Black Static Issue 2 by TTA Press
Lisa Tuttle, Steven Utley, Scott Nicholson & Peter Tennant Feature
The December 07 - January 08 issue of this British dark fantasy magazine highlights the best in alternative fiction and reviews of novels, anthologies, and DVDs.
Black Static Features
The usual suspects all gather; Stephen Volk on writing for cinema; Christopher Fowler laments the ever-decreasing choices available to the discerning seeker of fiction; Mike O’Driscoll presents an alternative horror canon featuring such unlikely candidates as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Don DeLillo’s White Noise; John Paul Catton reports from Japan, while Tony Lee rounds up the DVD releases. The columns alone are worth the price.
Peter Tennant -- Case Notes
The most impressive column in this issue is Case Notes, Peter Tennant’s regular review column, which covers three novels, five collections of short stories and two anthologies; given that it’s only a fraction of his work (as well as his own writing, Tennant is also proof-reader for sister magazine Interzone, and non-fiction editor of Whispers of Wickedness) the quality of his reviews is staggering.
Black Static Fiction
The opening story is Lisa Tuttle & Steven Utley’s ‘In The Hole,’ a story that is at once contemporaneous, yet strangely timeless --in many ways welcomely reminiscent of a Dozois, Dann or Effinger story from an early 1970s Orbit– drenched in the strange dislocation that many POWs must feel when freed. It details the corrupting disappointment that unchecked fantasy leads to when confronted by reality, and is a welcome appearance by two authors who are as well known for their collaborations as for their solo work. Let’s hope there will be more from them.
‘The Serpent and the Hatchet Gang’ by F. Brett Cox is a curious mish-mash of ideas, a temperance campaign set in a fishing town haunted by legends of an off-shore monster that works better on second reading, and is oddly thought-provoking.
‘Must See to Appreciate’ is by the prolific Scott Nicholson, this time taking the old haunted-house idea and giving it a neat twist through ninety degrees.
Steve Rasnic Tem’s ‘Unknown’ is a disturbing examination of our shared drive to name, to categorize and by labelling them, to constrict people, and is all the more effective because of it’s brevity.
‘In The Shape of A Dragon’ by Melanie Fazi tells of a little girl and her artist father, who shows her drawings of dragons, all of whom appear to be suffering from some sort of leprosy that erases them from the page. He fears he is losing his talent; “I’ve begun to ask myself whether I might have used up my capital. It may be the case that people like me only receive their gift for a fixed period, their mission being to get the best out of it…Might it really be taken back?”
Lynda E. Rucker takes the reader to more conventional territory in ‘Ash Mouth,’ with a precocious little girl whose elder sister disappears one summer, but Rucker avoids the norm, while still leaving the reader with a chilling final line.
Andrew Humphrey’s ‘Holding Pattern’ takes a simple idea –a reflection whose actions are slightly delayed- and builds neatly on it.
David Gentry
The artwork for the opening issue of Black Static was striking, but if anything David Gentry has exceeded even that level of quality to produce artwork that is profoundly disturbing, enhances rather than distracts from the stories, and unusually for genre art is photographic, rather than painted. Any US publisher who wants to distinguish the covers from the run of the mill should seek out Gentry and study his methods – or better still, commission him to do their covers.
If anything, Black Static 2 is even better than the previous issue, and is highly recommended to anyone who likes to read thought-provoking fiction.
