by Andy Cox
BLACK STATIC : TRANSMISSIONS FROM BEYOND
Issue 42, Sep–Oct 2014
© 2014 Black Static and its contributors
Publisher
TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, UK
http://ttapress.com/
Editor
Andy Cox
[email protected]
Books
Peter Tennant
[email protected]
Films
Tony Lee
[email protected]
Events
Roy Gray
[email protected]
Submissions
Unsolicited submissions of short stories are always very welcome, but please follow the basic guidelines on our website
CONTENTS
COVER ART
FEBRADANT
DAVE SENECAL
http://senecal.deviantart.com
COMMENT
COFFINMAKER’S BLUES
STEPHEN VOLK
BLOOD PUDDING
LYNDA E. RUCKER
FICTION
BE LIGHT. BE PURE. BE CLOSE TO HEAVEN
SARA SAAB
illustrated by Vincent Sammy
SCARECROW
ALYSSA WONG
illustrated by Richard Wagner (email)
WHAT HAPPENED TO MARLY AND LANNA
NOAH WARENESS
illustrated by Ben Baldwin
PATRIMONY
MATTHEW CHENEY
illustrated by Richard Wagner
GOAT EYES
DAVID D. LEVINE
DECEMBER SKIN
KRISTI DeMEESTER
THE BURY LINE
STEPHEN HARGADON
REVIEWS
CASE NOTES
PETER TENNANT
Books, including interview with Carole Johnstone
BLOOD SPECTRUM
TONY LEE
DVDs/Blu-rays
COFFINMAKER’S BLUES
STEPHEN VOLK
GIVING THE DEVIL HIS DUE
It was with an uncharitably heavy heart I read the announcement of Pan Macmillan’s new James Herbert Award for Horror Writing. Having tried in vain to adapt two of his books for television, I’ve wrestled with plots that don’t make sense and characters who don’t begin to convince. Yes, Herbert dragged horror into the mainstream on the shirt-tails of Stephen King, but he dragged slugs and crabs with him. Sorry, but to me it’s like giving a comedy award in the name of Jim Davidson.
My preferred choice – and this will not be to everyone’s liking – would be a now almost forgotten, prolific, best-selling author who was for a huge chunk of the last century a household name: Dennis Wheatley.
Setting accusations of concrete prose and right wing bias to one side for a moment, let’s not forget in the 1930s he brought supernatural horror into modern life, making evil terrifyingly plausible through diligent research, leading the Sunday Times to exude “he makes the most incredible seem absolutely real”.
His first novel, The Forbidden Territory (1933), was reprinted seven times in seven weeks and optioned by Alfred Hitchcock. But it was a publication the following year that set his career truly aflame, being called “the best thing of its kind since Dracula” by James Lost Horizon Hilton in the Daily Telegraph, while Howard Spring in the Evening Standard raved “he forcibly abducts the imagination”. It was, of course, The Devil Rides Out.
Legend decrees that the bon viveur treated Aleister Crowley to lunch for research purposes, thought the man repugnant, and never wanted to meet him again. The truth is rather different. Wheatley himself wrote that the black magician “dined with my wife and me several times. He was a fascinating conversationalist and an intellect of the first order” – a curious assessment of the self-claimed Devil’s emissary on earth, who identified himself as the Beast 666.
In retrospect it’s no surprise, though, that the novel is about the threat to English civilisation from corruption and debauchery. “I’d rather see you dead than monkeying with black magic!” the Duke tells Simon, and we know immediately a young soul is at stake – and not just from indulging in the Clicquot again. We are initiated into arcane law with astonishing speed, enticed and repulsed like its victims by the lure of moral abandon. When the Satanist Mocata has eyes “like burning coals” on the virgin child of the upper-class Eaton family, lucky horseshoes, the Quabalah, numerology and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse all get a look-in before the pentacle is drawn for the final, dizzying psychic battle.
And it’s no coincidence that this, Wheatley’s most enduring book, was too action-packed to let his politics get in. The Secret War, for instance (as Simon Bestwick informs me), has blacks depicted as savages who need to be kept in line, while Italian fascists are presented as courageous and admirable and the German ambassador is “a dedicated Nazi and a thoroughly decent fellow”. But hindsight is a wonderful and dangerous thing. The truth is Wheatley was a product of his time and class, as are Herbert and King, as are we all. He held dear what he saw as Anglo-Saxon Christian values, and saw villains as those who threatened them in the dying light of the British Empire.
Hence, too old to sign up in WWII but desperate to do something for the war effort, Wheatley luckily had an introduction to the Deputy Head of MI5, Maxwell Knight (sometimes called “M”), since the man’s chauffeur happened to be Joan, Wheatley’s wife. As detailed in his book Stranger Than Fiction and Craig Cabell’s Churchill’s Storyteller, the famous novelist soon found himself in the uniform of Wing Commander as a member of the underground (literally) London Controlling Section, which supervised deception plans and misinformation against the might of the Nazis. Amongst the many papers he wrote for the War Office was an imagined plan for the invasion of Britain as conceived by Hitler’s High Command.
This commandeering of a highly creative mind later inspired another Dennis – Spooner – in creating thriller author Jason King, who helped Interpol with their unsolved mysteries in the sixties detective series Department S. But Wheatley also played a key role the creation of an even more iconic hero.
Ian Fleming was a Lieutenant commander in Naval Intelligence working on a plan to smuggle Aleister Crowley into Germany to trick Rudolf Hess into contacting a fake cell of anti-Churchill Englishmen in England. Wheatley and Knight were involved in the soon-redundant mission, but Fleming was a big fan of Wheatley, whose ruthless spy Gregory Sallust regularly bedded women and saved the world from megalomaniacs – and became the main inspiration for James Bond. The two men shared a love of gadgets – Wheatley even had a sword hidden in his swagger stick. The quintessential Englishman, suave, convivial and dapper, wearing a greatcoat with red lining, he can’t help reminding me of the debonair John Steed of The Avengers.
Hutchinson were selling a million copies of Wheatley’s books per year by the time I devoured them – novels like Strange Conflict (a bizarre tale of astral projection, far more intoxicating a feat of the imagination than Inception); Uncharted Seas (which gave Hammer possibly their weirdest movie in The Lost Continent); and They Used Dark Forces (a giddy combo of Hitler, spies and black magic). Meanwhile his image proliferated as the successful author in a smoking jacket with the cliché shelves of occult books behind him. Then he became – dread word – unfashionable. British readers identified more with Stephen King’s small town USA than with the stuffy, posh world of “brandy and cigars” that seemed so distant to them. Wheatley became less like John Steed in The Avengers and more like the dotty old retired generals the show parodied. In 1976 Hammer made To the Devil a Daughter but it couldn’t compete with the realism of Friedkin’s The Exorcist, and aged movie star Richard Widmark seemed to advertise that the product was well past its sell-by date.
But that doesn’t mean his body of
work is without influence. I see it in Rosemary’s Baby, The Wicker Man, The Blair Witch Project, House of the Devil, even Inside No 9. However, perhaps the true inheritor is Phil Rickman with his Merrily Watkins books. Except now the Duke de Richleau is a single-parent female vicar lured into Deliverance Ministry by a modernising Bishop, who struggles with faith and self doubt and has a spiky relationship with her 17-year-old daughter. I don’t know if Wheatley would fear occult influence in a Psychic Fair or a meditation group above a health food shop, but there’s a Wheatleyesque warning implicit in Rickman’s novels, where even mindfulness might open the crack for the “virus” of evil to get in. There again, I wonder what he would make of African witchcraft beliefs now being tolerated as part of “ethnic diversity”, and the dumbing down of the baptism service, removing the requirement to “reject the Devil” because the Church Liturgy Commission fears the word could be “off-putting”.
To modern ears his style might be incredibly laboured, and I am no fan of his politics – far from it – but whether racist, snob or patriot, I think Wheatley meant every word of his earnest sign off in The Devil and All His Works: “None of us can hope to lead perfect lives. But if we follow the Right-hand Path we shall be armoured against the temptation to do evil.” Even if, to our cynical ears, it sounds woefully trite.
He died in 1977, but I for one will continue to champion Dennis and All His Works. Most of all for redefining the dark art of horror to a wide and hungry audience. Smoking jacket or leather jacket – it’s the storytelling that counts.
www.stephenvolk.net
BLOOD PUDDING
LYNDA E. RUCKER
GOING TO EXTREMES
It’s a question nearly every horror fan and writer has grappled with at one time or another. Is there any such thing as going too far, and if there is, where do we draw that line?
There is a bigger problem embedded in the question however, which is that it presumes horror is the literature (or film, or storytelling) of “going too far” in the first place. For me, the best literature all strives for a sense of something greater, something we might call transcendence, and horror is no different. The difference that does exist perhaps for horror fans is the means by which we arrive at that point of transcendence.
Sometimes what that means is fear, but it can be difficult to frighten the experienced horror fan, at least in the sense of creating a genuine sense of frisson at the appearance of monsters or ghosts. More often, it is what underlies those monsters and ghosts that moves us: a reminder of our own smallness in the universe, a sense of the eventual annihilation that awaits us and everyone that we love. For me, this is as likely to evoke a sense of profound wonder as despair. I always find it odd when people say they enjoyed Lovecraft as teenagers but the older they got, they found him more ridiculous and less readable. For me, Lovecraft’s absurd universe with its gods for whom humanity is utterly irrelevant becomes more meaningful the older I get. What’s scarier than the monster who is bent on destroying you? The monster that does so because you are simply beneath its notice, and this is something that I think is missed in many modern reinventions of Lovecraft. When Cthulhu wakes from his dreaming at Ry’leh, it’s bad news for humanity not because he hates us, but because he doesn’t care one way or the other.
It’s taken me much of my life so far to come to terms with the idea that life is essentially meaningless – but what arose from that sense of essential meaninglessness was also a realisation that the people we love and the things that we do are really the only things that matter. This is one of the truths embedded at the core of the very best dark fiction for me. The recognition of loss makes us hold on harder.
But also? It’s fun to be scared.
There’s the famous quote by Stephen King that goes “I recognize terror as the finest emotion … But if I find I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out.” What is often missed is that within the space of the ellipses King invokes Robert Wise’s film The Haunting and the story ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ – the things in those stories that remain unseen. What really scares you? Such moments allow us to fill in the blank with our own boogeymen. And they are legion.
Horror can be many things. It can be gross, it can be funny, it can be terrifying, it can be fun, it can be thought-provoking, it can be awe-inspiring. Like all great forms of storytelling, it can act as catharsis and lead us to epiphany. Can it also be dangerous? Can words and the stories that we tell be bad for people? How much responsibility do writers bear for the power of their words?
There was a time when I would have argued that art transcended morality. I’m not sure whether I actually believed this or how thoroughly I had thought this through. Today, I would say there is a much more nuanced conversation to be had about that, about what words like art and morality and responsibility mean in the first place and where we might draw certain lines. I think this is a conversation that lies in a vast grey area, and by that I mean I don’t know that there is a final judgment that can be reached. As humans, we don’t like that very much, things that are open-ended, ideas that leave us in uncomfortable places without conclusions.
Most fans and creators of horror are all too accustomed to being drawn into conversations about the genre’s more unsavoury elements, whether that is crossing a line in terms of the way in which violence and depravity are depicted or elements like misogyny that are all too common in horror fiction and film. And we’re also all too used to defending our genre against charges that it actually drives people toward those acts of violence.
But recently, a conversation has been trickling down from American academia into discussions of popular literature. This conversation is rooted in an idea born from online self-help forums that discussions of certain topics could retraumatise forum participants and thus warnings should be attached to those discussions. This suggests that it’s not just the extreme that we need to worry about.
As this idea makes it way into classrooms, conventions, online spaces and the larger public sphere, contentious debates have arisen in which one side insists that literature ought to come with warning labels – what are known as trigger warnings, to be precise. What could be wrong with such a reasonable request, its proponents ask. Who among us would have survivors of war and rape and abuse retraumatised in the name of encountering literature unfiltered. And surely anyone who would resist such a movement is simply bereft of compassion and lacking in experience of trauma on their own – or are they? Should they have to say one way or another? Show us your scars and you can join the conversation, comes the sentiment from some quarters.
It is a conversation that has been of particular interest to me as a lifelong fan of dark fiction and as a writer of the same, because let’s face it – our entire genre is one big trigger warning. Maybe it’s something we don’t even need to think about; maybe the horror label alone is our answer to the conundrum, but most of us love storytelling outside of horror, and many of us are troubled not just by the substance but the tenor of the debate. Trigger warnings on literature, whether limited to the classroom syllabus, reviews headings or placed on the covers of books (the latter, in fairness, I don’t think I have seen anyone propose directly) have the peculiar effect of simultaneously exalting and reducing literature. It is so powerful that it can do us irreparable harm; its shades and subtleties can be reduced to a series of words that will effectively convey the impact those events woven into a story will have on individuals. Storytelling is about conflict, and troubling things, and there is arguably very little worth reading or watching that might not invoke powerful and even upsetting reactions in the right person.
Suddenly the question of going too far becomes not one of where we draw the boundaries around, say, depictions of extreme violence but what it is appropriate to talk about and write about at all, about a caution so extreme that some would say it threatens to stifle the creation and experience of art itself. There are two sides in this debate and very li
ttle in between, and both sides are very certain they have the right of it. There’s little tolerance for the liminal spaces where stories simultaneously have the power to heal and destroy and little acknowledgement of how fragile and how powerful both stories and humans can be, sometimes at the very same time.
We want to be safe; safety must be one of the most essential of human desires, but the problem is that we cannot be safe as long as we are alive. Warning labels perpetuate that lie in the same way that words like closure suggest that we ever recover from the things that wound us the most. Safety is a lie. Storytelling should strive for truth.
lyndaerucker.wordpress.com
BE LIGHT. BE PURE. BE CLOSE TO HEAVEN
SARA SAAB
Illustrated by Vincent Sammy
Tanta had two jobs.
During the day she sold train tickets to glazed commuters coming and going through Nunsin Street Station. The tickets were pink rectangles, sharp enough that their papercuts collected on her fingers, crisscrossing, subway maps in miniature.
At night she was the officiant for the icebox.
Daydreaming in front of the glare of the half-antique train reservations screen, Tanta imagined her sensitive fingertips wedging under the heavy lid of the icebox, the quick relief of the frosted inside as her fingers slid in. She thought about this when she sold returns to Bergagio, off-peak day tickets to Little Atene, explained the policy about bicycles on trains. The icebox was on her mind a lot, like a lover or a visual mantra.