Black Static

Cover

The cover art is 'Take Death' by Joachim Luetke

 

Contents

 

Fiction

China by Ralph Robert Moore
illustrated by Vincent Sammy 

From the time he was a little boy, he dug holes.

Walking outside in the wet morning, bird songs, with salt in his pocket, small hand scattering the salt across the ground before he started, to anesthetize the patch he had chosen, so the dirt would not feel the pain of his trowel.

 

Cora by Steven Sheil

The house next door to Diana had been empty for four months before the new family moved in. On the Tuesday the place had been quiet, its windows dark, the flaking metal gate past which Diana walked every day on her trip to the local shop, closed and latched. She had got used to its hollow presence, its bricks joined to the bricks of Diana’s house, its wall to her wall, but absent of the thin sliver of activity which Diana brought to her home, instead just sitting there, ever-present but inanimate, like a paralysed limb.

 

The House of Y by Joanna Parypinski 

I confess I had never planned on joining a sorority, the very notion being, at least to me, inextricable from a kind of sexualized femininity incompatible with my own lack of real gender conformity, yet after going through the motions of recruitment out of an abject curiosity with secret societies and social convention, I soon found myself invited to join the Y House, the strangest and least popular sorority on campus. Its sisters were not like the other sorority girls familiar to clichés and television tropes; they were the outcasts, the intellectuals, the ones not pretty enough to join the more well-regarded sororities with their teeming giggling hordes, their long tan legs, their #blessed hashtags. Yet in a strange way, the Y House was perhaps the most selective and exclusive house, its ancient roots creeping back to the earliest of sororities – certainly the earliest one here.

 

Everybody Knows That Place by Giselle Leeb
illustrated by Joachim Luetke

Everybody knows that place. A place that blooms with fresh holidaymakers, excited, screaming children and the freshly retired in spanking new motorhomes, already too big for their needs – we should have taken our time to choose. The huge family-sized tents. The place where everything is neat and mapped out and simple, where the rituals continue, only slightly transformed: the extra walk to wash the dishes, to take a shower.

 

The Fifth Horseman by Nicholas Kaufmann
illustrated by Ben Baldwin 

He thought of them as “the Four Horsemen” – four of his fellow professors at the small Northeastern university where he taught. They were an inseparable unit, looking for all the world like those apocalyptic figures of legend as they walked shoulder to shoulder from their offices at one end of the campus to their classrooms at the other. In the faculty lounge they sat together, clumped closely around a table like mussels on a wave-washed rock. Out on the quad they spoke in hushed tones to each other, their backs to the rest of the world, a closed circle. Dunbar Brooks wouldn’t have minded the Four Horsemen so much, might not even have noticed them in the first place, if it weren’t for the fact that Yvonne was one of them.

 

Columns

Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker

GOOD FOR YOU

Someone, or more than one person, said something to the effect of “I write to find out what I know” – the internet credits Flannery O’Connor, Joan Didion, and even Stephen King with some variation of it. Maybe all of them did.

 

Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore

A MASK FOR THE BONES BENEATH

I know this has happened to you.

You’re finally back in your home, after having to deal with people for all those brightly-lit work hours, front door shut and locked at the end of the long day, wanting to relax, the time when you can finally do whatever you want to do, not what other people want you to do, and in your happy loneliness you’re watching a movie. Isn’t watching a movie, in some ways, like listening to our parents when we’re still really young, crawling across carpet?

 

Reviews

Case Notes: Book Reviews

Daniel Carpenter: New Fears 2 edited by Mark Morris • Laura Mauro: Hell Ship by Benedict J. Jones, A World of Horror edited by Eric J. Guignard • David Surface: One Good Story (True Crime by M Rickert) • Georgina Bruce: Gamble by Kerry Hadley-Pryce (plus author interview) • Mike O'Driscoll: The Dark Masters Trilogy by Stephen Volk • Philip Fracassi: Sleazeland by Cody Goodfellow

Blood Spectrum: Film Reviews by Gary Couzens

Night of the Demon • The Fog • Prince of Darkness • They Live • Monkey Shines • Candyman • Troll: The Complete Collection • Night of the Creeps • Schlock • Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds • Deadbeat at Dawn • City of the Living Dead • Incident in a Ghostland • The Dark • The Monster • The Hatred • Down a Dark Hall • The Innocents • Iceman • Lake Placid: Legacy

 

Where To Buy Black Static

Black Static is available in good shops in the UK and many other countries, including the USA where it can be found in Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million and elsewhere. If your local store (in any country) doesn't stock it they should easily be able to order it in for you so please don't hesitate to ask them. You can also buy the magazine from a variety of online retailers, or a version for e-readers from places like Weightless Books, Amazon, Apple, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble etc.

The best thing though is to click on Shop above or the link below and buy the new issue, or better still take out a subscription, direct with us. You'll receive issues much cheaper and much quicker, and the magazine will receive a much higher percentage of the revenue.

 

Please Spread the Word

If you enjoy Black Static please blog about it, review it, or simply recommend it to your friends.

 

Coming Soon

Black Static 67 is out in January. Magazines like this cannot survive without subscriptions, so thank you for your support.

 

The Teardrop Method by Simon Avery

2018 WORLD FANTASY AWARD FINALIST

Black Static readers will be interested to know that TTA Novella 4, The Teardrop Method by popular contributor Simon Avery, is out now as a B-Format paperback of 160 pages with wraparound cover art by Richard Wagner and a bonus connected short story. You can buy it now from the new TTA Shop or subscribe to four novellas for just £24 (10% off during September with the SEP10 code).

"The Teardrop Method is a story about stories; a beautiful novella about love and loss and the connections people make and then sometimes break. It's quiet, haunting, and ultimately moving" Gary McMahon

"Nightmare plotting infused with an aching mitteleuropäische sadness, Simon Avery’s tale of music and mortality could be the novelisation of a lost Argento movie" Nicholas Royle

"Without any prep or background, I started reading the novella The Teardrop Method by British author Simon Avery, and was immediately engaged by the moodiness, the bleakness, the desperation and creaky, world-weariness of the setting and characters. These appealing elements perfectly coalesced into a tragic and fervent eulogy to the creative process - to Art with a capital A - as a means of salvation and transcendence and doom, and to love itself in all its complex iterations, exploring the concept of loving, dying, and even killing, in order to achieve the proper reception code from the eternal Muse while the roaring Danube drowns out the rest of the world. This is a very European story, in all its faded baroque finery and cafe claustrophobia. The snow is heavier here, the dawn ever more surprising. The supernatural and the natural are not so far removed in places like this. The old and the new forever caught in a twirling waltz. I highly recommend this novella, and cannot wait to see what melody Mr Avery pens next. I'll be listening" T.E. Grau

"A monumentally haunting novella" Des Lewis

“Simon Avery’s descriptions of Krysztina’s music makes me want to hear it. It’s a subtle and beautifully told tale with echoes of European film-makers like Haneke and Kieslowski, as well as their predecessors like Franju and Polanski. It conjures a powerful sense of foreboding that reminds me of Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, and shares with that film a sense of being haunted. It has moments of profound sadness and yet still managed to surprise me with its uplifting ending. One of the novellas of the year” Mike O'Driscoll

“Majestic and compelling throughout, The Teardrop Method is an exemplary specimen of a standout novella. It’s beautifully written, excellently produced, and a sign of publisher TTA Press at the top of their game” Gareth Jones, Dread Central

"I can honestly say that Simon Avery's The Teardrop Method is one of the finest and most fascinating novellas I've ever had the pleasure of reading. I highly recommend this novella to speculative fiction readers, because it's a beautiful and subtly complex exploration of death, love, loss and how to recover from a tragedy. Its darkly beautiful atmosphere and delicate story will captivate everyone who appreciates quiet horror" Rising Shadow

"The Teardrop Method is a complex, intricately structured piece of dark fiction, or perhaps quite horror. It is a story about the weaving of stories, about the transmutation of the darkest personal grief into art, and about the coming to terms with the inevitability of death. As a key line puts it – Art leads you back to the person you were after the world took you away from yourself" Gary Dalkin, Amazing Stories

"Simon Avery’s prose is spare and masterly, and certainly the equal of any Booker Prize nominee I’ve ever read. As much goes on between the lines as on them. The interstitial dark spaces are filled with horrors and a creeping unease that drags the reader in and won’t let go. The characterisation and storytelling, too, are brilliant" John Dodds, Amazing Stories

"This highly original piece is written with the sad, chilly atmosphere of much central European fiction but it has a very British rejection of miserabilism for its own sake. The desire for even the most fantastical stories to make sense and to make progress keeps breaking through and the result is a charming, and charmingly odd, novella which stays in the mind like an overheard song" Mat Coward, Morning Star

"Avery's story is a dark and tense thriller, set against a cold Hungarian back drop. The reconnection between father and daughter gives The Teardrop Method melancholy in light of the father's declining health, and the handling of the supernatural element is done so latently it feels authentic and hence, genuinely spooky. The prose here is compulsively readable and even the stranger members of the cast pop off the page" Nick Cato, The Horror Fiction Review

 

Crimewave 13: Bad Light

Available from the TTA Shop for just £10 is the new edition of Crimewave. This 240-page American Royal paperback contains groundbreaking and often genre-bending new stories by Simon Bestwick, Gerri Brightwell, Georgina Bruce, Ray Cluley, Mat Coward, Catherine Donnelly, Stephen Hargadon, Andrew Hook, Linda Mannheim, Ralph Robert Moore, Mike O'Driscoll, Steve Rasnic Tem and others, with wraparound cover art by Ben Baldwin.

“One of the very best anthologies I have ever read, in any genre. An absolute gem” Tim Lees