BLACK STATIC
#25
A magazine of horror and dark fantasy.
Cover:
.
Foreground; crop from Ben
Baldwin's art for 'About the Dark'.
Background:
from Rik Rawling's art for 'The Travellers Stay'.
Black Static.
Issue 25
(OCT–NOV 2011)
Print edition ISSN 1753-0709 © 2011 Black Static and its contributors
Published bimonthly by TTA Press
TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane
Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, United Kingdom
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Website: ttapress.com
Email: blackstatic@ttapress.com
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TTA Press on Smashwords ISBN 978-1-4660-4775-4
First draft v2 Roy
Gray
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Editor: Andy Cox
Contributing Editors: Peter Tennant, Tony Lee, Christopher Fowler, Stephen Volk, Mike O’Driscoll
Podcast: Pete Bullock, transmissionsfrombeyond.com
Twitter + Facebook: Marc-Anthony Taylor, facebook.com/TTAPress
Events/Publicity/E editions: Roy Gray
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Retail Distribution: Pineapple Media, pineapple-media.com; Central Books, centralbooks.com
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Smashwords Edition License Notes
This emagazine is licensed for your personal use/enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this magazine with others please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this magazine and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please go to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the contributors and editors
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Unsolicited submissions of short stories are always welcome. Please follow the contributors’ guidelines on the website.
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CONTENTS
NEWS
WHITE NOISE - compiled by Peter Tennant
COMMENT/COLUMNS
COFFINMAKER'S BLUES - by Stephen Volk
INTERFERENCE - by Christopher Fowler
NIGHT’S PLUTONIAN SHORE - by Mike O’Driscoll
FICTION
ABOUT THE DARK by Alison Littlewood
illustrated by Ben Baldwin - benbaldwin.co.uk
THE CURTAIN PARTS by Christopher Fowler
illustrated by Vincent Sammy - karbonk.deviantart.com
THE TRAVELLERS STAY by Ray Cluley
illustrated by Rik Rawling - rikrawling.co.uk
THE HOLY SPEAR by Barbara A. Barnett
illustrated by Dave Senecal - senecal.deviantart.com
BEST. SUMMER. EVER. by Nathaniel Tapley
REVIEWS
CASE NOTES - Horror Down the Years: book reviews by Peter Tennant
books: Bricks by Leon Jenner, Roman Hell by Mark Mellon, Viking Dead by Toby Venables, King Death by Paul Finch, Revenants by Daniel Mills, The Devil in Love Jacques Cazotte, The Third Section by Jasper Kent, Acceptable Loss by Anne Perry, A Lust for Lead by Robert Davies, Isis Unbound by Allyson Bird, The Company Man by Robert Jackson Bennett, The German by Lee Thomas, O My Days by David Mathew, The Zombie Autopsies by Steve C. Schlozman MD, The Joy of Technology by Roy Gray; The Chaos Theory of Everything: D.F. Lewis interviewed, plus reviews of Weirdtongue, Nemonymous Night, The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies
BLOOD SPECTRUM - DVD/Blu-ray reviews by Tony Lee
discs: Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Tomorrow When the War Began, The Twilight Zone Season 4, The Cape, The Cat o' Nine Tails, Fringe Season 3, Manhunter, Tucker and Dale vs Evil, Gantz, Stake Land, Empire of Passion, The New Daughter, The Ward, Mother's Day, Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer, Straw Dogs, The Tree of Life, Mimic Director's Cut, X-Men: First Class, Episode 50, Cannibal, Blood Runs Cold, Deadtime Stories, The Man With the Severed Head.
ENDNOTES – links etc.
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EDITORIAL NOTES –
Most of these notes are specific to the print edition but they are included here for completeness and just in case you wish to try a real - hold it in your hands, smell its ink solvents and sully it with eye tracks - edition.
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On being a bit late Pete suffered a catastrophic computer failure which meant he had to rewrite and email the entire Case Notes from his local library, one hour at a time. It was a magnificent effort. Still, this issue is a bit late, sorry.
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Lifetime subscriptions; If you can afford to do so, why not consider supporting our magazines Black Static and Interzone by taking out a very long-term subscription to the print edition?
A lifetime subscription is defined as one lasting either the lifetime of the subscriber or the lifetime of the magazine
The cost of such a subscription is based on ten years at the current print edition rate: £210 UK • £240 Europe • £270 USA/RoW
There is also the option to take a slightly cheaper joint lifetime subscription to the print editions of both magazines
Lifetime print edition subscriptions have now been added to the online shop (ttapress.com/shop)
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Black Static issue #26 is out in December. Please don’t forget to check for a subscription reminder on this issue’s insert and renew in plenty of time if necessary. Thank you for your continued support
The latest Black Static print issue, #27, is dated February 2012, with new stories by Stephen Bacon, Simon Bestwick, V.H. Leslie, Gord Sellar and Jacob Ruby. It is on sale as this issue (25) is uploaded for E editions.
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E-Edition (An Apology): Normally an E book version of each new issue of Black Static (and sister magazine Interzone) could be downloaded from Fictionwise and, more recently, Smashwords. Unfortunately we failed to keep this process up to date and are now, despite our recent efforts, several months behind. If this has affected you please accept our apologies and reassurances that we are closer to fixing the problem. Keep checking Fictionwise, or Smashwords, for new issues. Thanks for your patience!
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WHITE NOISE
THE AWAKENING
The new film that Black Static columnist Stephen Volk co-wrote (with director Nick Murphy), The Awakening, is out on 11 November in the UK. It has already garnered some praise at the Toronto Film Festival, and is also showing at the London Film Festival in October. It’s a Canal+/BBC Films/Origin Pictures production starring Rebecca Hall, Dominic West and Imelda Staunton. This is a short blurb: England, 1921: a nation beset by the grief following World War I. A sceptical woman scientist, Florence Cathcart, is adamant in her conviction that all ghosts and spiritual manifestations can be explained away as either callous fraud or the products of fevered imaginations. But when she is called to a countryside boarding school for boys to investigate rumours of an apparent haunting, she finds her beliefs – all her beliefs – shaken to the core. Facing something genuinely awakened from the past, she realises her rationality finally gives her no place to hide.
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THE LONDON HORROR FESTIVAL
The Courtyard and Theatre of the Damned will present The London Horror Festival, a new festival of theatrical horror and the macabre, at The Courtyard from 25th October to 27th November. The programme includes Revenge of the Grand Guignol by Andre de Lorde, Tom Richards and Stewart Pringle; Theatre of the Damned, four short dramas inspired by Paris’ notorious theatre of the macabre; Breathing Space by Dallace Jones, Laura Steel and Arden Redgrave; The Dunwich Horror by David Dawkins, based on the short story by H.P. Lovecraft; Night of the Damned, pitch-black comedy, gothic rock and electro-carnage for Halloween; and much, much more. For details of all shows and to book tickets go to www.londonhorrorfestival.com.
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NITROSPECTIVE
Andrew Hook’s fourth collection of slipstream stories, Nitrospective, was published by DogHorn Publishing at the end of September. Containing a mix of reprints and originals, these twenty-one stories grapple with things like Japanese school children growing giant frogs, a superhero’s secret identity, onions foretelling global disasters, and an undercover agent who is ambivalent as to which side he works for and why. More info at www.doghornpublishing.com/nitrospective.html.
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WORLD FANTASY CONVENTION
In 2013 the World Fantasy Convention comes to the UK, and will be held in Brighton. The convention’s special ‘Early Bird’ rate ends on November 7, 2011. From that date Attending Membership will rise to £100. The Convention’s first Guest of Honour will be announced at midnight on October 29, 2011.
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SHADOWS & TALL TREES
Issue #2 of Shadows & Tall Trees is now available, featuring fiction from Steve Rasnic Tem, Alison Littlewood, Louis Marvick, Eric Schaller, Richard Harland, Ian Rogers, and Sunny Moraine. The first Black Static reader to email editor/publisher Michael Kelly with the subject line ‘White Noise – Shadows & Tall Trees’ will receive a complimentary copy of the issue. The email address is undertowbooks@gmail.com.
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A COLD SEASON
Alison Littlewood – four stories in Black Static with the publication of this issue – has been signed up to have three novels published by new Quercus imprint Jo Fletcher Books. The first of these, A Cold Season, is the story of a young mother who finds herself pitted against forces she can barely comprehend in a fight to save her son, and is scheduled for a February 2012 release.
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2011 SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARD JURORS
The jurors for the 2011 Shirley Jackson Award have been announced. They are Laird Barron, Matthew Cheney, Maura McHugh, Kaaron Warren, and Gary K. Wolfe. The Shirley Jackson Award is an award recognising the legacy of Shirley Jackson’s writing and are given for the best work of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic in the categories of Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Single-Author Collection, and Edited Anthology. For more information about the jurors and the award, please see www.shirleyjacksonawards.org.
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ILL AT EASE
Out now, an ebook collection of three new stories of the macabre, from Stephen Bacon, Mark West and Neil Williams. Check it out in the amazon.co.uk Kindle store.
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CELLULOID SCREAMS
Celluloid Screams, the Sheffield Horror Film Festival, returns to the Showroom Cinema for another spine-tingling, blood-curdling weekend of horror films, Friday 21 to Sunday 23 October. The festival will include the usual blend of brand new horror from around the world, including several UK premieres, along with horror classics and short films from the fear makers of the future, plus some very special guests. Weekend Festival Passes are now on sale and can be purchased at www.showroomworkstation.org.uk/csfestivalpass. Keep up to date with Celluloid Screams 2011 at www.celluloidscreams.co.uk.
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TWISTED TALES EVENTS
The Occult Horror event runs from 7–9.30pm on Thursday 27 October in Runcorn • The Halloween House of Fear event – with readings by contributors to the Solaris anthology Lisa Tuttle, Adam Nevill and Nicholas Royle – runs from 6–8pm on Friday 28 October at Waterstone’s Liverpool One. For more information on Twisted Tales events go to twistedtalesevents.blogspot.com. • Meanwhile, Twisted Tales organiser David McWilliam is giving a reading and lecture on H.P. Lovecraft at 1pm on Friday 21 October in Lancaster: www.litfest.org/2011/08/31/lunchtime-classic-hp-lovecraft-read-by-david-mcwilliam.
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Terror Tales of the Lake District
Gray Friar Press have released this anthology edited by Paul Finch, containing ten new chilling tales and three classic reprints, all of them set in the Lake District. Contributors include Ramsey Campbell, Adam Nevill, Simon Clark, Peter Crowther, and Reggie Oliver. The book also features numerous anecdotal tales concerning true incidents of Lakeland terror which will ensure you’ll never regard that scenic part of the world in the same innocent light again. For more details and ordering go to www.grayfriarpress.com.
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horror for breakfast
Join horror author Niki Valentine (pen name Nicola Monaghan, author of The Killing Jar, Starfishing and latest novel The Haunted, published by Sphere) for ‘Read and Breakfast’, a morning of author readings, Q&A and book sales, with breakfast to boot! 10:30am–12:30pm, Saturday 26 November at The Wonky Table, Sadlergate, Derby. Tickets are £10. To book your place contact Alex Davis on 07896 228367 or email alexdavisevents@hotmail.co.uk.
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MORE HALLOWEEN HORROR
Warwick Arts Centre is hosting an evening of terror on Monday 31 October, beginning at 7.15pm, with three of Britain’s best contemporary horror writers: Gary McMahon, David Moody, and Adam Nevill. Each writer will read a story and talk about their writing and careers.
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THE RITUAL – THE MOVIE
Stillking Films have optioned Adam Nevill’s horror novel The Ritual (Macmillan in the UK, published in the US by St Martin’s Press in 2012 – see Pete’s review and interview in issue #18). The deal was brokered by the Gotham Group in Los Angeles, representing the John Jarrold Literary Agency. Stillking have produced many major films including Casino Royale, The Illusionist, From Hell and The Bourne Identity.
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BRITISH FANTASY AWARDS
At FantasyCon on 2 October Black Static received the British Fantasy Award for Best Magazine/Periodical. Thanks from all the Black Static staff and contributors to everybody who voted for us, and also to Andrew Hook for collecting the award on our behalf. (below) Other award winners included Stephen King, Sam Stone, Johnny Mains, Telos Publishing, Vincent Chong, Ian Culbard, Simon Clark, Robert Jackson Bennett, Sir Terry Pratchett, Inception, and Sherlock.
Photo by Stuart Lambeth
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COMPILED BY AND © 2011 PETER TENNANT • SEND YOUR NEWS TO whitenoise@ttapress.com.
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COFFINMAKER'S BLUES
by Stephen Volk
CHASING THE DEAD BABIES
Back in May this year I listened to a radio programme claiming that in times of economic crisis people turn in ever-increasing numbers to the comforts of the spirit world. This brief examination of the so-called psychic was complemented by another programme in which someone asked, rhetorically, “Why do people go to therapists? Don’t they have aunties?” I mused on this as I saw Kate McCann’s book on supermarket shelves, her missing daughter Madeleine smiling out at prospective consumers of grief.
The programme was Thinking Allowed with Laurie Taylor, talking to Annette Hill, author of Paranormal Media: Audiences, Spirits and Magic in Popular Culture, who said a rise in belief in mediums, angels and sundry communicators with the unknown was anticipated by no less than Business Week. Of course, the idea that we “look in unusual places to deal with uncertainty” is irrefutable. But another guest, broadcaster Matthew Sweet, remarked on how psychic phone lines now advertise like pornography: the only difference being, he added, “sex exists” – making this “odd currency”, intangible therefore neverending, the “perfect consumer product”.
They went on to discuss how the 19th century séance, a setting for “ambiguous experiences”, had today become something even more dubious. Not just the silly pantomime of Most Haunted, with its cynical-yet-slapstick search for ‘proof’ about as scientifically rigorous as Wallis and Gromit, but the more general entertainment of damage.
Now we have theatre and TV shows where mediums are clearly fishing for tragedy, and people flock to them to have eternal values of love and peace reinforced which are not present in their current lives or the world they see around them. The Higher Plane is now sold to them on a par with the Lottery Rollover.
My own take on all this is somewhat personal.
A friend came back into my wife’s life who she hadn’t seen for years. This woman (let’s call her Helga) had had a serious accident after which she found she could talk to spirits. My wife indulged her when she visited us by letting her do a sitting. We’d already told her that our daughter was trying to conceive by IVF, and during the session, Helga told my wife that the IVF wouldn’t work and “the spirits had told her she should prepare herself for that”. My wife, even though she thought it was all bollocks, found it hard not to be upset by this. Months later they met again and Helga asked what had happened. After my wife told her the IVF was successful, Helga said: “See? I was right.” My wife decided never to see her again.
This was all about the emotional need of the medium, not the sitter. The real desperation of someone essentially deeply insecure to have emotional power over others. These people’s belief system gives them validation that’s hard to repudiate without being just plain rude, whether it’s Sally Morgan (www.starpsychic.co.uk) or some Channelling Channel.
“I won’t believe it till I see it on TV,” said Terry Waite’s brother when he was told the hostage had been released, but now, to paraphrase Charlie Brooker in How TV Ruined Your Life, TV has to be seen to be disbelieved.
Elsewhere, Brooker lays into the shtick of 6th Sense with Colin Fry, accusing the programme-makers by their own admission of making grief-stricken relatives cry for entertainment. “On a scale of moral reprehensibility,” he says, “this isn’t too far away from child porn. It’s psychological rape: disgusting, dishonest and exploitative.” He also attacks Crossing Over with John Edward, a US import, saying “his victims fall for it, possible because they can’t quite believe a fellow human being would exploit the pain of their bereavement for financial gain.” Oh, believe. Believe!
In the pages of Fortean Times, a ‘Ghostwatch’ (sic) article by Alan Murdie bemoans the impact of celebrity culture on serious ghost research, which certainly is a valid point when you see tripe DVDs of the likes of Ghost Hunting with Coronation Street. (It’s almost certain that the facts leave by the very door by which Yvette Fielding enters.) But are parapsychologists really any different from any other form of rent-a-gob? “Why is so much screen time wasted on programmes that contribute zero to any understanding of the paranormal?” Murdie asks, in the typical high dudgeon of experts. Yes, there is an appetite for the visceral, the emotional, the hysterical and the fantastic in television, much of it running in fear of the intellectual and critical thinking, but I’d posit in turning their backs on it, researchers are being as narrow-minded as those they berate.
Firstly, they’re ignoring good shows like the Despatches about African exorcists operating their cruel scams in London, Derren Brown’s first class debunking lessons in Messiah and Faith Healer, and poet Simon Armitage’s excellent programme Pendle Witch Child.
Secondly, I once heard an esteemed parapsychologist say “I never watch TV” – thereby announcing he had zero knowledge or interest in what preoccupied 90% of the public. Worse, another ‘name’ psychologist who told me she never watches the box regularly appears on it, wheeled out for a convenient sound-bite on anything from near death experiences to the nature of consciousness. The very definition of hypocrisy. Or idiocy.
Images and stories impact upon our view of the world 24/7, in case those psychologists hadn’t noticed. Maybe white rats don’t go to multiplexes or watch soaps, but we do.
It’s been noticed (again in Fortean Times) that chupacabra sightings may have been influenced by the release of the movie Species with its Giger-designed alien, and that other ‘lizard creature’ encounters may have been inspired by lurid pulp SF covers. Has anyone done research into how UFO experiences were reporter pre- and post-Close Encounters? Or whether reports of ghosts and hauntings changed after The Sixth Sense or The Blair Witch Project? I bet they did. Because we are cultural beings. It would take a lot to convince me that global hits like The Exorcist or The X-Files don’t have a major effect on how we perceive anomalous events.
It’s as if parasychologists are thoroughly searching a room, but forgetting to look behind the door. The most obvious place. One day it may dawn on them that the paranormal was a cultural construct all along.
So maybe it was always inevitable that the supernaturalism of the past, shaped by social and personal needs, should robe itself with the cloak of the shoddiest, weepiest reality TV fare, where a widow sings a song for her late husband, and Cheryl Cole prattles out her hand-on-heart platitudes, not so different from the ‘lovie’ rhetoric of Doris Stokes. Was not mini-diva Jackie Evancho heralded mawkishly as “an angel come to earth” as she belted out ‘Nessun Dorma’ on America’s Got Talent? Andrew Davies, the TV writer famous for sexing up the classics, has said “our sensitivities have been debased by Simon Cowell”, but maybe our sensitivities were base all along.
The truth is that human beings crave contact, not necessarily with the dead, but with each other. We are a network. We are social animals. We grow by that. And séances and gatherings, channelling or communally watching programmes that reach out to ‘the other side’ could be seen as not so much a leap of faith but an act of collective imagination.
Ironically, in the same month as I heard the radio programme above, Stephen Hawking said bluntly in an interview in The Guardian that a belief in heaven or an afterlife is a “fairy story” for people afraid of death. I also watched Michael Moseley’s taboo-breaking television programme Inside the Human Body: Gerald’s Death, a tasteful and humanistic documentary which the presenter ended so movingly by saying: “This is the true miracle of your everyday existence… From your first breath to your last, you become so much more than the sum of your parts… You become someone with hopes and dreams…likes and loves…able to touch the lives of others…”
In the end, whatever you believe or disbelieve – contact, connection, is everything.
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Copyright © 2011 Stephen Volk
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For more information on Steve’s fiction, film and television work please visit his website at www.stephenvolk.net.
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INTERFERENCE
by Christopher Fowler
THE SAFETY OF FAMILIAR SURROUNDINGS
From the moment Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz said “There’s no place like home” I knew she’d be one of those Americans we hear about who never bother getting a passport. Home is safe. Home is what we know. Therefore, Hollywood thinks that ‘foreign’ is what we fear. It’s when we go outside of our comfort zones, and bad things start to happen.
You know how that one goes. A car full of teens. A backwoods road. An accident. A rundown garage. And it usually ends up with someone getting nailed to the floor. First you’re out of your comfort zone, then someone in a pig mask is bending over you with a rusty hacksaw.
Actually, it’s America I’ve never felt very safe in. When I lived in Los Angeles, people were getting murdered all around me. There is a wonderful German word, unheimlich, meaning ‘uncanny’, which has deeper connotations because it suggests the unease that is caused by being away from home, literally un-home-like. The Jewish word shpilkes catches how I feel in the USA – to be on shpilkes is to be jittery, walking on needles, unsettled. How come so many horror films are set in countryside? That’s not where most of us live. I’ve been to the countryside a couple of times and it’s horrible. There’s nothing except scenery and branches of Pasta Bella.
Few horror films are set in worlds we know. Most of us live in an urban environment, but horror is routinely set on empty roads, in the woods or even at sea. Of course it’s cheaper to do this than trying to film crowded city life as we know it. But surely cities offer greater opportunities for fear fiction.
Eli Roth fired up a fearmongering attitude that reminded us ‘there’s no place like home’ with the well-made but pernicious Hostel, and the ‘tourists wander into something evil’ plot became an entire sub-genre, climaxing in a hilariously dreadful movie called The Shrine, in which some teenagers go to creepy, scarily medieval Poland (!) and shriek “We’re American, do you speak English?” at everyone who comes near them before succumbing to robed priests in funny hats.
Why are the heroes in these films always so globally unaware? The female lead in The Shrine is the world’s least likely journalist, who scoffingly turns down a great chance to find out why the world’s bee population is vanishing in favour of looking for a local backpacker, so that we think she’s stupid from the start. Poland is portrayed as a backward country full of mad simpletons. Having been shown wonderful hospitality there, I think the country should sue the Canadian film makers for defamation.
Weird foreigners are always blamed for the world’s ills. In the big-budget Contagion, bird flu comes in from abroad to kill innocent Americans. In the 80s and 90s the villains used to be English, then Russian, and now they’re Chinese. Hollywood is running out of people to hate. But the most intriguing and complex threats come from inside; inside our family units, our bodies, our own rebellious minds.
I find Middle America far more frightening than anything in Eastern Europe, mainly because good people have been duped into hiding guns around their houses and thinking that everyone beyond US borders is out to get them, whereas Eastern Europeans are relatively sophisticated and worldly by comparison.
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THE DANGER OF UNFAMILIAR SURROUNDINGS
Of course, the ‘strangers get into hot water’ genre has been around for a long time, only it wasn’t treated as a separate strand of horror film making. The Hills Have Eyes presented us with the tourists-vs-hillbillies theme, but in Race With the Devil the sinister locals keep spreading wherever the tourists are headed, to finally envelop (by inference) the whole of the country.
Perhaps we should go to Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs to see this best in action, as mild-mannered Dustin Hoffman faces off against the builders who raped his wife. Hoffman has had the violence bred out of him by city life, but rediscovers his inner brute at cost. I’m a sucker for films in which people are held captive, a sub-genre that began with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and the underrated Fanatic (aka Die! Die! My Darling!) in which deranged Christian Tallulah Bankhead imprisons her future daughter-in-law for being a slut.
Virtually every zombie film has at least one ‘trapped in a house’ scene. [Rec] and [Rec] 2 both managed them brilliantly, and Hollywood keeps turning out crafty unacknowledged remakes of those films. There have also been films like While She Was Out, which makes a trip to the shops disturbing, and the office building-set P2 which keeps the heroine trapped at her place of work. The best was After Hours, which trapped Griffin Dunne in downtown New York and played out like a horror film, complete with marauding villagers bearing torches.
An excellent recent example of the ‘prisoner in the city’ sub-sub-genre came from France. In 1550 Elm’s Way a young man falls off his bike and picks on the wrong house to ask for help. But he’s in a suburban neighbourhood, and his captor has a loving wife, children and a jaw-dropping secret. However, the captive’s own state of mind becomes unravelled, leading to a brilliant new twist I’ve certainly never seen before in this type of film.
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THE PLEASURE OF LOW BUDGETS
Low budget doesn’t have to mean low quality. The ready availability of CGI means that ingenuity can trump finance if it’s smartly used, and there have been some wonderful examples in the last few years, from The Ruins, the first genuinely disturbing killer plant movie, to Buried the terrifyingly claustrophobic film-in-a-box that caused me to ruin my nails.
Hollywood sometimes produces low to mid-budget surprises like the disturbing Limitless, in which Bradley Cooper becomes addicted to an unlicensed drug, or the ever-dependable Brad Anderson’s Vanishing on 7th Street, a flawed but intriguing apocalypse film. Anderson is an old-school auteur who tells frighteningly believable, nicely written stories, just as Larry Cohen used to with his roster of films that included It’s Alive, The Stuff, Maniac Cop and Q: The Winged Serpent.
What were once popular films, to my mind at least, are now considered very obscure. We watch these as DVDs on television – hardly any TV channel shows them – and it made me think. Now that we hardly ever see old black & white films, or even ones from the 80s and early 90s, isn’t it time for the return of rep cinema? Well, that’s where pop-up cinemas and film clubs have stepped in lately. Run by enthusiasts, all kinds of unusual fare can be seen if you know where to look.
Speaking of such places, my pal Evrim Ersoy runs a great film club in King’s Cross with his mate Alex. The pair have kept the Duke Mitchell Film Club below the radar, but now the secret is out. You think you know obscure films? No, you really don’t. Since its inception the club has run grindhouse, Ozploitation, Eurotrash, an evening dedicated to Michael Gough, another to William Castle and one to Turkish time travel, as well as gore movies, giallo movies, the transcendentally good and the unimaginably bad.
Every event has a theme. Last time we had trailers (Elizabeth Taylor deliriously fondling her brassiere in The Driver’s Seat!), short films and an 80s punk-Nazi SF musical called Stranger in Paradise, which is so staggeringly awful that I want the album. Attendees include film executives and those in the know. The Duke Mitchell Film Club can be found on Facebook and Twitter, or by following message threads, and you get a badge for attending. But I’m blowing their cover because something this obsessive needs to be shared. The nights start at 8:00pm once a month on a Wednesday in a pub called the King’s Cross Social Club.
And who, exactly, is Duke Mitchell? Why, he made Gone With the Pope and Massacre Mafia Style obviously!
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Copyright © 2011 Christopher Fowler
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NIGHT’S PLUTONIAN SHORE
by Mike O’Driscoll
THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT
Justin Cronin’s mammoth post-apocalypse quest story, The Passage, belongs to a strand of fantastic fiction whose enduring appeal owes as much to its psychological and philosophical themes, as it does to the bewilderingly inventive depictions of apocalypse and its aftermath. It’s a tradition that has produced a huge and rich body of work, both by writers firmly rooted in the fantasy and SF genre, and by others primarily associated with literary fiction. Writers as diverse as John Christopher and J.G. Ballard, Stephen King and Samuel Delany, P.D. James and Margaret Atwood, have all been inspired to produce either traditional, narrative-driven takes on the collapse of civilisation, or surreal, complex philosophical responses that are more interested in exploring and embracing their particular apocalypse rather than resisting it. Certain ideas and themes recur, nuclear war and, linked to this, the consequences of radioactive fallout: mutation; zombies; overpopulation; famine; pollution; alien invasion; climate change; unforeseen consequences of genetic engineering; nanotechnology; religious fundamentalism; natural disasters on a global scale; a meteor smashing into Earth; a supernatural force as the agent of apocalypse; and the release of deadly biological agents, whether accidental or intentional.
It is this last which kicks off Cronin’s end of the world saga. Here, the agent is a virus that has the potential to enhance human strength and agility. Discovered in a virulent breed of South American bat, the serum has been brought back to the US for refinement by a clandestine branch of the US military at a secure, underground facility in the Rocky Mountains. Twelve ex-death row ‘volunteers’ are infected with a modified strain of the virus in the hope that it will turn them into a new breed of super-soldiers. The test subjects begin to mutate, develop odd feeding habits and become photophobic. They also seem to exert a negative telepathic control over their guards. Inevitably, this malign influence leads to a security breach, and after slaughtering those who operate the facility, the infected creatures escape and precipitate the holocaust whose aftermath provides the setting for the remaining two-thirds of the story.
The idea is not particularly new but the skill and verve with which Cronin sets about creating the backdrop for his apocalypse is wholly convincing and as exciting and tense as the early stages of Stephen King’s The Stand (a book with which it has been frequently compared). Apart from the main protagonist – Amy Bellafonte (about whom more later) – we are introduced to a variety of skilfully drawn, clearly individuated characters, each with their own convincing and compelling back-stories, who become involved in a mission to abduct Amy who, because of her anonymity, has been targeted as the latest test subject. The key figures are Wolgast, a morally compromised FBI agent charged with recruiting the death-row prisoners for the experiment; his partner Doyle who just wants to get the job done and is initially wary of Wolgast’s doubts; Carter, a simple-minded but harmless death-row inmate, wrongly convicted of murder and the most recent of Wolgast’s recruits; and a novice nun called Lacey who befriends Amy after she has been abandoned outside the convent. In the course of the tightly plotted, fast-moving narrative which brings them all together, Cronin hardly puts a foot wrong. Even his bad guys have complex and conflicting motivations that elevates them above the usual cast of stock villains.
The one flaw here – though it’s easy to forgive in light of the tension and excitement of the story – is the character of Amy herself. Or rather the problem is the absence of character, for, out of all the main protagonists in the book, Amy is the only one whose inner life we are denied access to. This is not so much of a problem early on – Lacey’s connection with the girl comes through shared experience, and Wolgast’s decision to try to save her from the experiment is borne out of a complex mix of guilt, disillusion and simple empathy for an abandoned, frightened child.
It is in the second and much longer part of the book, set some ninety years later in a southern California colony established by survivors of the initial outbreak, that Amy’s lack of an inner life becomes more problematic. Here, we are presented with a whole new bunch of characters, none of them as engaging as Wolgast or Lacey. Cronin deploys a variety of techniques, including flashbacks and extracts from future journals and diaries, to flesh out the lives and relationships of the colony’s inhabitants. We learn about the rivalries and tensions that undermine its governance and threaten the stability of the community. Soon though, all this detail begins to slow the forward momentum like so much verbal cholesterol clogging up the narrative’s veins. In between increasingly repetitive attacks from the ‘virals’ – the colonist’s term for the creatures which have wiped out most of the human population – the plot unfolds with all the vigour, excitement and originality of a long-running soap opera. It got to the stage where I found myself wishing that the majority of the colonists would meet the same kind of fate that Stephen King used to reserve for characters he once called ‘shreddies’. But just when things had slowed almost to a standstill, Amy reappeared and my interest was rekindled. Now, finally, we’d get to discover how she survived all those years. We’d learn something about her powers and, most crucially, we’d get to know who and what she really is. Except, we don’t.
Instead, Cronin continues to withhold Amy’s thoughts and feelings from us, and though this creates a kind of elemental mystery around her, it’s not enough to compensate for the manner in which the plot morphs into a formulaic quest narrative that borrows liberally from King, Zelazny, and the Mad Max films (a disconcerting turn of events given the debt owed by the conclusion of the first part of the book to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road). The relationship between Amy and Peter Jaxon – the young colonist who leads the quest to find other communities, and is the first to sense Amy’s link to the virals and the crucial role she will play in defeating them – never matches the gut-wrenching humanity of the bond between Amy and Wolgast. The book rumbles on towards the inevitable confrontation between the small band of humans and the hordes of virals, the prosaic drag enlivened by an occasional moment of genuine surprise – Alicia’s ‘conversion’, the reappearance of Lacey. The climax itself is open-ended and ambiguous, no surprise at all since we already know the book is the first in a trilogy. The prospect is dispiriting, given Cronin’s tendency to pad out the narrative with extraneous material revealed in tricksy flashbacks that – like too many American SF and fantasy shows such as Lost, Heroes, Flash Forward, The Event – tells me more, much more, than I need to know about characters who I care little about.
There’s no doubting that The Passage is a big and brash foray into the post-apocalypse genre, and that, at least in narrative terms, Cronin doesn’t lack ambition. Given that it has already found a huge audience, my criticisms may seem like mere carping but the truth is I was expecting something different. Aside from the works already mentioned, there are others like Riddley Walker (Russell Hoban), The Birth of the People’s Republic of Antarctica (John Calvin Bachelor), Days Between Stations (Steve Erickson) and Winterlong (Elizabeth Hand), all of which find radically new ways, both formally and thematically, to grapple with the conventions and constraints of the genre. For whatever reason, Cronin has stayed too faithful to these conventions – or perhaps he simply recognises their commercial value – but the resulting work is a disappointment. Given that the novel’s first section promised so much, and that intermittently, Cronin shows himself a skilled and imaginative writer, it’s a shame that in his preparatory reading he didn’t encounter a 2008 anthology of post-apocalyptic fiction Wastelands, edited by John Joseph Adams. Had he done so, he might have discovered that generic conventions are no obstacle to ambition, invention and imagination.
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Copyright © 2011 Mike O’Driscoll
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ABOUT THE DARK
by Alison Littlewood
Illustration for About the Dark by Ben Baldwin
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ABOUT THE DARK
Dark Cave didn’t sound the most promising place to hang out, but it was the driest place Adam could think of away from the town centre. Adam didn’t want to be in the town centre, mainly because his latest school had an ‘attendance optimiser’, otherwise known as a truant officer. The truant officer knew what Adam looked like, partly because of the number of times he’d hauled him back to classes, and partly because of the way Adam had tried to deck him the last time he’d tried.
He’d nearly been expelled for that one, and it was only because they decided to blame his mother that expulsion had been commuted to a three day suspension, a punishment that seemed to more than fit the crime, although not in the way they’d intended. Adam grinned at the thought, then grimaced. Blaming his mother was what everyone did. No one seemed to expect anything from his dad, least of all Adam himself.
He turned now to see Sasha flick wet hair out of her face, rubbing at her black-rimmed eyes. Adam decided not to tell her she’d smudged her makeup. No doubt she’d find out later, on her own. He exchanged looks with Fuzz, so named for his shaved head rather than any liking for the police. Fuzz nodded back. He didn’t tell Sash about the smudge on her cheek, either.
There was a wall of rain behind Sash, the muted grey-green of trees beyond that. She already had a cigarette clamped between her lips and she flicked her lighter, emitting a brief flame that fizzled before it could begin.
“Get under, shit-fer,” Adam said. Shit-fer brains: his favourite mode of address. Adam stood just beneath the cave mouth, not quite far enough that the dangling ferns couldn’t drip down the back of his neck. Fuzz edged onto the rock behind him, feet slipping, sending loose pebbles down to clip Adam’s feet. Adam stared down at them.
“Soz,” said Fuzz.
Adam didn’t say anything. Sometimes he didn’t have to, and that was best. That was when he knew it had worked; the face he put on, the tough words, the fists. No one messed with him anymore. Now he skived off classes because it made him look hard. That wasn’t why he’d done it at his last school.
Sash started giggling, trying to get the cig to light. She couldn’t. Adam rolled his eyes, snatched it away, felt damp paper under his fingers and flicked it, one-handed, out into the rain. He ignored Sash’s squeal of protest. Instead he turned and looked into the cave mouth, the way its misshapen walls faded into the dark.
“You going in?” He looked at Fuzz. He didn’t look at Fuzz because he wanted Fuzz to lead the way. He didn’t want Fuzz to lead anything. That was Adam’s job. He said it as a challenge.
“Course.”
Adam didn’t ask Sash. He knew she’d follow. He knew that because of the way he’d told her, once, to take off her top; the way, after a moment’s hesitation, she had.
Sash had full tits, for a skinny lass. Adam remembered them now, thought of how they would feel under his hands in the rain, the way her top would stick to them. He felt a flush of warmth beneath the cool air that rose from the cave. There was a smell, too; dank stone, mingling with the scent of rain. He wrinkled his nose. “Come on,” he said, and stepped forward. He flicked on his own lighter as he went.
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It was more difficult than Adam had expected. The lighter emitted a circular glow, highlighting each finger in glowing blood red, but not illuminating much else. It was hot and he kept switching hands, pulling a face he knew no one could see. He felt the irregular rock through his shoes. He heard the others following, their footsteps seeming more sure than his own. That wouldn’t do. He couldn’t show weakness; something he’d learned the hard way. Weakness painted a target on your back.