Black Static #47 (Magazine)
Gareth Jones
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Edited by Andy Cox
Published by TTA Press
Issue 47 of Black Static hits the asphalt with James Van Pelt’s opening story, On the Road with the American Dead, wherein travelling salesman Jeremy Lowe finds his usual relaxing cross-country drives interrupted by the random appearance of ghosts in his car.
Some talk to him, revealing snippets of their past lives – regrets, successes and lasting grudges – while others remain silent… but they all come and go with equal abruptness. Initially shocked by this peculiar new routine, Jeremy soon learns to cope with it before one particular visitor refuses to be ignored – insisting on teaching Jeremy the importance of remembrance, and the stories of lives that need to be told.
At its core, On the Road with the American Dead is a simple tale, awash with sentimentality but assuredly not maudlin with it. A few nice touches of humour pep things up as Jeremy tries his best to blank out his unwelcome passengers and, ultimately, the central message is a worthy observation of the human condition.
Kate Jonez follows up with All the Day You’ll Have Good Luck. Here, teen Jessup is a girl apart from the normal world. She refers to herself as a shadow, an opinion formed from her role in her family’s ongoing trade – thievery and con-artistry.
As a group, Jessup, her mother and two younger sisters travel the US, occasionally settling town in small towns for a bit. In well-practiced form, the others create a distraction in crowds whilst Jessup, the pickpocket, moves silently amongst the marks, relieving them of wallets, purses and loose cash.
In this particular instance they’re in the backwater town of Frederick, Oklahoma, kicking off a job at the carnival. Things don’t go exactly to plan, however, and Jessup soon finds herself wandering the site accompanied by the local sheriff’s wayward son, Calvin. As events take a seemingly inevitable path given the setting and character types, Jonez brings us instead toward an ending that feels allegorical, perhaps mythical… but just a bit too perplexing to work.
The puzzling (and somewhat unbelievable, given the circumstances at the background of the story) ending notwithstanding, however, All the Day You’ll Have Good Luck is a wonderfully written tale with a dazzling sense of place about it. Jonez brings the sights and sounds of the carnival alive, and even the most minor of characters are ably brought to life through a perfect economy of words.
As mentioned, the path of Jessup’s evening feels predetermined as soon as she engages with Calvin, an element which Jonez uses to keep the reader firmly on track towards the inevitable train wreck – but the attempted rug-pull just doesn’t work as well as it should.
Next up is John Connolly’s Prohibition-era nightmare, Razorshins. Following a number of inconsistencies and missing product, bootlegger Tendell Tucker finds himself and his crew accompanied on their latest run by brutish enforcer Mordecai Blum. Reporting to gangster kingpin King Solomon, Blum is all business and all fury – a quiet, yet powerful and wholly unpredictable force of the criminal underworld.
When heavy snow sets in, Tendell opts to spend the night at the home of local moonshiner Earl Wallace, hoping to stash the cars and booze away from the potential eyes of the authorities while waiting out the snowfall. A violent disagreement over whether to leave an alcoholic offering for the mythical beast Razorshins sees events take a dark turn – and darker still when the penalty for failing to heed tradition raises its malevolent head.
Simply put, Razorshins is a stonking piece of work, holding just about everything it takes to keep yours truly wholly satisfied when it comes to fiction. Perfect pacing, a powerful sense of foreboding and the-worst-is-going-to-happen-but-when-is-that-going-to-be unpredictability pull you through every line until the bloody, monstrous climax. A thoroughly brilliant read.
The issue’s traction takes a slow with the next story, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s The Devil’s Hands, wherein a young woman named Cocoa lies awake at night, listening to the laboured breathing of the monstrous creature that lives in her bathroom at night. Rather than an outright monster piece, however, Stufflebeam’s story concerns itself with Cocoa’s own laboured existence.
Fractured from society, she’s an occasional prostitute of sorts for her roommate — slacker “artist” Vincent – and thoroughly unhappy with her lot. Taking drugs before family dinner and having to step away due to subsequently tripping balls isn’t quite as telling her mother’s nonchalant, semi-defeatist response to the situation – but by the end, the path to personal redemption becomes most definitely open to her.
The problem with The Devil’s Hands is that, whilst it’s an appreciably realist look at the frustrations of a life stuck spinning wheels in mud, it’s rarely unsettling and ultimately lacking in a sense of threat. The prose is perfectly toned in the same manner as Cocoa’s disheartened floatation through daily existence, but it’s difficult to find personal concern for her even as the final confrontation with the monster unfolds toward an ending which, admittedly, is nicely tuned to a reluctant sense of hope.
Ray Cluley takes things down a much more assuredly dark path with his grim character study When the Devil’s Driving. Teenager Lucy is a goth-like social outcast who spends her days lurking at the shore of Devil’s Basin – a fetid local pool nestled away in the woods – where she smokes cigarettes, offers silent worship to Satan and imagines all of the brutal killings she could enact on her preppy schoolmates.
One day, her lounging and fantasising is interrupted by the arrival of a younger schoolgirl, who takes an inquisitive liking to Lucy’s sarcastic, rebellious nature. Awful things await for the pair of them, however, and Lucy soon finds herself on a rapid ride into hell – literal or allegorical, you decide.
Cluley’s formidable skill at drawing well-rounded, but profoundly damaged characters is out in force in When the Devil’s Driving, painting a thoroughly disturbing and deeply shocking story of a lost cause run riot – someone so far removed from, and philosophically starved by, the norms of society that the most supreme kind of personal destruction feels more like a finish line than something to be afraid of.
Or perhaps, Cluley offers, it’s a starting line. Because when the Devil’s at the wheel, who knows where you’re off to next.
Finally, this issue’s fiction rounds off with Eric J. Guignard’s superbly realised post-apocalyptic yarn A Case Study in Natural Selection and How it Applies to Love. In a future scorched Earth, humanity is on a downturn. Settlements work to survive in camps surrounded by desert and desolation, carrying on with normal life in the hope that soon either the planet, or the efforts of human science, will find a resolution.
There’s another big issue, though. One that isn’t easily investigated…
Spontaneous Human Combustion… colloquially referred to as “fireballing”.
Without rhyme or reason, people pop, spark and burst into flame – immolated in moments due to some unknown combination of factors.
Amidst all of this lies schoolboy Kenny, who lives with his scientist father in the relatively civil settlement of Stockton. Navigating the general situation of humanity, Kenny also struggles with his place in a love triangle – hoping against hope to gain the affections of his crush, Liz… but she’s into their more physically capable friend, Ogre.
Guignard paints Kenny as a smart, reasonable kid, so while he laments the situation, he isn’t crass enough to do anything untoward about it. It makes for a pleasant read, following the cognisance of an intelligent youngster who more than understands the state of affairs around him. Whilst not pinned down by needless negativity, he also isn’t bound by foolish optimism – and all of this plays out within an excellent drawn world and central scenario that would easily lend itself well to fiction of a broader scope.
Meanwhile, Stephen Volk plays further with his knowledge of Alfred Hitchcock in his column (which he also ably demonstrated in the excellent novella Leytonstone) and Lynda E. Rucker continues her everlasting quest to dissect just what it is that makes horror so appealing to the human psyche.
On top of that, there’s an extended Q&A with author Ray Cluley and Black Static‘s usual quality lot of book, TV and film reviews. All in all, yet another excellent issue that is easily worth dedicating some shelf space to.
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Magazine
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