled overheard *sound* of the writing in books and notes as if the curse of word-molten ebooks are already audio-beating the burning books at their own game…. I am a sucker for any story that mentions Ives, Rachmaninov, Mahler, Debussy (even Salieri) as well as Pound’s Cantos, but I am a sucker for this story *anyway*. It eventually becomes a relentless chain letter in which we shall all one day participate (Cf: the story ‘The Chain’ that I have just serendipitously read as part of a concurrent (“Derridean“?) real-time review of a story collection by another author.). “When his fascination with the w ebbed away, he looked up.” (19 Feb 12)
Perhaps this stunning story also resonates with the world’s first blank story (published in ‘Nemonymous 2’ in 2002)? (19 Feb 12 – two hours later)
The Little Things – Jacob Ruby
One of the books being ‘taught’ to the students in the previous story was ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley. Now we have a very powerful and often repulsive scenario that seems to factor-in a detached monstrous life towards, say, a conceptual feel of Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go’ … here, further factored-in towards a historically poor-house-type, God-fearing ‘extended family’ co-responsibility. We share the tentative tussle of Cassie (who looks to be about 13) with the story’s reality of deadpan, taken-for-granted predicaments, as she tries to find her own self of emotions, the correct loyalties as well as the location of the street with sloughed-off familial connections amid the poignant searching for ‘care’ to give as well as to accept, for roots to watch unroot as well as take root again. Meanwhile, the mother’s own envisaged writing is factored into the story’s writing and – like the previous story’s internal writing – underpins a tragic sense of unrequitedness. Spreading parcels of of word-text: reaching out for audibility: “This was not the first time the growths had come into the world with cries.” (20 Feb 12)
Cuckoo Spit – Stephen Bacon
“Sunlight was crowding the edges of the curtain. The clock ticked a comforting heartbeat. Timber was stretching within the structure of the building. The fridge began humming to itself, distracting her.”
[Stephen Bacon is a rising star of the Horror genre whose work appeared on three separate occasions within ‘Nemonymous’ from 2008. So very pleased to see his work synchromeshing with ‘Black Static’]. An atmospheric, well-stylised, often effectively poetic Cumbrian tale of feral concupiscence — conveying a similar (but equally different) relationship between a daughter (Megan) and her mother to Cassie’s relationship with her own mother in the previous story, both relationships containing parallel senses of detachment by creatures or outgrowths or ‘were’-nesses acting as vehicles for humanity, and vice versa. The relationships here are also well-drawn and any metamorphoses are sufficiently subtle-haunting without allaying their head-on power as horror images. No mean feat. And the cuckoo spit’s conceit as salaciousness is another subtle but striking momentariness of realisation. And, arguably, the metaphor of the cuckoo as occupier is present here. Who is the occupier? The animal-human parasite/host symbiosis? Or simply Megan subconsciously assuming control of the house just before her mother’s ‘departure’? Not even the characters always know their own motives because, in my experience, any author is often powerless to help such characters’ eventual puzzlings-out of self (thankfully). And that lack of ultimate control works for me here, even if Bacon may not have consciously intended to relinquish any authorial control for creative purposes. [Me brainstorming:- In tune with the chain of cause and effect: the empty page from the first story above: awaiting some unknown force to start writing upon it — so as to help alleviate those challenging tentative tusslings that most writers (old and new) have when beginning a story from scratch or claw. That unknown force is ‘occupying’, in micro, this portrait of Cumbria or, in macro, the fluid-glistening White Noise of ‘Black Static’ itself?] (20 Feb 12 – three hours later)
The Churn – Simon Bestwick
“Two employees’d already been sacked for ‘churning’ – instead of amending a policy because details’d changed, you cancelled it and incepted a new one, in order to claim a sale.”
Not that I was guilty of it myself, I know all about that meaning of the word ‘churn’. But before today, I had not really related it to the word ‘chain’ – nor does this story do so explicitly, but the idea as used here certainly resonates with the ‘chain letter’ conceits above and resonates again – serendipitously – with my concurrent real-time review, I mentioned above, here: and the plot resonates strongly, too, with the title story reviewed there: ‘Nowhere to Go’. Meanwhile, it is an original plot here of a middle-aged lady who is subject or subjected to encroaching ‘Gaslight’ (Ingrid Bergman) or ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ (Mia Farrow) types of paranoiac fear – in a very effective and shuddery way – cumulatively a masked ball to share your dreams. Occupied or occupier, mad or enmaddened, one never really knows for sure. (21 Feb 12)
Family Tree – V.H. Leslie
“People shouldn’t be so scared of embracing their bestial natures.”
This is a telling outcome of the gestalt of ‘Black Static #27’ stories in the form of, for me, a hilarious account of the human-animal ‘chain’ in the sheer explicitness of reaching its own Bestwickian mid-‘churn’ of a “missing-link” – here upon the brink of some challenging form of ‘Cuckoo-Spit’ stickiness and symbiotic feral ‘were’-ness. ‘The Good Life’ sit-com’s fashionable mock-sophisticated natural food and self-sufficiency – in family form – taken to the logically absurd gap-jumping along its chain of cause-and-effect, with the schoolboy protagonist (on the brink of going out with girls) coping with the reaction of his peers to the sudden revelation (after their ball is kicked into the long grass) of a highly embarrassing incident in one of their regular “parent share” evenings at his own house (NB: the Jacob Ruby story’s own ‘parent share’ concept as an illuminatory comparison!). Yes, hilarious: potentially repulsive, too – but with a skilful sense of thought-provoking seriousness as it touches on ‘mental illness’ in a similar way to ‘The Churn’ and, familially, to the Jacob Ruby story with its treatment of bodily-change and family-links via a semi-genealogical ‘Tree’ of sloughed-off connections. The ending allows our protagonist to make a sudden absurd jump which is, in the context, perfect: making me, in a vaguely metaphorical parallel way, proud openly to read Horror fiction, whatever people think of me. But does Gord Sellar’s ‘Frankenstein’ conceit come into it?
Another great statically dynamic group of blackstories. (21 Feb 12 – two hours later)
END
“Whitney breathed again…” — “February’s bristling winds had come,…”
An accessibly but cumulatively sophisticated story about obsessional love for one of one’s students – an unrequited obsession utterly felt by the reader as well as by the literature-teacher protagonist himself via the skill of the writing – the story’s writing, his own writing. And the real-life-mingled overheard *sound* of the writing in books and notes as if the curse of word-molten ebooks are already audio-beating the burning books at their own game…. I am a sucker for any story that mentions Ives, Rachmaninov, Mahler, Debussy (even Salieri) as well as Pound’s Cantos, but I am a sucker for this story *anyway*. It eventually becomes a relentless chain letter in which we shall all one day participate (Cf: the story ‘The Chain’ that I have just serendipitously read as part of a concurrent (“Derridean“?) real-time review of a story collection by another author.). “When his fascination with the w ebbed away, he looked up.” (19 Feb 12)
Perhaps this stunning story also resonates with the world’s first blank story (published in ‘Nemonymous 2’ in 2002)? (19 Feb 12 – two hours later)
The Little Things – Jacob Ruby
One of the books being ‘taught’ to the students in the previous story was ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley. Now we have a very powerful and often repulsive scenario that seems to factor-in a detached monstrous life towards, say, a conceptual feel of Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go’ … here, further factored-in towards a historically poor-house-type, God-fearing ‘extended family’ co-responsibility. We share the tentative tussle of Cassie (who looks to be about 13) with the story’s reality of deadpan, taken-for-granted predicaments, as she tries to find her own self of emotions, the correct loyalties as well as the location of the street with sloughed-off familial connections amid the poignant searching for ‘care’ to give as well as to accept, for roots to watch unroot as well as take root again. Meanwhile, the mother’s own envisaged writing is factored into the story’s writing and – like the previous story’s internal writing – underpins a tragic sense of unrequitedness. Spreading parcels of of word-text: reaching out for audibility: “This was not the first time the growths had come into the world with cries.” (20 Feb 12)
Cuckoo Spit – Stephen Bacon
“Sunlight was crowding the edges of the curtain. The clock ticked a comforting heartbeat. Timber was stretching within the structure of the building. The fridge began humming to itself, distracting her.”
[Stephen Bacon is a rising star of the Horror genre whose work appeared on three separate occasions within ‘Nemonymous’ from 2008. So very pleased to see his work synchromeshing with ‘Black Static’]. An atmospheric, well-stylised, often effectively poetic Cumbrian tale of feral concupiscence — conveying a similar (but equally different) relationship between a daughter (Megan) and her mother to Cassie’s relationship with her own mother in the previous story, both relationships containing parallel senses of detachment by creatures or outgrowths or ‘were’-nesses acting as vehicles for humanity, and vice versa. The relationships here are also well-drawn and any metamorphoses are sufficiently subtle-haunting without allaying their head-on power as horror images. No mean feat. And the cuckoo spit’s conceit as salaciousness is another subtle but striking momentariness of realisation. And, arguably, the metaphor of the cuckoo as occupier is present here. Who is the occupier? The animal-human parasite/host symbiosis? Or simply Megan subconsciously assuming control of the house just before her mother’s ‘departure’? Not even the characters always know their own motives because, in my experience, any author is often powerless to help such characters’ eventual puzzlings-out of self (thankfully). And that lack of ultimate control works for me here, even if Bacon may not have consciously intended to relinquish any authorial control for creative purposes. [Me brainstorming:- In tune with the chain of cause and effect: the empty page from the first story above: awaiting some unknown force to start writing upon it — so as to help alleviate those challenging tentative tusslings that most writers (old and new) have when beginning a story from scratch or claw. That unknown force is ‘occupying’, in micro, this portrait of Cumbria or, in macro, the fluid-glistening White Noise of ‘Black Static’ itself?] (20 Feb 12 – three hours later)
The Churn – Simon Bestwick
“Two employees’d already been sacked for ‘churning’ – instead of amending a policy because details’d changed, you cancelled it and incepted a new one, in order to claim a sale.”
Not that I was guilty of it myself, I know all about that meaning of the word ‘churn’. But before today, I had not really related it to the word ‘chain’ – nor does this story do so explicitly, but the idea as used here certainly resonates with the ‘chain letter’ conceits above and resonates again – serendipitously – with my concurrent real-time review, I mentioned above, here: and the plot resonates strongly, too, with the title story reviewed there: ‘Nowhere to Go’. Meanwhile, it is an original plot here of a middle-aged lady who is subject or subjected to encroaching ‘Gaslight’ (Ingrid Bergman) or ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ (Mia Farrow) types of paranoiac fear – in a very effective and shuddery way – cumulatively a masked ball to share your dreams. Occupied or occupier, mad or enmaddened, one never really knows for sure. (21 Feb 12)
Family Tree – V.H. Leslie
“People shouldn’t be so scared of embracing their bestial natures.”
This is a telling outcome of the gestalt of ‘Black Static #27’ stories in the form of, for me, a hilarious account of the human-animal ‘chain’ in the sheer explicitness of reaching its own Bestwickian mid-‘churn’ of a “missing-link” – here upon the brink of some challenging form of ‘Cuckoo-Spit’ stickiness and symbiotic feral ‘were’-ness. ‘The Good Life’ sit-com’s fashionable mock-sophisticated natural food and self-sufficiency – in family form – taken to the logically absurd gap-jumping along its chain of cause-and-effect, with the schoolboy protagonist (on the brink of going out with girls) coping with the reaction of his peers to the sudden revelation (after their ball is kicked into the long grass) of a highly embarrassing incident in one of their regular “parent share” evenings at his own house (NB: the Jacob Ruby story’s own ‘parent share’ concept as an illuminatory comparison!). Yes, hilarious: potentially repulsive, too – but with a skilful sense of thought-provoking seriousness as it touches on ‘mental illness’ in a similar way to ‘The Churn’ and, familially, to the Jacob Ruby story with its treatment of bodily-change and family-links via a semi-genealogical ‘Tree’ of sloughed-off connections. The ending allows our protagonist to make a sudden absurd jump which is, in the context, perfect: making me, in a vaguely metaphorical parallel way, proud openly to read Horror fiction, whatever people think of me. But does Gord Sellar’s ‘Frankenstein’ conceit come into it?
Another great statically dynamic group of blackstories. (21 Feb 12 – two hours later)
END
Displaying 1 of 1 review