Black Static #44 (Magazine)
Gareth Jones
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Edited by Andy Cox
Published by TTA Press
Stephen Volk opens issue 44 of Black Static with the continuation of his ‘How to Stay Insane’ column from the magazine’s previous entry, speaking directly to the fellow writer’s brain about the rocky world of stress, rejection, writer’s block and the love/hate relationship all career writers inevitably cultivate when it comes to putting words on pages for a living. It’s frank, honest, yet ultimately hopeful and considered – much like Lynda E. Rucker’s column which follows it.
Leveraging her previous column also, Rucker enters the fray regarding the argument that ‘fantasy’ and ‘horror’ as genres should have a defined line between them when it comes to the likes of awards and societal bodies. Hint: She doesn’t agree that the two should be so easily pigeon-holed and segregated… and following her solid reasoning and astute observations, it’s likely that you won’t, either.
Simon Avery’s novelette Going Back to the World opens the curtains for this issue’s fiction with our protagonist, Susanna, receiving a drunken phone call from her ex-husband, Jack. Frustrated with his self-pitying, she puts the phone down on him – but not before he makes a chilling declaration: “It won’t stop following me, Suze. It’s been fucking following me for six months now. I don’t sleep anymore because I’m terrified of it, of what it’ll do.”
That night, Jack commits suicide via a cocktail of drink and drugs, leaving Susanna to inherit the large home in which he lived alone. She moves in with a view to getting rid of the contents before selling the house… but there seems to be something else in there with her – something that bangs around downstairs, switches off the lights and watches from the darkened havens of doorways and corners. Something that doesn’t seem to be held at bay by the ritualistic sigils painted all over the house.
Avery’s tale has everything it needs to make it a compelling page-turner of a read. The creepy set-up, brooding sense of unease, mysterious journals and thoroughly human characters all come together for a gripping yarn. When Susanna meets up with Jack’s erstwhile mistress, Felicity, Avery skilfully weaves his way through Susanna’s initial distasteful reaction to the woman before she realises that acting in such a manner simply won’t change the past. It makes Susanne a refreshingly logical character, and together she and Felicity set out to bring an end to what Jack has brought into being within the house – but in a surprising turn, Avery switches from the monster formula to something much more abstract and thematically inclined. It lends extra weight to the finish of a tale filled with the guilt and shame of shattered pasts, but in moving into that very personal darkness it somewhat lessens the threat and fear of its central creature. This is rather necessary, however, for Avery’s intentions when it comes to his treatise on the acceptance of past mistakes, letting go of toxic grudges and moving on with life.
More personal darkness comes up next in Priya Sharma’s The Absent Shade. Thomas Leung is a corporate assassin, brought in to take out high profile targets in a low profile manner in order to protect capitalist interests – but Sharma’s tale is less concerned with his present activities than it is with his past. A strongly-realised story of broken family life, The Absent Shade sees a young Thomas build a relationship with his magically gifted (and thematically named) nanny, Umbra. Given the ability to manipulate her shadow to amazing effect, Umbra uses her talents to entrance and amuse Thomas, taking him (however briefly) away from the daily frustrations of life with his spiteful, bickering parents. But a cruel, childish betrayal sees a darker side of Umbra’s abilities revealed, leading directly to the individual that he is in the present – resigned to an empty fate; a shell of a man.
Sharma does extremely well in her efforts to garner reader connection with the young Thomas and his nanny – feeding the inherent assumption that conventional circumstances in his broken past have led him down the path that he now treads – and it makes for a number of effective shocks when it comes to their behaviour as the story continues. Her prose is slick and flowing, effortlessly carrying you through to the finish – and while The Absent Shade isn’t what one could call particularly frightening, it’s very bleak stuff, filled with shadow and pit-like darkness of the soul.
Jackson Kuhl’s The Fishers of Men follows fishing enthusiast Howard Conway. During the summer months, he retires each weekend to his lakeside cabin, where he can while away his hours fishing for trout, enjoying the freedom and silence away from a wife and child that he has come to despise. Stressed due to the fact that he will have to give up his cabin because of the Metropolitan District Commission exercising eminent domain on the land, Conway begins to experience strange dreams of awakening in a submerged graveyard, meandering amongst the fish and kale, and hearing tempting voices beckoning him to join them in their watery realm where the trout are legion.
If there’s one thing that can be said about Kuhl’s story, it’s that the author really makes a weekend retreat for some fishing time sound like an exceptionally attractive proposition. He has a way with words that really bring Conway’s bliss to life in contrast to the drudgery that he merely endures during his weekdays, and the man himself is a slickly-drawn rendition of a character rendered listless by his daily lot. References to vampires point towards supernatural entities enticing the man for their own nefarious gains, but it all comes to a rather confusing and vague finish that is satisfying in broader terms but doesn’t seem to line up fully with the otherworldly pact offered to Conway.
More watery goods are up next with E. Catherine Tobler’s excellent short Sweet Water. Marie is a rotting, skeletal corpse, swept from her tomb by flood waters and dragged through hurricane-devastated streets in what appears to be an apocalyptic level flood. And she’s alive. Picked up by a young couple in a rowboat, who are naturally quite shocked to be coming into contact with a talking corpse, Marie’s origins and the nature of the disaster are unfolded throughout their conversation and towards a Tales from the Crypt-esque finale.
Sweet Water is short and (ahem) sweet, shooting along through its offerings at a snappy pace and with plenty of dark humour alongside a punch of tragedy. It genuinely feels as though it could have been lifted straight from the pages of an old EC Comics release. That should say enough about its quality without risking giving anything away. Great stuff.
The final fiction entry in this issue comes in the form of Tyler Keevil’s Samhain, which sees American-born Tod, now living in England with his wife, lamenting the Brits’ lack of engagement with the US style of Halloween festivities. Driving back from the gym, he notes the lack of pumpkins, the drawn curtains and the general feeling of discontent within the population. Completely enamoured with all of the pizzazz surrounding trick or treating, Tod stops his car to shout his address to three teenage boys who he believes are having little luck in their quest for candy, hoping to increase footfall so that his annual efforts don’t go unnoticed. Something seems wrong about these boys, however… and later that evening, they do indeed pay Tod and his wife a visit – and they have a peculiarly old-school approach to the ancient traditions of Samhain.
Keevil’s tale is effective in a number of respects. Firstly, Tod’s plight should capably ring true with anyone else in the UK who feels a little resentful or despondent about the prevailing grumpy attitude on these shores when it comes to what many decry as the “Americanisation” of Halloween that encourages children to harass and beg. Owing to his heritage, Tod truly feels alive at this time of year – fuelled by the creativity and sense of magic surrounding the date.
Of another heritage entirely are the boys that come to visit, and Keevil does a great job of not only planting that seed of dread in the very beginning but maintaining it throughout. Once Tod has obtained the boys’ attention, you know that something strange is inevitably coming to his door – and in throwing Tod’s wife into the mix alongside strange, static-laden phone calls that seem to be coming from another plane and a horror film (which many readers should recognise as John Cusack vehicle 1408) that ends much differently than Tod (and we) remember, the atmosphere is consistently spooky and oppressive.
And this lasts until the very end, with a kitchen table encounter with the strange trio of boys that is eerily amicable, yet subtly threatening, ending on a thoroughly disquieting note that embeds in the brain a cliffhanger loaded with festering doubt and unresolved tension. Samhain is another great story for Black Static, but if there’s one thing that yours truly found irksome, it would be Tod’s thoroughly English neighbours referring nonchalantly to their child being at “soccer” practice. It just never sounds right from the mouth of a Brit!
Once the fiction is through for this issue, we have the usual expanse of DVD/Blu-ray and book reviews, alongside an extensive – and very interesting – Q&A session with author Tim Waggoner, a number of whose novels also receive reviews alongside it.
Categorized:Reviews
