Black Static seems either unaware of the diversity of their potential audience, or determined to cater to a particular, narrow readership. The issue begins with several short blurbs on various happenings in the horror industry. The very first of these blurbs takes a sideswipe at Japan’s popularity as a cinematic horror capital and touts the release of a Swedish-language horror novel. Other than the fact that the author’s previous novel was made into a successful movie, the release of the current novel doesn’t seem to have much to do with horror cinema, the cumulative effect coming across to this reader as having a white, Eurocentric bias. There’s further sniping at Stephen King, thrillers, and the remake of Friday the 13th and fawning over H. P. Lovecraft and William Peter Blatty.

Given the impression of bias illustrated in the announcements, the first story is no surprise. “At the Gates” by Patrick Samphire is the story of Grace, a young woman with a troubled home life, who finds a sick dog in an alley and attempts to nurse it back to health. The prose is workmanlike at best, containing such plodding passages as:

If it hadn’t been out of power, she would never have heard the dog. And if she hadn’t heard the dog, everything would have been different.

The story starts off building a subtle sense of menace, with some interesting parallels between Grace’s state of mind and the health of her dog. Grace is engaging, as are several of the secondary characters. However, the climactic scene of the story never allows the sense of menace to coalesce, thus leaving the resolution to fall flat.

“These Things We Have Always Known” by Lynda E. Rucker suffers from a similar problem. The prose is eminently readable, and again the characters are engaging, but the plot never develops into something satisfyingly frightening. The atmosphere starts off uneasy, with obtuse hints by the narrator at something lurking in the background of the town where he’s lived for several decades. The narrator mines for something that is never identified, and he feels compelled to create horrific sculptures in his home workshop. His wife writes poetry she doesn’t share with him, his daughter barely speaks to him, and his brother turns up with headaches he’s terrified might indicate a brain tumor. The pacing is excellent, and the characters’ voices lucidly downbeat, but it all leads to an ending that just fizzles.

The scarcity of strong endings continues in “Noppero-Bo” by Steve Rasnic Tem. The story of Aaron, a boy who has come to live with his father in Japan after his mother’s death, the writing isn’t simplistic, but the language still reads as being appropriate for a child not yet in high school. The xenophobia Tem presents is frustrating in the context of so many stories like it—about how Japan is so homogeneous and inscrutable, polite, and weird. While individually such approaches might work, I personally found it undercut the narrator’s sense of isolation here. The focus on the strangeness of Japanese culture mitigated the numbness and sorrow which I think the author meant to highlight as the point. Even so, this was a compelling read. Aaron’s conflicting desires to be noticed by his father, to hold onto who he was before living in Japan, and to blend in with his schoolmates strike a resonant chord. His fear of the horrific element is subdued, and again overshadowed by his general fear of Japanese culture, but the lack of dramatic reaction fed into the particular monstrousness described. Tem continues to be a strong short story writer.

“There’s Something Wrong With Pappy” by James Cooper, the story of Henry, Alice, and their father after the loss of their mother to illness, also plays on themes of loss and grief. Henry is our first-person narrator, and his voice is strong, evoking an intense sense of place. His descriptions of the moors on which his family lives, and the nearby abandoned grey house, are imbued not just with a sense of the sinister, but with a sense of utter desolation. When Alice first insists on burying a doll on the moor as a way to deal with her grief, then builds a replica of the grey house, both Henry’s fear and worry for her are clear. When “Pappy” begins to act erratically, Henry is caught between the desire to confront his father, the cultural inclination against doing so, and the desire to pretend that nothing’s wrong, that the family is recovering.

While there are some terrifying images in “There’s Something Wrong With Pappy,” the ending is as heartbreaking as it is frightening, making this one of the stronger stories of the issue.

The fiction in Black Static is divided between articles, media reviews, and an interview with Simon Clark. This reader found the tone of the articles problematic, as each one makes sweeping assumptions about the nature of both writers and people. Given the abundant proof against universal experience, this tendency served to weaken the conclusions arrived at by these articles.

The reviews seem to follow the same tone of judgments and assumptions made in the beginning announcements, making them less useful than they might otherwise have been, since it’s less focused on how successful a book or movie is at what it means to do than whether it should have been meant to do something else. Still, the interview will be of interest to Clark fans, as it makes mention of current projects in progress.

The next story seems to break somewhat with the default readership assumed by the articles and reviews, and indeed the previous stories. Unfortunately, “The Book of Ruth” by Steven Pirie also breaks with the thus far clean-copy of the publication. This is the first of the stories in which I noticed typos. There aren’t many, but they’re distracting when they happen.

Even with typos, “The Book of Ruth” is intriguing. It’s another take on the plotline of a female victim of sexual harassment/assault gaining revenge through a supernatural object. In this case, the protagonist is Ruth, who works at a secondhand shop where the books seem to whisper to her and where her boss constantly hits on her. The details are finely observed, and a lot of the story’s horror comes from the reality of sexual harassment and the ways in which it’s encouraged by the desire to maintain the status quo.

The real strength of “The Book of Ruth” is the way in which Ruth changes her circumstances through self-control, a trait she is shown to exercise against the titular book, the wish-fulfillment object of the piece. The book does not grant her this self-control, nor any sudden physical prowess. While it arguably imbues her with psychic abilities, what she does with them is rooted in the characteristic of discipline she’s shown to have at the beginning of the narrative.

Particularly after such compelling pieces as “There’s Something Wrong With Pappy” and “The Book of Ruth,” the final story of this issue is a letdown. “Taking on Life” by Gary Fry features the sort of passive, “showing not telling” writing that would make even the most exciting narrative drag. It also features a lot of clichéd descriptors:

At any rate, they took their goods to a till-point, paid with what little scraps they’d managed to save from their meagre student grants, and then exited to start strolling for the residential areas of the town.

The above also contradicts the later assertion that the narrator’s girlfriend is well-off, living at home, attending a good school because of her parents’ wealth, and able to afford fashionable clothing. The narrator, Louis, is a poor boy ashamed of his origins, and his girlfriend is clearly a status symbol, so that first denial of her affluence makes little sense. This is a problem that recurs with the story’s horror element, and the other issue is a lack of originality. Louis’s parents had to marry young because his mother was pregnant, and now they’re unhappy. His father drinks too much, and Louis himself is terrified of ending up the same way. He thinks he sees and hears things rustling in the bushes wherever he goes. When he finds a portrait-morphing program online, he first ages himself up, then tries to see what a child with his girlfriend would look like. Unsurprisingly, the things he thinks are following him take on aspects of both morphed portraits, yet after clear descriptions of these creatures, the narration asserts Louis didn’t actually catch sight of them.

This essential problem of a contradictory narrative is not helped by the story’s resolution, which is either a failed stab at true horror, or a very poor joke. Either way, it’s not a strong note on which to end. One can only hope this isn’t a representative issue of this publication’s usual standard.

[Disclosure notice: The Fix is brought to you by TTA Press, publisher of Black Static.]