Black Static Issue 41

Black Static

by Andy Cox (Editor), Richard Wagner (Illustrator), Stephen Volk

Apologies for this July–August issue appearing out of sequence in that we have not posted issues 39 and 40 yet. Those two issues have been delayed by a hard drive fault and some files were lost. We are working on recovering these files but, meantime, we hope Black Static 41 fills the gap.
Issue 41 has new horror and dark fantasy fiction from Tim Waggoner, Vajra Chandrasekera, Ralph Robert Moore, Carole Johnstone, Leah Thomas, Ray Cluley and Thersa Matsuura. Richard Wagner provided the cover art and some interior illustrations along with Vincent Sammy, and Joachim Luetke. The usual features are present: Comment in Coffinmaker's Blues by Stephen Volk and Blood Pudding by Lynda E. Rucker; Blood Spectrum - Tony Lee’s DVD/Blu-ray reviews; Case Notes - Peter Tennant’s book reviews which includes a substantial interview with A.K. Benedict, and Mike O'Driscoll’s Silver Bullets weird detectives on and in the box investigated.


Essentially Black Static is a fiction magazine containing short stories in the horror and dark fantasy genres but it covers other aspects of the genre via comment columns, reviews of books, movies, DVDs and TV.


Fiction this issue
None So Empty by Tim Waggoner
Caul by Vajra Chandrasekera
Ghosts Play in Boys' Pajamas by Ralph Robert Moore
Equilibrium by Carole Johnstone
The Driveway by Leah Thomas
The Hutch by Ray Cluley
The Spider Sweeper by Thersa Matsuura


The issue's artists are
Vincent Sammy
Joachim Luetke
Richard Wagner


Peter Tennant's Case Notes book and novella reviews this issue include:
The Art of Ian Miller, Dark Work - Keith Minnion, Veins and Skulls - Daniele Serra •
A Stir of Echoes - Richard Matheson, The Ritual of Illusion - Richard Christian Matheson •
Home and Hearth - Angela Slatter, The Elvis Room - Stephen Graham Jones, Water For Drowning - Ray Cluley •
The Beauty of Murder - A.K. Benedict with author interview •
Carrie - Neil Mitchell, The Thing - Jez Conolly, The Silence of the Lambs - Barry Forshaw, Splice Vol7 #1, The Sorcerers - edited Johnny Mains
Red Cells - Jeffrey Thomas, Marrow’s Pit - Keith Deininger, Deceiver - Kelli Owen, Hell’s Door Messages From the Dead - Sandy De Luca, Shattered - C.S. Kane, Ash and Bone - Lisa von Biela, Elderwood Manor - Christopher Fulbright Angeline Hawkes, Dead Five’s Pass - Colin F. Barnes, Whom the Gods Would Destroy - Brian Hodge, I Am the New God - Nicole Cushing, Love and Zombies - Eric Shapiro, Ceremony of Flies - Kate Jonez, When We Fall - Peter Giglio, Sow - Tim Curran


Tony Lee's DVD reviews this issue: The Last Horror Movie, Cellar Dweller, Demon Legacy, Pit and the Pendulum, I Frankenstein, Re-Animator, The Pit (aka Jug Face), True Detective, True Blood, 13 Sins, Rapture, Haunter, The Forgotten, The Attic, Delivery, Devil's Due and others


Mike O'Driscoll’s Silver Bullets this issue:
TV Noir on DVD/Blu-ray
Weird Detectives: True Detective, Hinterland

Genres: Horror, Short Stories

ebook

First published July 1, 2014

Reviews

[Bogdan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I want to subscribe to a horror magazine and I thought to try a random issue of Black Static.

The story weren't so bad, but in the same time, not what I expected. To be sincere, only Leah Thomas's The Driveway was quite interesting and was well thinked. But the final part with a lot of reviews, about a tone of horror books literally hooked me.

Maybe I will try another issue to see how the stories will be, but in a way, the reviews are a strong factor that half convinced me to buy this magazine.

Until then, I will study further the market to make up my mind on this subject.

[Matt Dent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Regular readers — hello to both of you! — will know that I like my horror dark, and tailor my reading habits thusly.

Recently, though, rather than fiction I sometimes feel like I could just be reading the news. Probably I’m just noticing it more than usual, but it seems to have become a never ending cavalcade of misery and suffering; new stories of murder and worse on a daily basis.

Misery, it goes without saying, is not entertainment. What is fertile ground for exploration in the hands of writers of fiction, is bleak and unremittting in the cold light of the real world, shorn of analogy.

But fiction is where we explore the world. We can bring out ideas from today and test them, analyse them, know them. All fiction is analogy, after all. So when the world is become so dark a place, where does our fiction have to go in order for us to get a handle on it? How far into the dark night must we go to flush out the real monsters behind our fears?

And on that note, the latest issue of Black Static.

Opening story, “None so Empty” by Tim Waggoner, is an odd one. That feels slightly redundant when talking about a TTA Press magazine, but it’s true. A retired man , with not much joy in life, finds a mannequin head in a dumpster near his block of flats. Maybe a mannequin head. It plays on his mind, as his neighbour — who lacks a head — makes advances on him. It’s a softly stirring story of passion for life gone cold, and loneliness in the crowd.

Vajra Chandrasekera’s “Caul” is a very short story — which I like — which uses a passive voice to weave a mystical and compelling story — which I also like. A man recounts elements from his life, including being born with a caul, never learning to swim, and an apparent curse which takes women from his life by drowning. It’s not clear whether the curse is something he hates or savours, but there is an abstract beauty in the conclusion.

“Ghosts Play in Boy’s Pyjamas” by Ralph Robert Moore sets this issue on another route, to the dark places I mentioned before. A boy and his newly single father move into a new house, next door to another boy and his widowed mother. The parents grow close, but although the boys do too there is a dark undertone of violence to the neighbour. I say undertone, it emerges starkly and shockingly into the fore. The titular ghost is a construct, but it lingers over the whole thing even as it comes towards a chillingly unflinching conclusion. Not an easy read, but an excellent piece of fiction.

“Equilibrium” by Carole Johnstone is another dark one, though a little more softly. A woman whose husband is dying tries to find solace and feeling in an online relationship, whilst navigating a twisted, bitter bereavement. It’s reasonably simple in construction, but has captured a real sense of confused grief, ringing remarkably true. The slow reveal of key pieces of information twists the nature of the story from one thing to another as it pushes onwards, and is entertaining even if the conclusion — if not what has come before — feels a little predictable.

Leah Thomas’ “The Driveway”, on the other hand, was a complete curve ball for me. A woman uses some sort of magic to make herself a child out of meat and household objects, who unexpectedly starts to grow up. It is an excellent picture of motherhood and the difficulty — on both sides –of letting go, which for some reason recalled to me Pinocchio. The circular nature of the internal story, though, was what really impressed me. I think this was the first of Thomas’ stories that I’ve read, and hers will be a name I’ll be keeping an eye out for.

Welcome back to Black Static for Ray Cluely! Ray is one of my favourite short story writers, but hasn’t featured in these pages since issue #37. Here we have his story “Hutch”, which takes us again to a blended home of two broken families, and to the nearly-teenage daughter struggling to adjust. The metaphors of a feral (dead) rabbit, and the titular dark, putrid hutch recreate a familiar story with an undercurrent of reality shifting away and the main character — and the reader — caught somewhere in the middle.

Finally, “The Spider Sweeper” by Thersa Matsuura takes us to a Buddhist temple in Japan. The main character is the titular spider sweeper, caring for the arachnids as well as undertaking other chores. Haunted by the maybe-ghost of a traveller he fell in love with, the story explores their past and heads towards a conclusion of heartbreak and jealousy undercut with a final line which ramps up the bizarre to eleven. It jars a little, but not necessarily in a bad way. A neat ending for this issue’s fiction, I suppose, but this is by far the lightest story in a pitch black issue.

There is, of course, the usual host of non-fiction as well. The two columns, as I have said many times before, are one of my favourite parts, and something which I think Interzone could stand to replicate.

Both Stephen Volk and Lynda E. Rucker take a very personal approach, both relating their own personal journeys with horror. Stephen dwells on the inherent superiority (my term) of short fiction, something of which I am very much in favour of. He brilliantly extols the thrill of something as short, simple and devastatingly effective as a horror short. Lynda gives us an intensely personal look into her life, and how she came to be such a horror fan. It’s not something I can really review, so much as saying buy a copy and have a read. Which goes for everything in here really. The usual reviews finish up, including an interview with A.K. Benedict, an author with whom I confess I was not previously familiar.

And so closes what was, in my opinion, one of the darker of Black Static ‘s recent issues. If you like your horror dark, cold and liable to wake you up in the night feeling uncomfortable, then this is the magazine for you.

[Des Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

None So Empty by Tim Waggoner
“A plastic spoon, a splintered chicken bone, a stained paper plate that’s folded in half.”
This is unarguably a genuine classic. After a while having a break from TTA reviewing, I only return surreptitiously to discover straight off a terribly haunting deadpan story of people in their lonely mid-sixties, a sort of old-fashioned Avant Garde art-cinema short film, one that, if I told you what happens in it, would be spoiled.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.