Colin Harvey – author

A night out in Bath brings an unexpected bonus as Kate and I visit the theatre.

Into Bath, to the Theatre Royal last night: Last night’s performance was The Pitman Painters.

My heart had sank when I read the pre-performance blurb. The cast -all refugees from such solid BBC series as Byker Grove, Spender and Our Friends In the North– read like Rent-A-Geordie leavened with a couple of regulars from The Bill. The subject sounded uninspiring, too.  A bunch of miners in the 1930s took up painting after a series of Art Appreciation Lectures.

What I hadn’t expected was that it would be quite as funny as it was; the rule quoting shop steward who consulted the rulebook at each unexpected situation, such as the artist’s model who arrived expecting to strip off, the Socialist war veteran  who quoted Marx at every opportunity, the scally who had a one-liner for every occasion – all of them had us roaring with laughter, the dialogue razor-sharp, the delivery whip-cracking.

There was unexpected pathos as well as one of the miners was offered patronage from an heiress – her offer of £2.50 a week was more than he could earn as a miner for work that was literally back-breaking should a roof collapse. But the group were a collective; what would he do? Should he leave the community that was everything to him, friends, family, companions– and if he did, would he lose the very identity that made his art what it was?

Because this was based on the true story of a group of Durham miners who received unexpected national acclaim amid the poverty of the 1930s, there were no easy answers, and George spent the rest of his life wondering if he had made the right decision.

Written by Lee Hall, who wrote Billy Elliott (which was set in the same area, but 50 years later) the play wore its Old Labour sentiments on its sleeve, depicting a time when many of its protagonists lived in poverty, and the Attlee government’s aspirations were like a call to the New Jerusalem – healthcare for all, an end to poverty, and the dawning of a new democracy. Which made our cynicism-drenched hindsight of the outcomes all the more sad.

Long after the doors had closed, I kept thinking about how much of what we take for granted was denied to these men; we assume that anyone who wants to be a painter now has access to education and opportunities, but to these miners the world of art was closed, which made their achievements even more remarkable.

And the bonus? Because the theatre was empty, we got an upgrade from our £6 at the top of the theatre bench to £30 seats so close to the stage that we could see the cast’s hobnailed boots. 🙂

Terra Damnata is the first book-length work by James Cooper, whose dark, disturbing stories of dysfunctional families have been ornamenting Black Static for the last three years.

Arthur Woodbury is the archetypal Everyman living in a suburb with a wife and daughter in the comfortable suburb of an unnamed city, his car a Volvo, a bottle of sherry in the house for visitors.

But there is a darker side to Arthur. He has a serious gambling problem, and is in debt to local casino owner Norman Foley, whose ‘enforcer’ Randall has a nasty reputation for violence. Worse, Arthur and Beth’s daughter Cherise has just been killed as the novel opens.

And one rain-swept night a rich businessman arrives offering a fortune in exchange for the right to buy Cherise’s body. Although Arthur is appalled at the idea, he realizes that the money offers a way out of his debts….

Most of Cooper’s regular themes recur; the Woodbury family are dysfunctional through tragedy, and while the purpose for which businessman Gerald Appleton wants the cadaver is eventually revealed to be part of Chinese society, for much of the book it seems decidedly creepy. As is often the case with Cooper’s work, he leaves his setting unnamed and background undelineated, as if preferring to let archetypes give the story their own imagery.

It’s an approach that carries risk; at times Arthur and other protagonists seem underdrawn, their motivations skimmed over, but Cooper is a stylish writer and imparts enough traction to the story to get away with it. With its character’s old-fashioned names and close focus, it’s a novella that is very British, and strangely redolent of 1950s thrillers with actors like Stanley Baker and Laurence Harvey.

Terra Damnata marks an important step in Cooper’s career; it is a novella from PS Publishing rather than a full-length novel, but it will hopefully lead to progressively longer works, and with a gorgeously macabre cover by Les Edwards, it is a fine book in its own right.

This morning has been a real battle, in stark contrast to yesterday morning when I laid down a good four hours and ended up with about eight hundred words.

It shows how variable a writer’s output can be. This morning I feel like one of those birds that you sometimes see trapped in greenhouses or conservatories – they’ve flown in, and at every attempt to get out they fly into a glass door or wall.

I awoke with plans to do three or four jobs, and at every turn I’ve thudded into an invisible wall; that, or I managed to finish the job, but after several times as long as it should have taken. The delays have been tiny, but niggling; a phone call at an inopportune moment, a notebook that locks up and refuses to respond, a chequebook that isn’t where I think it should be and which takes ten minutes to find, my own inability to concentrate.

It’s probably that last factor that’s the real cause of the problem.

I may have had one beer too many, last night (the monthly meetings are on the whole becoming ever better attended), or that I’m tired. It may be that without the constant relentless pressure of assignments, but also without the structure that uni provides, I’m adrift. Whatever it is, it’s only with typing this that I’m starting to regain some clarity. That’s one of the many reasons why I blog – talking about it to someone helps me see where the problem is.

Years ago, on a course run by Bruce Holland Rogers*, he (or it may have been co-organizer Eric) observed that sometimes writers procrastinate, finding a million and one things to do rather than actually write. “That’s fine,” he said, “but you have to be honest with yourself. If you’re not getting much done, give yourself the day off.”

So I did. And since I gave myself the day off after I finish this post, the pressure and confusion has lifted. I have no idea why, but I’m just going to go with the flow; if I write one word today, it will be one word more than when I started this blog.

* I don’t normally link to Wikipedia, but Bruce has so many sites that it seemed sensible to link to a hub – you’ll find his websites at the base of the article there.

It’s already been mentioned on their site that I’ll be attending Alt Fiction in Derby, but as it’s a 2-day event, I thought I’d better clarify; I’ll be there on Saturday 25th June only, rather than for both days…unless anything changes over the next month.

I’ve had my provisional timetable, which involves me in three panels — although panels isn’t quite the word. I’ll be participating in a podcast at noon; ‘Breaking into Writing is the subject, and I’ll be one of four  writers involved.

From 5 to 6 I’ll be reading in the Participation Space (I have a vague memory that that’s the middle of a big open plan area…).

And earlier, from 3 to 4 I’ll be involved in running a workshop, which is going to be erm, interesting….I’m not sure how exactly this is going to work; there’s no set format, so I may end up with people bringing things they’ve already written. If that’s the case, I’m happy to read previously written pieces. Or I may end up just fielding questions.

So let’s have a straw poll; if you were going to a workshop for one hour, what would you prefer to do?  Talk theory, or workshop written pieces? Is there a 3rd option, I haven’t thought of?

Feel free to feed back ideas to me…

Black Static for April / May 2011 boasts the usual array of superior fiction, comment, news from Peter Tennant and reviews from Tennant on books, and Tony Lee on horror DVDs and Blu-ray.

Stephen Volk

For whatever reason –and it’s really never explained why- this issue sees the renaming of Volk’s column to ‘Coffinmaker’s Blues.’ Volk talks about humanity’s seemingly innate tendency to create narrative from even neutral symbols, and how the preoccupations of contemporary artists overlap massively with modern horror, and urges the next generation to get into art gallerys more and blog less.

Rarely has the title of Christopher Fowler’s ‘Interference’ column seemed more appropriate than now, as he bemoans the number of gatekeepers in media and the way true creativity has been hijacked by celebrities. There’s more here, if you want to read on..

In the Fiction Section

Alan Wall makes an elegant debut with ‘The Salt of Eliza,’ a novelette that’s only marginally horror, but which is very well written. Journalist Jim is offered an outlandish sum of money by a tycoon to write an article on an elderly hotel owner whom the tycoon believes possesses the secret to –if not immortality, then a very long life.

Credulous. That’s the word that’s been used about me, more than once. Open-minded is the term I prefer. Only credulous people once believed the earth spun round the sun. Only the credulous once thought any human being would ever set foot on the moon….

Wall avoids the obvious narrative route, and rather than throwing in vampires or zombies, the story is less about Peshgau the hotelier than it is about Jim’s reaction to him. Recommended.

Tim Lees

Tim Lees returns after an eighteen month absence with ‘Durgen’s Party,’ which sounds like a Jack Vance pastiche; it’s much darker than that – the party is a sort of seance in which a dead pianist is brought back to ‘life’ to give a recital.

            “I brought her back.”

“They don’t have feelings. They’re like CDs, playing the same old tunes, again and again. Little bundles of mimetic memory…Memory of feelings. Not the real thing. They don’t suffer. Not like us.”

            It’s original, beautifully written, dark without being horrific. Highly Recommended.

 Alison J. Littlewood’s ‘Black Feathers’ uses the mythology of the raven –a bird often associated with bad omens and death- as a symbol to examine the relationship between a  little girl and her brother and their friends.

There was a raven at the edge of the woods. It was huge – even its beak looked as long as Mia’s fingers. She stared at it and Little Davey laughed at her. Mia wrinkled her nose. Little Davey was younger than her by a year, but he wasn’t that little anymore….

Filled with fairy-tale imagery, it’s beautifully written, managing to expertly blend both the fairytale and contemporary aspects. Highly Recommended.

Stephen Pirie

‘This Is Mary’s Moon’ by Stephen Pirie turns out to be the most surprising story of the lot. A low-class prostitute, Mary is pimped by the vile Mrs. Anderson, a madwoman who stabbed Mary’s mother years before, and runs her neighbourhood with cruelty and unrelenting brutality: The last of the neighbours to complain Mrs. Anderson hanged by his bootlaces from the eaves of his shed. Suicide, the Chief Inspector had said, as Mrs. Anderson had led him away to one of her special, younger girls – a first-timer just  to the Chief Inspector’s taste.  But from the grim chrysalis of Pirie’s opening, something quite lovely appears, about which it’s impossible to say any more without spoiling it. So just read it, it’s Outstanding.

Simon Kurt Unsworth rings the changes on the theme of dead children and bereavement with ‘Child,’ a short but poignant conclusion to the fiction section. Like the Littlewood, Unsworth’s narrative trajectory never takes the form I expected, and it’s all the better for it. Outstanding.

Reviews

Peter Tenant interviews Stephen Pirie and reviews his new novel, Burying Brian, while the other Case Notes feature chapbooks from Joe R. Lansdale, Ramsey Campbell and Gary McMahon, plus three anthologies; Dark Minds Press offer the eponymous Dark Minds, The End of the Line is published by Solaris, while Tor provide an American perspective in Nick Mamatas and Ellen Datlow’s Haunted Legends.

Tony Lee reviews DVDs and Blu-Rays, with Gareth Edwards’ Monsters, Dario Argento’s Phenomena and the Irish Savage sounding the most promising titles.

Another superior issue of a superior magazine: Black Static continues to surprise, and to delight.

Another Monday has rolled around, but I don’t have to be on campus on 1pm, so with the last assignment finished, I’m free to turn my attention back to writing and editing.

I have a feeling that I rather buried the appearance of my story ‘Dark’ in Fearology when I posted Saturday’s blog. So, to repeat — I have a new story out!

I know a couple of the other contributors, having reviewed Gustavo Bondoni’s excellent but off-beat work in Albedo One, and Camille Alexa is another name I’m familiar  with, so I’m looking forward – now I have some time- to reading it.

And on the subject of Aeon Press, (as well as publishing Transtories, my latest anthology, they also publish Albedo One) I’ve been pulling together bios and chasing overdue revisions, so I’m hoping to post an update about Transtories, very soon. Who knows, maybe even some cover art….

Some months ago, a group of us writerly types on the net formed the Codex Blog Tour to cross-promote each other’s work. Codex is a group that’s open to writers with a promotional sale, or who have attended qualifying workshops such as Clarion, Odyssey or Viable Paradise. Many of us have blogs such as this one, and you may have read my interviews with Aliette de Bodard and Brad Beaulieu.

 One of the bonuses of this sort of activity is that it brings us into contact with writers who we wouldn’t normally meet.

Such an author is the mysterious Dark Historical author E.C. Ambrose, who has posted an interview with me on their website, in which I talk about Dark Spires at some length. That gives me an excuse to put up Andy’s lovely dirigible fuelling station again!

Cover by Ben Baldwin

Apologies for the delay – in almost four years, this is the first time the review has been quite this late….

Black Static for February / March 2011 sees the usual strong mix of returning regulars and talented neophytes, but this issue it the non-fiction that stands out especially, starting with genre news in White Noise, which details several new releases from Steven Pirie, Tim Lees and others.

Electric Darkness by Stephen Volk

In which Volk dresses as Father Christmas and puts the boot in to Bath City’s most famous supporter, who is almost a national treasure in some quarters.

Stand up, Mike Leigh. I’ve had enough of all your actors thinking that a speech impediment and ill-considered wardrobe is a substitute for characterization. I’m pissed off at hearing them going on and on endlessly about your “method” when the result of it seems to be the same deeply irritating whine. (It should have a verb: to blethyn)… Leigh sends out actors to observe and report. But writing isn’t just observing and reporting. It’s about imagining. 

Volk’s irritation is with those in the arts who elevate realism above the imaginary. All writers create secondary worlds, but in the case of Leigh and other ‘realists’ they limit their imaginations and substitute our primary world as a crutch, and then use this limited approach to validate their work.

Night’s Plutonian Shore by Mike O’Driscoll

In ‘The Genre Fallacy’ O’Driscoll issues a counterblast to what was largely a pompous, dim-witted and self-serving denigration of genre fiction, notably a shoddy attempt to publicize his new novel by Booker finalist Edward Docx in The Guardian.

O’Driscoll correctly identifies that ‘literary fiction’ is as much a genre as any other, and makes the point that constraining through the conventions of genre can actually result in a greater work than otherwise would be the case. 

Interference by Christopher Fowler

In the last of the comment columns, Fowler calls for a grass-roots movement to supplant the current crop of Hollywood no-brainers (How did Yogi Bear and The Three Stooges ever get green-lit?).

Fiction

V.H. Leslie opens the fiction with a first sale that bodes well for the future. Daniel and his expectant partner Robyn are converting an isolated baron the edge of the woods. Robyn decorates the nursery with wallpaper that as the story progresses, Daniel finds more and more disturbing.

‘Ulterior Design’ starts with a close focus on the couple, only gradually panning out to reveal more and more of the setting, which becomes increasingly claustrophobic. Its nightmarishly fairytale feel works well until the slightly telegraphed and rather conventional ending, but perhaps any feeling of slight anticlimax is more a reflection on how good the first half is.

The art by Paul Milne would overwhelm most stories, but Leslie’s imagery is so powerful that it actually complements it. Highly Recommended.

Ray Cluley

Ray Cluley appears in a second consecutive issue with ‘Pins and Needles’ in which James, a young man profoundly obsessed with space passes his days by putting pins, razor blades, even knitting needles in places where the unwary will impale themselves.

Because it’s the only way to make you feel something. Because sometimes the hurt is good, it helps, and eventually you can get used to the bad part, the pain, if everything’s all better afterwards. Just a quick pain, a nip, just a bit of a sting, that’s all. Then gone. All better.

For a brief while Cluley offers both James and the reader hope, in the shape of Angela, a kindly, carnal dental nurse, but it’s obvious that James is just too strange, and when the ending comes it’s both laugh-out-loud funny and poignant, which may be a first. Outstanding. (And it has great artwork by Rik Rawling as well)

Maura McHugh’s ‘Water’ is short but strange.

Watery references recur in Ed Grabianowski’s ‘Extraneous Invokat,’ in which a young couple about to move home become prey to disturbing visions and other unpleasant phenomena. The artwork is by Dan Henk. 

James Cooper

James Cooper’s ‘Cushing’ concludes the fiction, with an illustration by Ben Baldwin that provides the basis for the cover. Two brothers whose father has committed suicide live with their widowed mother, who spends her days painting and sketching her elder son, while she all but ignores the younger one. This is only slightly disturbing, but Cooper heightens the sense of ‘wrongness’ with one delicate touch: in all the pictures, elder brother David’s face has been cut out, and replaced with that of Peter Cushing. With a commendable sense of restraint, Cooper creates a tension between what is stated and that left unstated, leaving the reader space to think. Outstanding.

Reviews

The magazine concludes with Peter Tennant’s Case Notes (book reviews), which this time -in honour of Women in Horror Recognition Month- focuses on women writers; an interview with Australian horror writer Angela Slatter, and reviews of her three collections. Plus Amelia Beamer’s The Loving Dead, anthology Rigor Amortis, Allyson Bird’s Wine and Rank Poison (her follow-up collection to Bull Running for Girls) and many more. Tony Lee’s Blood Spectrum (DVD/Blu-ray reviews) profiles the remake of I Spit on Your Grave and A Serbian Film, amongst others.

 Perhaps the best way to sum the issue up is with a quote from Ellen Datlow: The most consistently excellent horror magazine published. Indeed, and Bs21 continues to maintain this consistency.

Award winning author Aliette de Bodard was kind enough to offer me the chance to guest post on her blog. For reasons that I make clear on the blog, I decided to talk about Winter Song, which proved to be an interesting exercise. It’s been so long since I’ve worked on the book that it was like revisiting an old home. The actual blog post is here — do drop by to read it, and while you’re at it, have a poke around the rest of Aliette’s site, which is one of the most fascinating on t’net.

Interzone 232 Reviewed

Four of this issue’s five contributors make their Interzone debut, including the 2010 James White Award winner, but if the fiction comes from new sources, the non-fictional surround comes from the regular suspects; news and commentary from David Langford’s Ansible Link, Film reviews from Nick Lowe, DVD and Blu-Ray releases reviewed by Tony Lee, and Jim Steel’s Bookzone crew reviewing new titles.

Douglas Lain 

Interzone opens its 2011 fiction inventory with ‘Noam Chomsky and the Time Box’ by Douglas Lain, a short story that focuses almost microscopically on the detail of an SF-nal trope –a trans-temporal jump—rather than the macro-effects, such as the history-altering consequences toward which IZ and other magazine stories usually gravitate.

If anyone needed more proof that the gadget driven marketing scam that was the American Empire is now completely dead, the utter failure to adequately create demand for the world’s first personal time machine should suffice as proof….The public seems content to leave history to the necrophiliacs and Civil War Buffs.

 Using entries from December 2013 to February 2014 on Crawdaddy Online (with the original Crawdaddy now online, is Lain offering the title as an ironic hint toward an alternate future?) blogger Jeff Morris attempts to override his time machine’s failsafes and alter history, with less than total success. Lain has appeared before in Strange Horizons and several other online magazines, and it’s easy to see why the ‘slipstream’ label has been applied to his work, judging by that micro-focus, together with his oblique, elliptical prose and the downbeat nature of the ending. Illustrated by cover artist Richard Wagner, it will probably delight and annoy readers in equal measure, depending on their tastes.

Michael R. Fletcher

Dhaka…capital of Gano Projatontri Bangladesh…the city was a madhouse. Buses and plastic Tata Kei Cars spewed thick smoke from their struggling two cylinder aluminum engines. The heat and pollution were stifling and the cacophony of car horns relentless….It was dirty. It was overcrowded. It was dangerous.

I loved it.

In ‘Intellectual Property,’ Michael R. Fletcher’s debut sale takes the reader on a journey into another near-future, this one a post-cyberpunk (biopunk?) tale of identity crisis inside sterile malls and offices amidst the incredible pollution quoted above. It offers interesting thoughts on corporate politics and is an effective debut. Highly Recommended.

Sarah L. Edwards

Monticello Dabney skimmed the beauty from beautiful things and fed it to those that had none. It was no honored profession; the animatists and the masquers nearer the center of the dark quarter took pleasure in spurning him whenever opportunity offered. They were the artists and he a mere artisan. 

Two years after her ‘Lady of the White Spired City’ appeared –and was selected for Hartwell’s Year’s Best SF 15– Sarah Edwards returns with ‘By Plucking Her Petals,’ a fantasy in which a beautiful young woman sells some of her beauty to alchemist Dabney. She succeeds, but she isn’t the only one changed by the experience – Dabney comes to view his profession with less satisfaction than before.

 Both the Edwards’ and the Fletcher stories are illustrated by Mark Pexton.

Sue Burke
Illustrated by Ben BaldwinWhen Letitia Serrano synched her phone to Brianna’s, I defeated its firewall and entered. I’m a benign program and would only observe through its microphone and camera, so I saw no ethical problems.

 Sue Burke’s ‘Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise’ takes the reader to near-future Spain where young American student Brianna and her AI are on a ‘study abroad programme.’ Except that when the AI hacks into her hosts’ phone, it discovers that the Spaniards have an agenda of their own, one not designed to help Brianna. What is an AI precluded from helping its owner to do in such circumstances? Burke is an American living in Madrid, which lends the story local colour, and her portrayal of the AI is among the best: Highly Recommended.  

James White Award

The James White Award is a short story competition open to nonprofessional writers and is decided by an international panel of judges made up of professional authors and editors, including Lois McMaster Bujold and Mike Resnick, and for 2010 Martin McGrath and Ian Whates. 

Sadly, the awards administrators seem a little shy, since the site hasn’t been updated since October 2010, so it’s difficult to find out more. Nonetheless, the winning story each year is published in Interzone, and the latest winner is ‘Flock, Shoal, Herd’ by James Bloomer, a fine piece of writing in which Rocco searches for Elaine; either of them is capable of hiding anywhere, be it amongst a flock of pigeons or a herd of wildebeest. Recommended.

It’s a good note on which to end the beginning of another year for this excellent magazine.