BLACK STATIC #41
Authors: Andy Cox
BLACK STATIC
Transmissions From Beyond
ISSUE 41
JUL–AUG 2014
ISSN 1753-0709
© 2014 Black Static and its contributors
PUBLISHER
TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, UK
EDITOR
Andy Cox
BOOKS
Peter Tennant
FILMS
Tony Lee
ISSUE 41 COVER ART
Richard Wagner
SUBMISSIONS
Unsolicited submissions of short stories are always very welcome, but please follow the basic guidelines on our website
STEPHEN VOLK
LYNDA E. RUCKER
FICTION
TIM WAGGONER
illustrated by Vincent Sammy
VAJRA CHANDRASEKERA
RALPH ROBERT MOORE
illustrated by Joachim Luetke
CAROLE JOHNSTONE
LEAH THOMAS
RAY CLULEY
THERSA MATSUURA
illustrated by Richard Wagner
REVIEWS
PETER TENNANT ON BOOKS
including interview with A.K. Benedict
TONY LEE ON DVDS/BLU-RAYS
MIKE O’DRISCOLL ON TV NOIR
weird detectives
STEPHEN VOLK
STAB WOUNDS
Like many people reading this column, I grew up with the lurid, seductive covers of Pan, Fontana, tales they wouldn’t let Hitchcock make, and the gunmen, gallants and ghosts of Dennis Wheatley. Later I’d sink into the warm, black water of Alberto Manguel’s magical realism, which Amazon now calls “a kaleidoscope from the Magi of the imagination”, consuming countless other paperback anthologies along the way.
Through these, my love of the genre was undoubtedly unlocked (or unblocked, for it felt like a liberation) by such visionary writers as Poe, whose ‘Tell-Tale Heart’, with its unforgettable opening POV – much imitated but never surpassed (even by Robert Bloch’s ‘Enoch’) – and M.R. James with his rising bed sheets, wetness and adjectives reminiscent of genitalia.
“No sex please, we’re ghost stories!” the latter author famously proclaimed – a belief that seems bizarre or even perverse to these ears. But my adolescent self was uninterested in whether his stories contained convincing human relationships. Nor was he, it appears. “If any of them succeed in causing their readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable when walking along a solitary road at nightfall,” he said, “or sitting over a dying fire in the small hours, my purpose in writing them will have been attained.” (Angry young Colin Wilson, however, was quite dismissive of James, saying his ghosts “could frighten no-one but a nervous schoolboy.” Later the existentialist generously revised his incompetent initial assessment, praising M.R.J.’s scholarly cast of mind and adding “at his best…there is a gentle, ironic delicacy of touch.”)
Robert Aickman is another, very different, master, acclaimed by his many literary admirers not for invoking spectres or putrescent guardians so much as a far more ambiguous feeling of psychic unease. Regarding his classics, such as ‘The Hospice’, David A. Riley has coined the lovely phrase Kitchen Sink Gothic as the antithesis of Jamesian horror. No scholars. No atmosphere in the traditional gothic sense. Instead, as John Coulthard describes it: “The quotidian Britishness of Alan Bennett, darkening into the inexplicable nightmare of David Lynch.”
I love this, but I still have a very soft spot for Conan Doyle’s ‘Playing with Fire’ – for me forever indistinguishable from the 1971 TV version of ‘The Horse of the Invisible’ starring Donald Pleasence as Carnacki, while, for all his expertise in folksy apple-pie-and-Martians, the Bradbury short story that chilled me to the bone, and still does, was ‘The Emissary’.
Another perfect beast is W.W. Jacobs’ ‘The Monkey’s Paw’, while Ambrose Bierce’s ‘Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ reminds us that the best “horror” stories are amongst the best short stories ever written, period. But the genre has indistinct borders, and Graham Greene’s ‘The Overnight Bag’ and ‘A Shocking Accident’ stretch the sinister and outré without ever leaving the realm of the real.
Borges showed me the fantastical can be concise, anecdotal, even read like a footnote in a history book. While at the other end of the stylistic scale Angela Carter’s unapologetically baroque language delivered a wry feminism via twisted, carnivalesque gags and loud, crashing symbolism.
All these authors have been influences on my writing, but none more so than Raymond Carver – whose pared-to-the-bone style almost instructs us to leave out everything except what happens, which is why he is the god to which all screenwriters sacrifice their first born – or the majority of their description, anyway. It’s no coincidence that his brilliant story ‘So Much Water So Close to Home’ has been adapted twice for film (in Altman’s
Short Cuts
and Ray Lawrence’s
Jindabyne
).
What I adore about Carver is that he excels in implying a world beyond the story. He tells you everything about a relationship, yet has only shown you a scene between a man and his wife eating breakfast. Reading a collection like his
Elephant
inevitably led to my appreciation of similar un-showy writers like Tom Wolff, Richard Ford, Bernard MacLaverty and Russell Banks.
Editor of the exemplary
Shadows & Tall Trees
Michael Kelly agrees that he loves how short stories say so much in so few words. How they spirit you to another place. That they are “the perfect art form”.
Something hard to refute when faced with the evidence of late.
Only Robert Shearman would dare write about a man in Hell sharing a cell with Hitler’s dog (‘Damned if You Don’t’), but the result is a comic turn, expertly handled, hilarious until the final twist of the knife. This story makes you feel guilty for being even remotely entertained, and hits you with an ingenious wake up call, all in a few pages. Tim Lebbon’s unforgettable ‘Discovering Ghosts’ is a masterclass in writing from the heart and touching the soul. Mark Morris continually shows he is at the top of his game with stories like ‘Waiting for the Bullet’ and ‘Fallen Boys’, while Conrad Williams, whose use of language is unparalleled, reaches new heights with a layered story such as ‘The Pike’. Together with the king of haunting brevity, Nicholas Royle, I consider all these writers “uncannologists” who will continue to inspire and excite me.
A more recent inspiration – no,
revelation
– has been Nathan Ballingrud, whose
North American Lake Monsters
is an achingly real tapestry of the sort of fears, mistakes, regrets and inabilities to change that curse us as human beings, salted and spiced by the downright weird. These stories do not
need
to be horror, but horror – here’s the thing – elevates them and makes them sing. The effortless naturalism of the prose is breathtaking, but more importantly, here is someone who knows what horror is
for
. “Whatever fantastic element is present in these stories, it’s not a primary focus of (the characters’) lives. They react to it, or are illuminated by it. And their reactions are what I really care about.” Failed masculinity, a broken family, frantic struggles not to drown “and sometimes drowning anyway.” Ballingrud sees horror as the only way to express the lives of people, deep down. He reinvigorates genre tropes as sharpened tools for carving tales with a Carver sensibility. And sensitivity. For instance, in ‘Sunbleached’ he describes a vampire as “a dancer pretending to be a spider” and I’m damned if you need any more than that.
Vitally, he is quoted in a recent interview saying: “I believe self-interrogation is a key to strong fiction. You should write about what you are ashamed of. You have to be merciless with yourself. That’s why I like to write about characters so easy to hate. Writing fiction is, in no small part, about practicing empathy: and if there is a noble purpose in literature, it’s [that].”
This is exactly what I aspire to. Horror is there to desolate, yes, but to demonstrate humanity, not inhumanity. To howl such dilemmas and emotions as sadness, loneliness, grief, anger – in a way that non-genre cannot. “The goal,” as Ballingrud says, “is to be intimate.” Echoing this, Carole Johnstone says, “Horror is supposed to unsettle you, but a good horror story should also move you and make you think.”
And now my time is up. There’s no space left to mention Joyce Carol Oates or Helen Marshall, or Alison Moore whose ‘Small Animals’ and ‘Late’ are heart-stoppingly good. Or James Lee Burke, who blew my mind with thirteen incredible pages called ‘Jesus Out to Sea’. Or Ray Cluley. Or a recent discovery, Aiden O’Reilly, whose terrific ‘The Laundry Key Complex’ appeared in
Unthology
4
…
Lovecraft’s quote may be true: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest fear is fear of the unknown” – but the unknown voices that lie ahead of me to discover in the future of short story writing produce nothing but a feeling of unbridled joy.