TTA PRESS 2023
Fiction by Simon Avery, Steve Rasnic Tem, Sarah Lamparelli, Rhonda Pressley Veit, Julie C. Day, Neil Williamson, Josh Bell, Françoise Harvey, Aliya Whiteley, Andrew Hook, Tim Lees, Ray Cluley.
My previous long-term reviews of this publisher: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tta-press-interzone-black-static/
Although I have retired from most reviewing after 15 years of doing it, I am keeping up with my regular independent relationships, such as with this momentous final edition of Black Static. Congratulations, good wishes and thanks to Andy Cox.
I am also reviewing any new single stories in anthologies and collections by writers whom I have reviewed before. Please keep me informed of the latter. Who knows, I may one day come out of such retirement and start obsessively gestalt reviewing whole books again!
When I read this Black Static book (192 pages) in 2023, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below….
THE CREASE by Simon Avery
“Everything was only the foundation of something else;”
The moving and engagingly plain-spoken story of strikingly red-haired Verity from youth into older middle age with foresight of her old age, starting with life with her mother after Verity’s father had left for another woman, the jewel the sea gifted her, the song that was equally gifted her by lamb’s blood within the countryside’s sinister crease of land, and her loved one who died of cancer – and her fame and success as a music performer now reclaimed in later age. I have broached part of this story’s ‘everything’.
And this particular ‘everything’ uniquely gifts you something else, too…. A prevailing bespoke verity. From her music’s instinctive groove.
“Her room already overflowed with paperback books and vinyl records.”
My previous work upon this writer’s own work: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/simon-avery/ AND https://etepsed.wordpress.com/2023/05/30/simon-avery/(with ‘The Crease’ now added)
R IS FOR REMAINS by Steve Rasnic Tem
And Rasnic Tem is for anagram of Miscreant, the laterally inspiring miscreator of fiction-truth by his horror apotheoses, and this is his most distilled apotheosis so far, unless he is also intending this story as a remains of himself? Indeed, why is it so special and so appropriate for a final Black Static? You will have to read it for yourself, as we follow a starter worker and an experienced old timer clearing up ‘decomp’ as humans die of ‘rage’, of suicidal despair and of gory rot in sheer utter enormous horror conditions that combine zombiehood and a simple gooey old age in bungalows like mine, lettered, too. Old age, moreover, as a disease in both mind and body, whether or not you are still young in either state.
I cannot do justice to how this neat tactile harmfully redolent brief story crystallises these things, a feat of fiction-truth that only an old timer with highly successful writing skills could possibly achieve. It is utterly awful and sublime. Oh, yes, not forgetting the ‘honest dead.’
“Their logo was three identical genies with tornado bodies leaving sparkling stars in their wake.”
My previous work on this author’s own work here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/steve-rasnic-tem/ AND https://etepsed.wordpress.com/2023/03/22/steve-rasnic-tem-reviews/ (including additional aimages for ‘R is for Remains’)
R is also for Retention
RETENTION by Sarah Lamparelli
“And things always went wrong. Eventually.”
Except if you had the equivalent of this constant earworm of prose fiction in a Forever War, where in such wars the very word worm worried and worked world without end. For me, a major story about war, geared to Iraq and Afghanistan and, here, a well-characterised woman medic in the throes of evoked gore concerning her soldier patients one of whom she suspected bore wounds that wound on and on… pay and payback in patterns of rough justice that ordinary humanity such as the medics she knew on this forever’s outside endured in finite doses. Makes a telling tactile pattern, too, with the Miscreant story above.
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/sarah-lamparelli/ AND a new ai-collage here: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/5198-2/
A WEDDING BY THE SEA by Rhonda Pressley Veit
“If a thing sings its pain, and there is none to hear it, does the pain exist, my son?”
Here the Miscreant’s ‘decomp’ becomes sea-exquisite, rhapsodic in its telling by an inscrutable maternal narrator leading to what I can safely say is something that ought to go down in history for what it is – the best evocation ever of subsuming sea-life and its eatables and the people who scar its primacy, a sly, unforgiving, narrative nod towards the mischievous miscreancy of a mother as she with proud jealousy goes to her son’s wedding on an island where the Atlantic Ocean threatens to absorb the rivers of Charleston, and whereon her son is equally absorbed by his new in-law family and their seafood culinary mœurs, this being a genius-loci evocation to die for, indeed — and what transpired can only be read by you, not foretold to you by me. Meantime, you’ve heard of unreliable narrators, yes? Well, this mother is straight-up reliable, even while as slippery in your reading hand as the sea-life itself. She watches two lovers eat each other’s face with a kiss. Then she acts. Then, she even writes this as a a proud record of its subsuming us all. Eaten by our own mother for what made us leave the primeval slime, I guess. You couldn’t make it up. Whatever the fiery passage where the Bible shows a leg, as quoted in the text from the Song of Solomon.
My previous Veit reviews here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/rhonda-pressley-veit/ AND a new ai-collage: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/2023/07/18/rhonda-pressley-veit/
WHOLE BODIES ARE NEVER LEFT BEHIND by Julie C. Day
“The song of bone to bone.”
And a mother and her son moving from dusty Kentucky to the Ocean ‘decomp’ of the earlier stories above, this story becomes the sheer apotheosis of bone on bone to transcend death, via fishing hooks, by the boy and his cat, yes, to transcend death, the death that his grandpa once wore.
It is an amazing foresight of our positive bone gestalt beyond the broken oyster shells on our footpaths, connections and synchronicities made manifest, the epitome of my endemic real-time reviewing and more recently its Ai-fication. Thanks!
“Each of the animal’s front paws had what looked like a second thumb, […] the bones revealed a different truth.”
My previous reviews of this author’s fiction: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/julie-c-day/ AND the still evolving collage in her name: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/2023/05/08/julie-c-day/
The next story below seems to be a natural coda to the previous one, as well as intriguing, suspenseful and powerful in itself, a timely read in the light of the disruptive climate we witness around us today, a ‘decomp’ that now cannot be warded off…
THE SALTED BONES by Neil Williamson
“Even the grey houses down there, clustered around a short slipway and then strung out along the bay’s gentle curve like oyster shells…”
A medical X-ray worker seeks the twin girls upon whose broken bones, under unscarred skin, he’d scried for faint words when they earlier presented themselves at the hospital with such breaks, self-inflicted or imposed by domestic violence? He negotiated a desolate part of Scotland that should have been immune by distance from any world’s climate change further south on the earth’ surface, I thought! But Scotland needs its sentries for future centuries, I equally thought. The medical man has his own well-felt family ‘backstory’ while driving his fuming pre-electric car to find the lonely bay along a barely decipherable scrawny road towards a set of houses tangled by loosestrife and with yellow dandelions that clamped his tyres. And the words’ panning out is far more than just a French Lieutenant’s Woman type silhouette by Giacometti witnessing or warding off the inevitable at the sea’s edge, and this story’s ultimate gulping catharsis hit me right where our combined sad heart sits.
My previous reviews of Neil Williamson here: https://wordpress.com/page/dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/3639 AND a still evolving collage triggered by my reviews here: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/2023/04/04/neil-williamson/
I forgot to tell you above that the name of Veit’s Island is Marion and Day’s boy is named Minnow…
SOMETIMES MY STEPFATHER IS A SEX ZOMBIE by Josh Bell
“And Marine is the one to point the minnows out…”
There is is a sort of marine life ‘decomp’ here, too, from bubblegum packets as refrains and an old forgotten pumphouse with a dead body at whatever stage within it. The former to stop birth, the latter to show where birth leads, with sex implicitly teased into being between them. An adolescent boy with a tall giraffe-stepping moon-accompliced stepsister called Marine and a woman teacher called Himms who once taught him at school, both of them doing such teasing or taunting, I guess. Yes, bubblegum bubblegum, and birthmarks, a million shampoos, thoop thoop arrows, live frogs skewered as fishbait, and “We lock elbows to keep from falling off the edges…” And there is much else.
Sometimes during the long history of Black Static, I have spotted stories that need to be re-published forever. Like, say, Flannery O’Connor’s once were. And this Josh is another such. It is witty and horrific in spades, incantatory prose that beats out poetry any day. I shall go out at night, like the boy’s stepfather, and gradually decant it in packets. Elbowing Marine in the ribs, Hoegranch, Winklepleck, dollops of soup and a cold white creek.
CUL-DE-SAC by Françoise Harvey
“…the wayward dandelions seemed somehow more yellow…”
Clamped, like Williamson’s venturer into a loosestrife community, here believable well-characterised newcomers Ruth and her sometimes wayward husband try to fit in with the less believable women in the woodland-margined community of bungalows, but also to maintain their own standards, and Ruth….well, if I tell you more, whether the Stepford pixies were in her brain or in ours, we’d be either spoilt or subsumed, just as Ruth seems to become part of a charmingly and disarmingly written disorientation of a story, from the receipt of a tulip-shaped tea-light to her drinking tea ‘obediently’….
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/francoise-harvey/ AND the visual bespoke collage that has already been marked out by whatever here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/2023/07/10/francoise-harvey/
Whatever you else you do, you must remove any possibility whatever of your reading this particular review below of a Whiteley work before reading the work itself. You may however read on below the three asterisks.
POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS by Aliya Whiteley.
“If you want a certain future you must pinch out all other possibilities. Lesson one.”
For ‘pinch out’ read ‘remove’.
The ‘worm of retention’ in Lamparelli above now made God’s ‘worm’ of removal! You couldn’t make it up!
The possibilities removed like spines – by a Remover such as I would like to think my own Hawler to be – even spines as long as the spine in the ai image that Williamson’s story triggered anew in his shifting collage linked above.
Lennie, once apprenticed to Marty, is Remover and teacher, and finds a new apprentice called Win, and the latter moves into the well-evoked house where Lennie lives. This important inspiring story is otherwise impossible to describe; you just need to leave room enough in your soul to read it. Remove whatever stops you doing just that.
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Completes the bone gestalt of this book? We shall see.
My previous reviews of Aliya Whiteley here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/aliya-whiteley/ and https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2013/07/28/horror-without-victims-an-editors-commentary/#comment-8504
AND her still evolving ai-collage here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/2023/07/10/aliya-whiteley/
THE ENFILADE by Andrew Hook
“One story is that the builder of the bridge received what he considered to be insufficient payment, and in his anger removed a segment…” (my ellipsis)
From one Whiteley Remover to another in the form of a Rasnic Tem “miscreant”, a word actually used here, the latter being a friend of the narrator as young men in Cambridge, one working in a photographic shop and the Remover in car parts. From the smell of the mosh pit to that of India, the miscreant vanishes by ‘India syndrome’ or in line with some theory that photos can ‘remove’ you gradually. To cut a still developing substantive story into a long exposure, I can safely say this is a work that surely, and perhaps ironically, will outlast itself. It teems with telling aspects of word-portraits of young men in the 1990s onward, from heavy expensive cameras into the digital age, and as in Whiteley’s apprentices, the miscreant has his own acolytes, and they are ‘removed’ by shooting an enfilade, in more ways than one! But is this removal syndrome permanent; one needs to become an actual part of this story’s development as the AI has done for me when triggered by this story in the link below… Or is AI just one fell stage of removal beyond digital? The story may or may not have asked this question, but it certainly made me ask it,
My many previous reviews of Andrew Hook are here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/3228-2/ AND his visual collage mentioned above is here : https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/2023/04/07/andrew-hook/
THE SUMMER OF LOVE by Tim Lees
“The barman says the bar is shut. He means his hands are stripped down to the bone, the bone is steadily fragmenting…”
This book’s bone gestalt faces its final helicopter ride? Peeling off a label from a beer bottle, or visiting a Giant Show in a fairground whereby you become midgets beside its furniture. And more!
And you decide whether you are characters in a story or knowing actors of it. Two young men again as in the Hook and his mosh pit world, teeming here with what young men do on nights out, chatting up two girls and vying for one or the other. And then leading, Nicholas Royle in reverse, the other’s life?
Seeing faces in water surfaces like developing photos in a slipstream of film!…
I am still processing this story as it processes me. Or is it me developing the story further than it ever imagined possible? Its skill is that it gave me this choice. Let’s see what turns up visually from the least expected part of it?
My previous reviews of Tim Lees: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/tim-lees/AND his still developing visual collage: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/2023/06/01/tim-lees/
CABIN FEVER by Ray Cluley
This is the perfect coda to our recent times, as well as ironically to the whole purpose of fiction, with a mock death to bring us all down with the buggers. I dare not describe the final outcome of this airplane captain’s tannoy message to the passengers.
Just keep in mind we are all passengers on the same vulnerable spacecraft called Earth, Williamson’s salted bones et al. Drowned in water or made more tasty by fire? The punch line is one to die for.
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/ray-cluley/AND his visual collage which shares its vanes and bones with another author’s collage, a small prize from me to whoever discovers which: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/4860-2/
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And so ends the greatest and most substantive Horror Fiction project of all time!
Clap!
Literary, slipstream et al.
All the more recent Black Statics I have reviewed are pictured and linked here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/black-static/
Earlier editions:
Black Static – issue 12
Black Static – issue 13
Black Static – Issue 15
Black Static – Issue 18
Black Static #19
Black Static #20
Black Static #21
Black Static #24
Black Static #25
Black Static #26
Black Static #27
Black Static #28
Black Static #29