Black Static 7: Transmissions From Beyond

Black Static 7: Transmissions From Beyond kicks off with Bruce Holland Rogers’s “The Reason for the Season,” where a boy with a bleak outlook on life creates a morbid Halloween costume. Goth without humor, Rogers reminds us that horror can still be unironic, existential, and, well, horrific.

Trent Hergenrader gives us a child’s-eye view of horror with “The Hodag.” Something vicious is tearing up pets and people in nine-year-old Jacob’s town; he provides an uncomprehending, spectator point of view for the monster hunt. Hergenrader writes competently; his rather straightforward story deepened with the suggestion that perhaps poverty and sadness are just as cruel as supernatural beasties.

We move into more allegorical, hallucinogenic territory with “Blood God Blood” by Eric Gregory. This tale is about a man, Hunter, who falls in love with Katie, avatar of a primal, chthonic new religion that, she says, worships the Blood God and feeds on secrets. Hunter worships Katie, but she is almost self-absorbed with her own troubles as the Blood God’s rejected daughter; her involution keeps the reader from sympathizing with her and understanding her as the antihero that she is apparently meant to be. Violence, thwarted desire, and emotional distance result. Alternating between the poetic myth of the Blood God and the equally flowing prose of Hunter and Katie’s story, Gregory creates a sympathetic Antichrist, and he almost pulls it off.

“The Talent Girl” by Daniel Kaysen moves swiftly and starkly, like reading a movie script; mostly in dialog, it follows the story of a young woman whose psychic powers allow her to pick up the last emotions and thoughts of gruesomely killed people. Our protagonist’s lifelong link to violence (her powers were triggered by the trauma of watching her father shoot her mother, then himself) makes her literally numb to the normal revulsion and grief one would feel in the face of such events. She wants to escape her job and go to college, but something—someone—doesn’t want her to. A taut, original twist on the concept of a psychic detective.

Playing on the flexibility of Internet-based identities, Tony Richards writes about a man in “Pages from a Broken Book” who meets a woman online who seems tailor-made to his desires. As they become closer, her lies and occult leanings prompt him to investigate her true past. Witchcraft melds uneasily with technology in Richards’s story, an unexceptionally written work that would be creepier if it were a) more sharply executed and b) published 15 years ago, when the novelty of the Information Superhighway could be more easily tapped with such stories about online anxieties.

In Alison J. Littlewood’s “The Deep Walker,” a tourist in Cuba finds himself increasingly estranged from his materialistic girlfriend’s insistence on the superficial pleasures of beach and hotel. Talking to some natives, the tourist explores the possibility of neglected gods, which would certainly be more interesting than your typical yuppie vacation. Littlewood has some rich, vivid descriptions of Cuba as a place and a set of sensory experiences, but I disliked the imperialistic overtones of this piece, in which a white dude seeks enlightenment from stereotypical Noble Savages.

“Bait” by David Sakmyster is the best of this issue, and I’m not just saying that because it’s set off coastal Massachusetts, which is approximately where I live. I’m saying that because it’s a successful blend of several elements: believable “Massholes” (residents of my fair state), a vividly evoked, chilly and gritty New England seascape, and eldritch horrors of the deep, all of this situated in a literary tradition as salty and local as Herman Melville and H.P. Lovecraft. “Bait” concerns a guy from a Nantucket dive shop and his business partner, Trent; they help the police discover some strangely fish-bitten corpses. They poke around in the matter, discovering that the hungry source of fish bait wishes to consume them as well. Icky, suspenseful, grim, and overall wonderful.

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