Black Static

New subscribers can get this issue free by using "BS58 FREE" as their Shopper Reference during checkout.

 

Cover:

The cover art is 'At the Drug's Core' by Joachim Luetke

 

Contents:

 

Fiction:

Holiday Romance by Mark Morris

Skelton could hear the sea from his room. As a teenager he had found the breath of the tide more soothing than a lullaby, but now, with disappointment filling up the years in between like accumulated grime, it seemed like nothing more than the death-bed respiration of a sick old man, struggling to draw air in to atrophied lungs.

 

The Process of Chuddar by Tim Casson
illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe

It’s true that I’ve always been awkward in company but it hurt when you said I was a sociopath. A person cannot be good at all things and my talents are weighted in one area. It’s simply not in my nature to smile falsely and engage in shallow conversation. That’s why I employ charming executives to head-up the company. Admittedly, I’m secretive, but corporate espionage is more sophisticated than ever these days. The nature of my business determines that the Process of Chuddar – its details and arcane peculiarities – remains locked in a safe where only one person knows the combination. No doubt this pattern of secrecy began to affect me when I discovered the Process as a young man, and had therefore shaped my personality to some degree when I met you. I’m aware too that we had this discussion ages ago and I’m not trying to open old wounds here by recalling your ‘sociopath’ slur. It’s not bitterness that drives me. I mention it because you shall soon hear things that only reinforce those negative opinions about my character, and for that reason I wish to relate my version of events. I need to explain everything to somebody, and you are the only one I trust.

 

Nonesuch by Joe Pitkin 

Jack’s friends had decided to have their wedding in McMinnville, way down in the valley. At first, when Jack read the invitation, the idea had sounded sweet, but now that he was driving out there, he took a wrong turn, and then, trying to double back to Highway 18, he took another. By the time he pulled over to take stock of himself, he had no idea where he was, except that he had stopped on an empty farm road, bordered by rolling alfalfa and corn fields, and away behind these, forest. He had passed a few farmhouses – he remembered that much. One stood not so far from where he’d stopped the car: a solitary barn-like Dutch colonial with peeling paint the color of brown eggshell. There was a For Sale sign out front, no price listed, just the legend Bea Anderson Realty. Jack noticed that the phone number was given in the old style: Twilight 7-1308.

 

Survival Strategies by Helen Marshall
illustrated by Vince Haig 

Barron St. John must have been nearing his seventies by that point. The pictures I’d copied from magazine covers and newspapers charted his rise from a rake-thin tower of a man, nearly six-three, clad in a badly fitting white wool jacket with a thick crop of black hair cut like a bowl around his ears to his older self: hair grey but still as thick as it had ever been, fine laugh lines etching the curve of that grinning, maniac mouth.

 

Songs to Help You Cope When Your Mom Won’t Stop Haunting You and Your Friends by Gwendolyn Kiste
illustrated by Joachim Luetke 

Song #1: David Bowie’s ‘Changes’

How to Listen: On the 8-track in your ’73 Gremlin. Turn it up until the only thing you feel is the buzz of the music in your blood.

It’s an ice storm in January when you bury your mother.

Cleveland winters are cruel. The ground is almost too frozen to accept new customers, and with the weather bleary and combative, the funeral director flashes you a tight smile and offers to send your mother’s body to a freezer in Lakewood until “conditions improve”.

 

Columns:

Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker

LET’S GET LOST

Missing women and girls are a storytelling staple. They populate some of the earliest tales we read for ourselves or are told: they become lost in the underworld, like Persephone, or Psyche, or the twelve dancing princesses; or they go to Narnia or Oz or Wonderland like Lucy Pevensie and Dorothy Gale and Alice Liddell.

 

Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore

NEW WORLD, SEARCHING

Norman Saylor, professor of ethnology at a local college, is creating a brochure to be used by the War Office, and with a “final staccato burst of typing”, completes it. Good for him. He decides to celebrate his accomplishment in a rather odd way, by “snooping around in his wife’s dressing room”. It’s an act of intimacy, albeit a one-sided intimacy, like reading someone’s diary in the silence of their absence, or watching someone through a window without their knowledge. And he’s smug as he does it. He’s the type of man who is “sure nothing could touch the security of the relationship between him and Tansy”, that anything he does find among his wife’s personal effects, if it does involve him, will be flattering. He’s that happy.

 

Reviews:

Case Notes: Book Reviews by Peter Tennant

FOUR GRAPHIC NOVELS AND AN ART BOOK

Night Screams for Mercy by Hannu Kesola, illustrated by Jussi Piironen
Bullet Ballerina by Tom Piccirilli, illustrated by Greg Chapman
Partners by Glenn Møane, illustrated by Elias Martins, colouring by Russell Vincent Yu
Bullet & Justine: The End and the Beginning by Mauro Padovani
The Art of Tomislav Tikulin 

DARK SHADOWS AND DIRTY CORNERS: RICHARD CHIZMAR

A Long December
Darkness Whispers, with Brian James Freeman
Gwendy's Button Box, with Stephen King
plus author interview 

EURO-TREATS

Black Tea and Other Tales by Samuel Marolla
Imago Mortis by Samuel Marolla
The Horror at Gancio Rosso by Paul Di Filippo & Claudio Chillemi
Vessel and Solsvart by Berit Elligsen
Ink in the Blood by Stéphanie Hochet (translated by Mike Mitchell) 

Blood Spectrum: Film Reviews by Gary Couzens

A Monster Calls, The Love Witch, Pieces, The City of the Dead, Caltiki: The Immortal Monster, My Father Die, The Phantasm Collection, House: The Complete Collection, The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, Ibiza Undead, Swiss Army Man, Pet, Seoul Station, The Chamber, Shut In, The Beaster Bunny!, Day of Reckoning, Stake Land II, The Resident, Midnight Sun, Fortitude Season Two

 

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, etc.

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Coming Soon:

Black Static 59 is out in July. Magazines like this cannot survive without subscriptions, so thank you for your support.