Black Static

Black Static #13 comes complete with a cluster of novella reviews, a serendipitous thirteen of them in all. Last time I reviewed novellas, which was back in #8, I asked some of the writers being reviewed if they'd care to talk about their favourite novella(s), and as I can't think of anything original for this time I decided to repeat the exercise with four of the people reviewed (and I'll catch the other guys at some later date, maybe).

It wasn't supposed to be a Stephen King love-in, but that's just the way the cookie crumbles, as the master of hometown horror himself might put it.

MATT VENNE

Nobody is better than Joe R. Lansdale, so it should come as no surprise that he's the author of my favorite novella - the only problem for me is choosing which one. On some days it would have to be The Magic Wagon, with its beautifully nostalgic portrayal of the old west alongside such characters as a wrestling ape named Rot Toe and a years-dead Wild Bill Hickock. On other days my favorite novella has got to be The Big Blow, a more ornery look at another period lost to time, the days leading up to the 1900 Galveston Hurricane, in which Lansdale's version of Jack Johnson prepares for the boxing match of his life against the only-could-Lansdale-create-this-type-of-character John McBride (who turns up again in my favorite book of all-time, Sunset and Sawdust). And still on other days my favorite novella shifts from the bat-guano-crazy Dead in the West (the best Weird Western ever - go ahead and check, it's a verifiable fact), to the pitch-perfect simplicity of The Boar, to the incredibly rich Mad Dog Summer (which eventually blossomed into the Edgar award-winning The Bottoms). Adding to my (fantastic) dilemma in choosing a favorite Lansdale novella is the fact that I've recently heard he has another one on the way, something called All the Earth Thrown to the Sky about the Great Depression in the Dust Bowl. You know what? Let's just go ahead and call that book my favorite novella of all time. Or at least one of them. I guess this piece should have been about who my favorite writer of novellas (and comics and short stories and novels and screenplays) is - because then there'd be no dispute.

JOSEPH D'LACEY

Stephen King's shorter fiction really worms into me. I loved The Long Walk.

The characters in this tale ought to be coming of age and The Long Walk is a rite of passage of sorts. In most of King's coming-of-age stories, kids pass through all three stages of initiation - separation, ordeal and return. In The Long Walk, however, they don't make the third step.

Besides being a tale of society gone wrong, The Long Walk suggests there is no longer a notable transformation from teen to adult. Instead of walking into their own power during adolescence, children walk into the bland death of adulthood not knowing who they are or why they're here.

The creeping, ever present halftracks of the story, with their vigilant troops waiting to pick off rule-breakers, are all too redolent of a society that demands you walk its very specific path and do nothing extraordinary. The road in the tale is a road to nowhere. But so is the road it refers to. Whether Stephen King knowingly created this metaphor or not, what he's done in The Long Walk is nail down the central crisis of modern youth.

It's brilliant, apposite and, sadly, still true decades after the writing.

STEPHEN VOLK

A really undervalued work by Stephen King, for me, is the novella Apt Pupil. I for one rate the sleek, concise King far more than the overblown burger-and-fries "airport novel" King, and this is one of his best, focusing as it does on the uncomfortable theme of American fascism (with the long shadow of the Peter Bogdanovich film Targets cast over it). Amongst British authors on the other hand, as most aficionados know, Tim Lebbon is a master of horror and fantasy, but his work is most potent when it's emotionally grounded and real. His remarkable novella The Reach of Children comes from so close to the heart it hurts. Seen through the eyes of a grieving child, and touching the child in us all, it is simply told, yet simply unforgettable. Another superb novella that was a revelation to me, never having sampled the author before and never thinking of him as a genre writer, is The Body by Hanif Kureishi. A Dorian-Gray like fable of re-found youth with the "be careful what you wish for" caveat, this is a brilliant, pitch-perfect exploration of narcissism, ageing, the futility of life and the fragility and emptiness of beauty.

CAROLE JOHNSTONE

As Stephen King is probably the king of novellas, I guess I'd better start with him. A long-standing favourite is Bachman's The Long Walk. It was just about the first novella I ever read, and its simple premise of one hundred teenage boys taking part in a seemingly innocent walking contest that soon descends into Battle Royale territory, is incredibly well done. Given that the action rarely deviates from the walk itself, character development dominates the story, and while bleak and brutal, it paints a vivid and very believable alternative future. The sheer volume of King's novellas meant that picking just one was difficult. Other favourites would be The Library Policeman and The Sun Dog.

While I'm not a huge fan of the Charlie Parker novels, I have always admired John Connolly's short fiction. Nocturnes is a collection that I've read over and over, but the novella The Cancer Cowboy Rides is a fantastic small town horror story, superior to most others I've read.

One of my more recent reads is Ray Bradbury's Somewhere a Band is Playing, alongside Leviathan '99 in Now and Forever. I have admired Ray Bradbury since reading The Veldt as a teenager, and Something Wicked This Way Comes is just about the best novel I've ever read. Somewhere...is another small town story, but Bradbury's beautiful prose and unique blend of fantasy and reality is like enjoying a few glasses of wine in a long, hot bath!