INTERACTION

Issue 14 is now mailing out to subscribers and contributors and will be in good shops... towards the end of next week maybe.

Overseas copies are sent on a Premium service which means they should arrive pretty much everywhere within seven working days – about the same time it takes within the UK.

Here I would normally say "as usual all the original art is by David Gentry" but it was completely unreasonable to expect Dave to continue as sole artist, so from now on we'll see an assortment of talented artists whose names you will recognise contributing to the magazine. Dave's original static and iconic fly remain of course!



The cover art is by Dave Senecal.

Stories:

We, Who Live in the Wood by Paul Finch
illustrated by Ben Baldwin

The Eleventh Day by Christopher Fowler
illustrated by Ben Baldwin

Hootchie Cootchie Man by Maurice Broaddus
illustrated by Dave Senecal

Survivor's Guilt by Rosanne Rabinowitz
illustrated by Mark Pexton

Teen Spirit by Gary McMahon
illustrated by Daniel Serra

Features:

White Noise monitored by Peter Tennant
news

Interference by Christopher Fowler
comment

Electric Darkness by Stephen Volk
comment

Blood Spectrum by Tony Lee
DVD/Blu-ray reviews of new releases, including Flick, The Uninvited, Vinyan: Lost Souls, Blood Rain, Blood: The Last Vampire, Silent Night Deadly Night, The Hide, A Perfect Getaway, Dorian Gray, Pontypool, Thirst, Dawn of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead, A Tale of Two Sisters, Feast II: Sloppy Seconds, Euro Killers: Essential Collection, Three Extremes 1 & 2, Park Chan-Wook Double Bill, Asian Horror: The Essential Collection, plus easy to enter draws to win several of these DVDs/Blu-rays

Case Notes by Peter Tennant
reviews of books by Gary McMahon + interview, Adam Roberts, Stephen Clark, Beverly Barton, Chris Carter, Tania Carver, Shaun Jeffrey, Karen Rose, Steven Deighan, Trevor Denyer, Ralph Robert Moore, Tom Fletcher, Michael Marshall Smith, Tony Richards

More details and extracts can be found on the Current Issue page of this website's Black Static section.

You can buy Black Static in good bookshops, newsagents and specialist stores, both here in the UK and overseas. If your local shop doesn't stock the magazine please ask them to order it in for you. You can also order Black Static via mail order distributors such as Fantastic Literature and BBR, or download an e-version from Fictionwise (see link). By far the best option though, for you and for us, it to take out a subscription to the magazine direct: please just click on any of the 'buy now' or 'subscribe' links on the website, or go straight to our secure Shop, where you can buy our stuff with a credit/debit card or paypal. Thanks!

Current subscribers: please check the status of your subscriptions now and renew if necessary. Thanks.

We hope you enjoy this issue and look forward to reading your comments on this thread.

The cover looks good.
Actually no it doesn't, it looks quite evil.
I'm looking forward to it

It touched down in Norfolk about an hour ago.

Smells divine. Looks pretty good too.

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http://trumpetville.wordpress.com
http://ttapress.com/blackstatic/casenotesblog/

Mine arrived this morning

Can't wait to get stuck into it.

Mine's here, and words can't do justice to my badly-concealed excitement at seeing the bit about In The Gloaming in White Noise. Just got to tear my eyes away to read the rest of the magazine now...

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Listen to In The Gloaming Podcasts: Creepy Tales of Now!
http://inthegloamingpodcasts.wordpress.com

Still working my way through the mag, but I have to jump in already and say that 'The Eleventh Day' must be a contender for one of the best horror stories I've ever read. A central concept so universal I'm suprised I haven't come across it before (or indeed that Stephen King hasn't made it the basis for one of his restricted novels, a la Cujo, Misery, Gerald's Game), and the ending is just killer. Great stuff.

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My fiction

Yes I really enjoyed Eleventh Day too.

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http://www.alisonlittlewood.co.uk

Arrived today (or maybe yesterday - forgot to check the post box) down here in SW France.

Perfect condition - and as Pete said "smells divine".

Thoroughly impressed with all of the stories in this issue. Survivor's Guilt and Teen Spirit are lingering the most

More comments please! Maybe Dec/Jan is the wrong time to be publishing issues.

Also, I'm a bit concerned about the UK delivery of this issue. It went out on the 14th December, and some copies arrived quicker than normal, yet one or two people have told me they've only just received theirs in the last day or three. Were they just unlucky, or have many others been kept waiting that long?

I got mine promptly, and enjoyed all of the stories. I particularly liked Suvivor's Guilt

Review by Colin Harvey at Suite 101:-

http://scififantasyfiction.suite101.com ... 4_reviewed

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http://trumpetville.wordpress.com
http://ttapress.com/blackstatic/casenotesblog/

The reviews in Suite 101 are good.

But what I found attractive about Teen Spirit is the way reality just tilts slightly and you get the horror.
With Survivor's Guilt what I liked is how you get the sense of a big back history hardly touched upon in the story, and my mind was gamboling to keep up with it!

Hi everyone,

As a contributor with a vested interest I was going to keep out of this. But since the traffic has been slow, I might as well add my 2p.

First, thanks for all the kind comments about “Survivor’s Guilt” on this board and in Colin’s review as well. Go ahead and gambol Paul! On a dark and chilly Monday afternoon you made my day.

I was also wondering what people thought about Colin’s comment that the cover art tends towards the generic. I’m afraid I have to agree with him. I also had a similar reaction to the illustration that went with my story, when I was geared up for artwork in the subtle and haunting style of previous editions of the magazine.

And after reading Colin’s review I thought: ‘Aha, so maybe there's more to this than me being precious!”

To broaden the discussion, are changes in the style of certain illustrations just a reflection of different artists being involved - or could it be a development in defining BS further as a horror fiction publication? I admit I always preferred ‘transmissions from the edge’ to a genre-specific identification anyway. But if part of Black Static’s ethos is to explore different dimensions of horror fiction (or ‘dark fantasy’, but that’s not on the cover this time), then subtle and/or ‘disturbing’ would still seem the visual way to go…

This criticism aside, I was very pleased to find myself in the company of all the other contributors to this issue.

Rosanne

I think it would be good to see illustrations that typify or demonstrate or represent the story.

The illustration for Survivors Gulit of a vampire with long nails doesn't quite hit the nail on the head, pardon the pun.

Somebody crouching under floorboards might have done it?