Black Static #4

If acoustic static is white noise—a random signal with a flat power spectral density—then perhaps it follows that Black Static or, forgive the synoeciosis, black white noise, presents a primary inversion, a constantly fluctuating power spectral density. The fourth issue of this stylish horror magazine delivers six signal bursts, and I’m happy to report that at least five are above average storytelling density.

Tyler Keevil’s narrator is confronted with the grim task of “Cleaning the Western Kittiwake.” The Kittiwake, having capsized and killed all its passengers save one, is now docked at the Lake Washington Canal awaiting a makeover. The lone survivor is Mike, the boat’s owner and the father and husband to the deceased. Are the deaths over? Narratively, this smells of unresolved business as pungently as the “fish scales, guts, brine and herring hoe” covering the ship’s aft hold. Keevil expertly steers us towards an investigation of Mike’s survival and an ultimate resolution. Working for his boss, Roger, our nameless protagonist sets about the thankless duty of making the boat “spick and spam” for buyers, after declaring:

“It wasn’t as if I believed in ghosts.”

Good thing for us readers, his non-belief doesn’t stymie the ghost’s activities one bit. Keevil’s choice to have the cleaner of the boat—and not Mike—be the story’s narrator is a smart one. It allows him to generate anxiety through speculation and additional mystery when we finally meet Mike.

The prose is assured, functional, unglamorous. Keevil’s choices for similes at times appear pedestrian (“docile as a rabbit,” “withered as a mummy”) until we remind ourselves that these are in truth not Keevil’s choices, but his character’s. Despite this therefore doubtful shortcoming, the overall effect is compelling. We are carried on a rising tide of anguish through a sustained compositional cadence and the inherent and appropriate realism of unexceptional description, as precisely befits the narrator. Boating terminology is built into the prose with confidence and buoys the immediacy of the proceedings.

On the whole, this story submerges us several feet deep in a suitably adhesive contemplation of dread, guilt, and closure, but the neat ending prevents us from being completely inundated with transformative effusion.

Water also makes an appearance in the next story, but perhaps only as a subtext to be found in the second half of the titular “Atwater” by Cody Goodfellow. Howell is a man who plans for every eventuality but still manages to get lost. When he does, he finds himself in Atwater. His experiences in this nightmarish realm, and the final revelation they will lead him to, make for a thrilling, though at times trying, journey.

Goodfellow’s prose, as finely attuned to each horrific moment as a marathon runner’s muscle fibers are attuned to the constant strain of anaerobic respiration, is sutured with breathless imagery (“the skull was black glass, toxic onyx ice, squealing and smoking as it met the hot, close air”). At times, the verbal agglomerations end up obstructing the circulatory flow of the narrative, and breathless becomes asphyxiating; this is most syntactically evident in Goodfellow’s non-standard use of the conjunction “and” (“The man came around to the passenger side, and Howell hadn’t locked it,” “Small sounds, but distinctive, and if not threatening, then in this place they portended a myriad of things, all awful,” etc.).

Hyperbole and Goodfellow are also on a first-name basis. The surrealism inherent in Howell’s experiences in Atwater, the unreality of which has been explicitly forewarned (“the first time it happened, he believed that it was as real as everything else in his life up to that point had been”), is best received in small doses. When it is superseded by psychedelic and tortuous gratuity, we can only hope that emerging from Atwater will lead us to greater coherence. It will.

As Goodfellow attempts to ratchet up the hallucinatory intensity, the ever-shifting and ever-mixed metaphors (in one paragraph a woman’s insides are likened to “ground-glass needles and gnashing teeth and mortuary marble, doors within doors opening in a cold black cathedral,” and in the very next, we are informed that “Her torso shook as if she was full of panicked birds”) deaden our senses and anesthetize us, rather than drawing us into the protagonist’s experience through this slightly misshapen linguistic aesthetic. The next excursion into Atwater is even more over-the-top (I’m still recovering from the snap of “black segmented tentacles growing from her gaping, snapping vagina”), but our patience with these Lovecraftian sections (and they are fun) is rewarded.

Details begin to fall into place, and a more rational investigation into what has occurred leads to Howell’s irreversible understanding of the true significance of Atwater and the events he’s been a part of while there—and beyond. With its implicit reference to a sort of Sturgeonesque gestalt, the final scene of this story delivers hefty psychological bravura and answers all of our questions while leading to a greater appreciation of the risks Goodfellow has taken and his skill in getting us this far. This story may not be for the faint of heart, but that’s what makes them faint of heart.

Conrad Williams’s writing kinetics make of the generically-titled “Zombie” anything but a generic or plodding reading experience. His writing, which deftly interweaves stream-of-consciousness associations, second-person narration, and sardonic reflection, is on fire. At the story’s start, our narrator, inebriated at the least, is at a party, and his experiences there become mingled with recollections from earlier days. Then there’s a car ride, and the psychological trip that ensues takes us pretty far down the rabbit hole indeed. That may not sound much like a plot, but I found myself enraptured by the story nonetheless. Williams’s postmodern style brought to mind the best of Chuck Palahniuk in terms of voice and rhythm. At one point, the narrator recalls:

“When you were little,” I ask, “was everything in black and white?”

Williams’s story is ample evidence for a world of plentiful shades of gray.

Nicholas Royle offers us a few tablespoons of crystalline writing in his refined “Salt.” A Manchester university student, seeking help with an assignment to write a horror story for Halloween, takes the course instructor, Dave, up on his offer to help through a writing tutorial. Dave has one published novel to his credit, the eponymous Salt, and as our narrator prepares to meet him for the tutorial, she begins to wonder why he proposed his home for the rendezvous. Royle does an excellent job of capturing the student’s voice, ambling, informal, non-literate (“’No problem at all,’ he says and I’m like, ‘Cool, thanks.’”), and the flavorful story proceeds swiftly. While the ending is neither surprising nor the whole piece particularly memorable, it is delivered with transparent artistry and eloquent understatement. Compared to some of this issue’s other, lengthier outings, this story feels more like seasoning than a full dish. As such, it is a welcome additive to the contents, but may feel underwhelming on its own. And of course, salt dissolves in water.

Steve Nagy’s deliciously Gothic “Ye Shall Eat in Haste” is a post-Draculean adventure in which Van Helsing, having investigated the Count’s demise and other related deaths, has gleaned some arcane secrets from nature’s book and put them to use. The protagonist of sorts, John Seward, who within the framework of the story has, in perfect Gothic tradition, captured the events and “drafted the account” we are now privy to, is sequestered and led to Van Helsing’s manor. There he will learn and see Horrifying Things of Great Import, and his background as a chemist will come into play. The story’s end provides an ironic moral counterpoint to the action.

Nagy displays excellent skill with tone and in the pacing of the scenes, which feature perfectly gloomy set pieces, including a cemetery and a basement cellar. The speech rhythms and word choices of his character’s dialogue are also right on the money, not only successful in imitating the style of canonical texts in this tradition, but adding enough personality and “realism” to infuse even the most dead of the Un-Dead characters with pulsing life.

There is something unabashedly attractive about Nagy’s mock-formal, decadent prose. The whole story, an especially difficult feat in my mind because of all the earlier works in this vein and the resulting abundance of connotations that are invariably attached to these particular tropes, is executed with impressive gusto and infectious zeal. As a reader, my acquaintance with the fictional and historical sources that may inform this story is at best a passing one; someone more familiar with this material will surely enjoy intertextual references and allusions that I missed. Considering how much I enjoyed this story, that constitutes a high recommendation indeed. This piece is better than gold; it’s pure silver.

Barry Fishler’s “This Much I Remember” is a remembrance in which not only memory, but the concept of identity and its relationship to memory, are lengthily and explicitly examined. It is fitting that this quiet, slow-moving piece brings the issue to a close, for it is more of a ruminative coda than a fully formed story. A man appears to be looking at old photographs in an attic and remembering his wife and his son, now deceased. Who is the man, and why is this significant?

Fishler invests a generous quantity of words, perhaps too generous, in examining the rememberer’s often circuitous train of thought. While some of the philosophical overtones of his musings were interesting, his digressions left little room for more thorough investigations into his thoughts. His non-emotional observations appeared to provide little more than a springboard for the rousing of nostalgia, suffering, and loss. At one point, the rememberer berates himself for being “maudlin,” and I found certain passages and reminiscences verging thereon, delivered as they were without the context of a larger sequence of events or the characters’ backgrounds. The cumulative effect for this reader was not heightened emotional intensity, but a compendium of battological divagations.

A much more minor issue, the protagonist’s frequent reminders to himself that an engineer would probably approach the problem so-and-so—the very repetition of his engineering skills—rung untrue for me. The scientists I know may have a greater inclination towards an empirical view of the world than the average person because it innately springs from their character or they have made a choice to internalize, to fully adopt at the deepest stratum of their perceptual being that mode of thinking. It does not arise from constant conscious reminders that because they are scientists they ought to perceive more empirically and, in that way, circularly be scientists.

And yet—and yet—the final scene of the story casts things in a new light and forces us to reexamine earlier assumptions about the memories at hand and their significance. The shift in point of view provides a nifty metaphysical revelation and gives us a sense of the temporal scale of the characters’ tragedy.

I would suggest that if the first few paragraphs of this story put you off, then the final paragraphs may not put you back on; but if you’ve had your share of action and plot and are prepared for a self-conscious, Proustian visitation with a twist, then this may be the finale of the issue you’re looking for.

I was impressed with the quality and variety of tales in Black Static #4. A wealth of comprehensive reviews and columns round out the issue. For any enthusiast of well-crafted stories of the dark, this magazine is not to be missed.

[Disclosure notice: The Fix is brought to you by TTA Press, publisher of Black Static.]