BLACK STATIC 19
Of all the writers, Steve Rasnic Tem’s story was the one I was most looking forward to, having just read and enjoyed his contribution to Stephen Jones’s latest anthology, ‘Visitants: Stories of Fallen Angels & Heavenly Hosts’ (not forgetting his excellent contribution to ‘Subtle Edens’ edited by Allen Ashley).
But it was a crushing disappointment: interminable and with unconvincing dialogue (though I suspect that was affected, but still...). The writing was dead and cold. Now, you could take the cop-out and say, “Well, it was written in the 2nd person, so that’s kinda unavoidable.” Hogwash. All 500 pages of Brian Aldiss’s brilliant new novel, ‘Walcot’, were also written in the 2nd person. It’s warm, it’s moving. It’s his magnum opus. In the end if I’m not ‘inside’ a story - if I’m consciously aware that I’m reading – then no matter what merits it may have, for me it’s failed. I want to lose myself in a story; not feel like I’m slogging my way through a pile of Cliff Notes.
“Beach Combing” by Ray Cluley was brief, but very effective: here a young boy ‘sees’ the memories in the found objects he touches.
Joel Lane is hit and miss for me: his ‘Earthwire’ collection left me cold, but ‘The Terrible Changes’ and ‘The Witnesses Are Gone’ were superb. At his best Lane can completely connect you to the honesty of the emotions he’s conveying. “The Sleep Mask” is good, but I didn’t have a strong reaction to it. It wasn’t a ‘miss’, so perhaps it was just a case of not doing for me what past stories had done better.
Lane’s tale was about a man suffering from a sleep disorder (although with Lane, such matters are just surface details to the deeper layers of his stories). The next tale is “They Will Not Rest” by Simon Clark is also about sleep – only here certain death awaits everyone if they fall asleep. This, then, is a nightmare scenario where people have to stay awake in order to stay alive. One of the best Simon Clark short stories I’ve read in years.
Last is “The Wound Dresser” by Lavie Tidhar. One of the shortest in the magazine, but not a word is wasted. Great tone, extremely effective. Having just read Jones’s angels anthology I was immediately intrigued to see what Tidhar’s angel story would be like – and it’s not at all like any of the contributions to ‘Visitants’! Along with the Clark, one of the strongest stories in the issue.
Despite disappointments, I do admire the range of stories in Black Static, something I never felt with The Third Alternative (although admittedly I bailed on TTA when it had barely reached its teen numbers: for me it was just a miasma of myopic misery. More than anything, what really galled me with the whole ‘slipstream’ malarkey was that all involved were convinced they were reinventing the wheel. Yeah, right. They were doing nothing Brian Aldiss hadn’t already done – better – with his ‘Acid-Head’ stories in the ‘60s. Hell, even on a bad day Aldiss could write circles around the whole lot of them).
All the regular non-fiction comments from Fowler, O’Driscoll and Volk are terrific reads, though all of them concern themselves for the most part with films.
There’s a lengthy interview with Stephen Jones and extensive coverage of recent anthologies. My only real gripe with Black Static is the amount of effort, time and paper – 9 pages – wasted on reviewing the utter schlock of DVD drivel. Really, who cares already? (Leave that nonsense, I say, to Kim Newman and his Empire Magazine column.) I’d much prefer another story or interview...
A note on the layout and design: I have to say, since issue 16 Black Static has become a far more pleasurable read, not least because of the colour; with the b&w everything – I don’t know – just sort of blurred and smudged together. Reading could be a chore at times. Not only does the colour do the artwork more justice, but it helps to separate everything out. Plus I like having all the comments at the beginning, stories in the middle and reviews at the end. It just makes it so much easier to find stuff. For instance, I was looking through some of the b&w back issues and, jeez, trying to find something was a killer: stories, comments and reviews were scattered hither and yon, and not always helpfully labelled. I hope the current design and layout stays the way it is, as I like it just fine.
All in all 19 is a solid issue, if for this humble reader not as good as 18.
