Black: Australian Dark Culture issue 1

Black

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c O N T E N T S

Features

Fate deals Ledger The Joker

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A guided tour through The Dark Tower

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M. Night Shyamalan: Behind the apocalypse

Australian Dark Culture Magazine Issue #1—July 2008 ISSN: 1835-9248 A Brimstone Press publication

www.brimstonepress.com.au

Staff Editor-in-chief Angela Challis

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Olympic shame: China’s ghost ban

Managing Editor HorrorScope Reviews Editor Shane Jiraiya Cummings

The world of the dominatrix

Staff Writer Gary Kemble Advertising 0407 405 345 mail@brimstonepress.com.au

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Brisbane’s dead heart

Interviews

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Dr Marty Young

Subscriptions & General info mail@brimstonepress.com.au

The Zombie Diaries

32

Nathan Burrage

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Robert Hood

Regulars

10 Graduation Afternoon

10 King of Horror

33 Australia’s Dark Past

19 Black Cauldron

36 Black Flag

19 Travelogue: Wolfe Creek

37 Medicina Macabre

22 Black Slash

41 Dark Flix

22 Monster of the Month

44 Four Colour Black

25 Dark Deeviations

44 Waltzing Macabre

27 HorrorScope reviews

46 Competitions

31 Horrors in Store

56 Black Market

50 Moments of Dying

Robert Hood

www.blackmag.com.au Catch BLACK magazine news on Facebook! (search for BLACK Australian Dark Culture Magazine)

Fiction Stephen King

PO Box 4, Woodvale WA 6026

31 Criminal Noir

Contributors Robert Black, Leigh Blackmore & Margi Curtis, Craig Bezant, Dr Carissa Borlase, David Carroll, Luke Challis, Shane Jiraiya Cummings, Bella Dee, James Doig, Stephanie Gunn, Talie Helene, Robert Hood, Chrissy Iley, AD John, Gary Kemble, Andrew McKiernan, Chuck McKenzie, Tony Owens, Josephine Pennicott, Mark Smith-Briggs, Stephen Studach, Matthew Tait, Brenton Tomlinson, and Rocky Wood.

Film

Fate deals Ledger

The Joker

By Gary Kemble

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“Here’s my card.”

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he Joker is responsible for the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of the good citizens of Gotham City, but did Batman’s nemesis cross the divide between truth and fiction and claim the life of Australian actor Heath Ledger?

In January, three months after filming on The Dark Knight wrapped and with Batfans in a lather over the latest shots of Ledger in full Joker mode, the young Australian actor was found dead in his New York home.

Although his death was ruled accidental by the coroner (the result of misuse of a cocktail of pain killers, anxiety medication, and sleeping pills), and Ledger was well into his next project, there is no denying that playing The Joker had a profound impact.

?

Cinematographer Wally Pfister told The New York Times that there were occasions when Ledger seemed “like he was busting blood vessels in his head,” he was so intense.

“It was like a séance, where the medium takes on another person and then is so completely drained.”

An unnamed source told FOX News that Ledger refused to talk to anyone out of character, and that towards the end of filming “he was warned by people that he had gone too far, but it was almost like he couldn’t connect with those who cared for him anymore”.

Did the Joker role contribute to Heath Ledger’s death?

Ledger himself said that he found it hard to shake the character, whom he described as a “psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy”, when filming wrapped for the day.

“Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night,” Ledger told The New York Times.

“I couldn’t stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going.”

Michael Caine said that by the end of filming Ledger was exhausted.

“I remember saying to him, ‘I’m too old to have the bloody energy to play that part.’ And I thought to myself, I didn’t have the energy when I was his age,” he said.

Suicide video But was it a case of The Joker taking hold of Ledger’s psyche, or some part of the actor reaching out to embrace a character who resonated with a dark aspect of his own personality?

After his death, a video surfaced. A music video Ledger had made for Nick Drake’s “Black Eyed Dog”, a song about depression. The end of the video clip features Ledger ‘committing suicide’ by drowning himself in a bathtub.

Ledger was fascinated with Drake, a British folk musician who suffered from depression and suicided in 1974.

“I was obsessed with his story and his music, and I pursued it for a while and still have hopes to kind of tell his story one day,” Ledger told reporters last September.

And then there’s the haunting portrait by Vincent Fantauzzo, which went on to win the People’s Choice award at the 2008 Archibald Prize.

While Fantauzzo said there was nothing dark about the sitting (he told of tea and crumpets brought out by Ledger’s mum), the painting offers an interesting take on the actor’s state of mind.

The portrait shows an exhausted Ledger, with two ghostly versions of himself whispering in his ears.

“I guess it’s the whispering, the voices, the frustration, or something comical—all the different ways that we might be thinking in our own mind,” Fantauzzo told The Telegraph.

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Fate deals Ledger The

Joker

Versatile actor Born in Perth in 1979, Ledger scored a range of television roles before gaining the attention of US filmmakers in 1999 with performances in acclaimed Australian film Two Hands and teen romantic comedy 10 Things I Hate About You. This lead to a range of diverse roles in both Australia and the US: war drama The Patriot; action-adventure A Knights Tale; Australian historical piece Ned Kelly; contemporary drama Monster’s Ball; and Australian indie flick Candy.

Then, in 2005, his moving portrayal of a gay cowboy in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain earned him Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations.

“Working with Heath was one of the purest joys of my life,” Lee said in a statement released after Ledger’s death.

“He brought to the role of Ennis (Del Mar) more than any of us could have imagined—a thirst for life, for love, and for truth, and a vulnerability that made everyone who knew him love him. His death is heartbreaking.”

Lee described Ledger’s performance as “almost like a miracle”.

“A lot of people told me that his performance reminds them of a young Brando. It’s just outstanding,” he said.

Ledger went on to further expand his repertoire in the title role in romantic comedy Casanova and as one of several actors to portray Bob Dylan in I’m Not There.

After Ledger’s death, Neil Armfield, who directed him in Candy, told the ABC’s 7.30 Report Ledger was clearly in control of his talent and the mystery of it.

“Everyone saw what incredible depth of ... sort of mental, emotional, psychological pressure Heath could carry in his performance,” he said.

You don’t wanna get this guy angry!

“He has ... had like the greatest potential to kind of go anywhere. He was a brilliant comedian. Such an extraordinary hold on sadness and complication in a part.”

Ledger was almost locked in for a return to Australia to star opposite Rachel Weisz in Phil Noyce’s adaptation of Tim Winton’s Dirt Music, but Hollywood wunderkind Nolan had other ideas.

“Ledger left Baz Lurhmann’s film [Australia] and then went to Phil’s film,” Winton recently told the ABC’s Shallow End blog.

“Then Batman came along, and I think he had 8 or 10 or 12 million reasons to leave our little film ... He was everybody’s dream choice to play Luther Fox. But yeah, history’s moved on there.”

‘Dumb’ comic book movies In 2006, Ledger was relishing the opportunity of playing The Joker, although he told Dark Horizons that, as a rule, he despised comic book movies.

“Like fucking hate them, they just bore me shitless, and they’re just

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dumb,” he said.

“But I thought what Chris Nolan did with Batman was actually really good, really well directed, and Christian Bale was really great in it.”

Ledger said he was looking forward to putting a nitty-gritty spin on The Joker.

“He’s going to be really sinister, and it’s going to be less about his laugh and his pranks and more about just him being just a fucking sinister guy,” he said.

On January 22, three months after the completion of filming for The Dark Knight, Ledger was found dead in his New York home.

Continued page 6

Behind the smile: origins of The Joker

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reated by Bill Finger, Bob Kane (and some say Jerry Robinson), The Joker appeared in the first issue of Batman in the Spring of 1940.

Originally slated to be killed off in issue two, The Joker was spared and has plagued Batman ever since.

The Joker was initially penned as a violent sociopath, committing crimes and murdering for the sheer hell of it. But from the late 1940s to the end of the 60s, he became more of a trickster-thief —perhaps the world had seen enough violence for a while?

This take on The Joker is best typified by Cesar Romero in the uber-camp Batman TV series.

The ultra-violence was shelved in favour of such ‘crimes’ as turning the city’s water supply into jelly, beating Batman in a surfing competition, and slapstick-laden bank robberies.

In 1973, writer Dennis O’Neil and artist Neal Adams took the character back to his roots as a basic workaday homicidal maniac. This was built on in the late 70s in a series by writer Steve Englehart and penciller Marshall Rogers.

But for non-comic fans, the first scary version of The Joker came along in 1989—in Tim Burton’s Batman.

Jack Nicholson took on the role, applying his crazy eyebrows and penchant for playing loonies to great effect. It has been almost 20 years since Nicholson wiped off the trademark make-up, so Ledger’s portrayal of The Joker is keenly anticipated.

Ledger has reportedly taken a more stripped-

Cesar (‘not to be confused with George’) Romero as the swingin’ 60s Joker

down, punk rock approach, aiming less for laughs and more for the creep-out factor.

And it works, according to film veteran Michael Caine, who plays Alfred Pennyworth.

“I did one scene with him, and he was ready to go and had to come up in a lift and raid our place ... I didn’t see him for rehearsal, and when he came out of the lift he was so incredible, I forgot my lines. He frightened the life out of me,” Caine told reporters in New York last year.

“Heath is like a really scary psychopath ... he’s a lovely guy, and his Joker is going to be a hell of a revelation in this picture.”

Origins There are many origin stories for The Joker (with The Joker, himself, admitting he often can’t sort the lies from the truth), but the most accepted goes something like this:

The heist goes wrong, with security guards gunning down the two goons. Our man tries to escape but is confronted by Batman who is investigating the disturbance.

An engineer at a chemical plant quits his job to become a stand-up comedian. He bombs out, and desperate to support his pregnant wife, agrees to help two goons break into his former workplace.

He falls into a vat of chemicals, and when washed out into a nearby reservoir, realises the chemicals have bleached his skin, and turned his lips ruby red and his hair green.

The sight, coupled with the events of the day, sends him insane—and The Joker is born.

While planning the job, the police contact him with the news that his wife and unborn child have died in a household accident.

He attempts to renege on the plan, but the criminals force him to follow through on his promise.

The Dark Knight director, Christopher Nolan, says there is no need for an origin story in the Batman Begins sequel because he “just is The Joker”. n

Jack Nicholson as 1989’s Joker.

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Fate deals Ledger The

Joker

Batman resurrected Nolan, the man tasked with providing a fitting tribute to a life cut short, won plaudits for reviving the Batman franchise in 2005, after the embarrassingly bad Batman & Robin (1997).

Bale, the first man to don the black suit after George Clooney, told The New York Times he could remember that people would laugh when told that Nolan was taking Batman seriously, but then they were surprised when he pulled it off.

“I believe that even the most popcorn-like movie can be done incredibly well and can have something that you really have to work at,” he said.

“That was what attracted me to doing it the first time, because I felt I’d never seen that done, and I didn’t understand why.”

Set soon after the events of Batman Begins, The Dark Knight begins with Batman, Lieutenant James Gordon, and new district attorney Harvey Dent’s campaign to clean up the streets of Gotham City.

But then a new criminal mastermind appears on the scene, sparking a wave of terror and leading to an escalation of Batman’s war on crime.

“As we looked through the comics, there was this fascinating idea that Batman’s presence in Gotham actually attracts criminals to Gotham, attracts lunacy,” Nolan told The New York Times.

“When you’re dealing with questionable notions like people taking the law into their own hands, you have to really ask, where does that lead? That’s what makes the character so dark, because he expresses a vengeful desire.”

In line with the gritty subject matter, Nolan has brought his lo-fi indie approach with him, filming in the streets of Chicago and other US locales and directing every shot.

Warner Bros has used viral marketing to push the film hard, developing dozens of websites revealing details of the film, and a trickle feed of screenshots and trailers to get fans salivating ahead of The Dark Knight’s July 17 Australian release.

Nolan was determined fans would not go away disappointed, telling The New York Times he felt a “massive sense of responsibility” to bring Ledger’s “terrifying, amazing” performance to the big screen.

“It’s stunning, it’s iconic,” he said. “It’s going to just blow people away.” n

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‘Bipolar disorder.

That’s why you’re

so high, then so low.

It’s exhausting.’

Bipolar disorder is the same as manic depression. That’s why sometimes you feel so high, you think you can achieve anything - then other times, you’re so low, you hate the world and yourself. With the right treatment, bipolar disorder can be managed. If you experience these extremes, it’s important to talk to a doctor.

To find out more visit our website or call the infoline.

1300 22 4636

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B

at m a n

vs

Iron Man

his year, two of the best known superheroes from Marvel and DC Comics are vying for the title of biggest film superfranchise. Hoping to capitalise on the success of Spider Man and X-Men, Marvel proved Iron Man could match it with the big boys and produced an outstanding film in the process. Meanwhile, DC Comics, whose better days looked behind them with the Supeman and Batman movies of the 80s, are looking to recapture the success of 2005’s Batman Begins, widely regarded as one of the best superhero movies ever made, with The Dark Knight. Curiously, the two characters bears some striking similarities, so in the interest of (comic book) science, we put the Dark Knight and the Golden Avenger head-to-head.

Origin

BATMAN Billionnaire industrialist Bruce Wayne sees his parents murdered by a criminal when he is a child. He later travels the world to explore his lust for revenge until he decides to use his fortune to fight crime as Batman, The Dark Knight, on the streets of Gotham City.

Billionnaire industrialist Tony Stark is critically injured and captured by terrorists, where he sees the human face of the destruction caused by his company’s products. After escaping, he uses his fortune to fight crime as the high-tech hero Iron Man. IRON MAN

Secret Hideout BATMAN: The Bat Cave, a high-tech complex beneath Wayne Manor that houses his arsenal of gadgets and vehicles—including the Batmobile and Bat Chopper.

IRON MAN: The garage beneath his LA mansion.

Later, Stark Tower and a S.H.I.E.L.D helicarrier.

Head-to-head BATMAN Creator: Company: Allies: Summary:

DC Comics.

Wayne Enterprises.

Robin, Gotham City Police, Justice League, Superman (occasionally).

Batman is a DC Comics A-lister (vying with Superman as the most popular DC superhero of all time). Although evenly matched with Iron Man in intellect and wealth, Batman is single-minded and possesses mental and physical fortitude that Iron Man lacks.

n Bonus points for the rogues gallery, pimped out rides, and not being a booze hound who loses his company.

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Super powers IRON MAN: Genius intelligence, supersonic flight, enhanced strength, impervious to artillery and high calibre rounds, Repulsor beams (hands and chest), wrist-mounted rockets, shoulder-mounted projectiles.

Later upgrades include mini-cannon, flamethrower, and ‘Hulk-Buster’ heavy armour.

BATMAN: Genius intelligence, master detective and escape artist, master martial artist, gliding flight, impervious to small arms fire, and high-tech gadgets (from Bat Belt). Armoured vehicles used include the Batmobile, Bat Chopper, Bat Jet, and Bat Boat.

Rogues Gallery BATMAN: The Joker, Catwoman, Two Face, The Penguin, The Riddler, Mister Freeze, Poison Ivy, Bane.

IRON MAN: The Mandarin, Iron Monger, Ultron, Doctor Doom, Titanium Man, Crimson Dynamo, Fin Fang Foom, The Hulk (occasionally)

IRON MAN Marvel Comics.

Stark Industries (later Stark Solutions).

War Machine, Avengers, S.H.I.E.L.D, US Dept of Justice, Captan America (occasionally).

Iron Man is one of Marvel’s most enduring heroes although he lacks the popularity of Spider Man, Wolverine, and Captain America. His technology packs more punch than Batman’s, and he does not shy away from lethal force. Inside the suit, Iron Man has the edge over the Bat, but pry Tony Stark out of it and he is toast.

n Bonus points for not having a ‘young ward’ with the innuendo that brings.

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Books

King of Horror

Rocky Wood

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The Stephen King you don’t know

tephen King—there’s a name that rings a bell. Most people have been exposed to King’s work whether they realise it or not. Yes, he’s the world’s best-selling author. Yes, the ‘King of Horror’—author of Salem’s Lot, The Shining, and Carrie. Yet, how often have you heard, “I don’t read horror,” or “I don’t read Stephen King?”

The hard truth is that almost everyone’s seen King on film—and loved it. Movies such as The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and Misery are viewer favourites.

Readers rate The Stand, It, or The Dark Tower among their favourite books.

Here, you’ll discover the King you don’t know—creator of a dark fantasy universe; screenwriter; pop-culture columnist—and discover the latest King news.

Recently, King has rewritten previously unpublished works, all while publishing ambitious new tales. His newest novel is Duma Key (Hodder), in which a badly injured man rehabilitates on a quiet Florida island—he discovers a great talent, but an awful price may have to be paid. The island’s secret past slowly reveals itself in tones reminiscent of King’s erotic ghost thriller Bag of Bones. This new novel follows last year’s Blaze, a rewritten 1973 manuscript—the touching tale of a very simple man who, with a ghost partner, kidnaps a baby for ransom. Flashback scenes recalling King’s childhood in rural Maine are as poignant as any in his novella The Body, filmed as Stand by Me. What can readers expect next? November sees King’s first short story collection since 2002. Just After Sunset offers 13 new tales (creepy, huh?) including The Cat From Hell, a tale unaccountably left out of King collections since 1977. There, a hit man is hired to kill … a cat, with dire consequences! New stories range from the sublime—mild-mannered crime writer takes a new identity in the face of domestic violence; to the chilling guilt suffered by a 9-11 survivor when confronted by the victims’ reappearing personal effects; and the gross-out—imagine being trapped in an overturned Port-a-Loo! These tales represent King’s best recent writing—dark, mostly mainstream, with little ‘traditional’ horror.

And King is currently working on ‘a very, very long novel set in Western Maine’. It’s another rewrite—this time of Under the Dome, previously attempted in 1976 and 1981. When reading the first pages publicly, he explained, “the project was just too big for me, and I let it go, I let it slide. But it was a terrific idea, and it never entirely left my mind.” The story involves a group of trapped people who resort to cannibalism!

One thing King fans know for sure is the man is prolific—so we may have trouble fitting all the news in one column! Tune in next issue for details of King’s connection to hit TV show Lost.

Rocky Wood is a Melbourne-based freelance writer. He is the author of Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished.

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Stephen King’s

The Dark\ A guided tour through

Tower

By Rocky Wood

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tephen King and fantasy—the terms don’t quite seem to make sense. King and horror—now that’s the ticket! Stephen King is, after all, the best-selling author of Carrie, The Shining, The Dead Zone, and the man behind movies such as The Green Mile, Misery, and It. Would it be surprising to learn that the hottest thing in the fantasy genre may well be Stephen King’s The Dark Tower?

Already a best-selling series of novels and comic books and the subject of elaborate fan websites; it’s even touted as a movie franchise to rival The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It just may be that this collection of tales will outlive the entirety of King’s other work. As the author himself says, “Fantasy stories, the bad as well as the good … seem to have long shelf lives.”

So why hasn’t the mania hit our shores? Perhaps it has— just in the quiet way legends build Down Under.

What exactly is The Dark Tower? Originally, it was a collection of seven novels, published between 1982 and 2004, loosely tied in to many of Stephen King’s other novels and short stories. Now, it has been extended by comic book kings Marvel (publisher of The X-Men and Spider-Man) into an ongoing series of comics and graphic novels.

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A guided tour through

The Dark Tower

joint enemy—the Crimson King (one of the great villains of modern fantasy).

The best fantasies, and many of the best fictions, are those that deal with the struggle between good and evil—which is also one of King’s recurring themes. It is core to The Dark Tower—good represented by white (surely a nod to the Rings saga) and evil by red (likely referencing Edgar Allen Poe’s classic The Masque of the Red Death).

The lead character is the last gunslinger, Roland—a knight of sorts—last in the line of Eld and a descendant of King Arthur. In many ways, he is a hero—a combination of Rambo and Aragorn, a warrior, and at the same time, a philosopher—burdened with the last hopes of his culture. In other ways, he is the most flawed of men—too quick with his guns, too easily throwing off family and friends in his all-consuming focus. We first meet him as he nears the end of his centuries long quest—to find and save the Dark Tower itself. If the Tower falls, all Realities will collapse into eternal chaos—over which the Crimson King intends to rule.

“You’ll tell me where the Dark Tower is or else I’ll ...”

Broadly, it’s a quest tale set in a post-apocalyptic world where technology and magic mix freely. All-World was once a feudal society in which the elite carried guns instead of swords. It’s fantasy in the broadest sense; yet, the Cycle (as fans, and even the author, have taken to describing the collected tales) also has very deep roots in science fiction and in horror—these genres could just as easily claim the tale.

The Dark Tower itself is a physical place— containing all of time and space. The representation of the Tower may appear differently in each world (in ours, it’s a magical dusky-pink rose growing in a vacant Manhattan lot). But in All-World, it’s a looming black-grey edifice held in place by magical beams. In fact, it is much, much more than a simple building … but that would spoil the tale.

The tale is mostly set in All-World, a planet with unexplained connections to the second setting—our Earth—a version of which turns out to be crucial to the storyline. All-World is startlingly similar to Earth in ways most readers will enjoy but proves to be something very different indeed. The few remaining inhabitants live in a post-industrial, post-heroic society which cherishes its myths and legends but has no central authority. Certain machines still operate but rarely to the common good. This technophobia is a constant theme in King’s fiction—as evidenced by Christine or his autobiographical short story The Mangler—and harkens further to the deep roots of horror fiction such as Frankenstein.

There are two key elements to The Dark Tower Cycle—the seeker and the sought.

The seeker, Roland Deschain, is an antihero loosely modelled on Clint Eastwood’s character, The Man with No Name, from Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns. Roland, akin to the last knight of the Round Table, is a deeply flawed man but one on a mission. Nothing will be allowed to interfere with that mission—not love, not friendship, not even loyalty to what is known in Roland’s lingo (High Speech) as ka-tet (a group of individuals deeply bound by fate). The sought is the Dark Tower itself, which Roland seeks to save from destruction at the hands of their

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In her Concordance, Dark Tower expert Robin Furth defines the Tower itself as, “… a looming grey-black edifice, which is simultaneously the centre of all universes and the linchpin of the time/space continuum.

All worlds and all realities are contained within its many levels … The line of Eld, of which Roland is the last, is sworn to protect the Tower. Yet a terrible illness affects this structure, one that is often compared to cancer … The Tower is held together by a network of magical magnetic forces—rays known as Beams … the Beams, Portals, and mechanical Guardians are breaking down.

If the weakening Beams collapse and the Tower falls, all creation will blink out of existence.’

As Roland moves towards his goal, he gathers a band of people from a New York not quite our own: Jake Chambers, a young boy who will learn too much of death; Eddie Dean, a drug addict forced to confront both his human enemies and his own fears; and Susannah Dean, a woman initially crippled by severed legs and a dual personality. He trains each to become a fellow gunslinger.

Oy completes the group—no pet owner can resist falling in love with this intelligent ‘billy-bumbler’ who proves to be loyal to the bitter end. Each turns out to have been chosen by ka (a form of fate) to be Roland’s fellow travellers.

King rightly claims that The Dark Tower is his ‘magnum opus’—the greatest work of his entire lifetime. He began the novels as a 22 year-old aspiring writer, broke and unknown, in a ‘scuzzy riverside cabin’, on 19 June 1970, the morning after being arrested and bailed for drunkenness (ruled not guilty a few days later). He completed them as the world’s best-selling author, an accomplished award-winner with three homes and the world of publishing literally at his command. As each successive book

was published, a fever pitch rose around Roland’s quest—at one point, death row prisoners and cancer victims were said to be writing to King pleading to know what would become of Roland.

As he wrote new stories, King deliberately linked many of them, including Salem’s Lot, The Stand, and It, to the Cycle—and did so in a manner that greatly pleased his legions of fans—dropping clues and doling out small parcels of critical information.

Too often, writers are asked where they get their ideas. Fans have their needs and that is generally one. In this case, after reading The Lord of the Rings in 1966-7, King had determined to write something as sweeping, ‘but I wanted to write my own kind of story … Then (in 1970) in an almost completely empty movie theatre … I saw a film directed by Sergio Leone. It was called The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and before the film was half over, I realised what I wanted to write was a novel that contained Tolkien’s sense of quest and magic but set against Leone’s almost absurdly majestic Western backdrop …

And, in my enthusiasm … I wanted to write not just a long book, but the longest popular novel in history. I did not succeed in doing that, but I feel I had a decent rip …’ He also took inspiration from Robert Browning’s epic poem, Childe Roland To The Dark Tower Came (1855); and acknowledges his debt to Arthurian legend. Other tales leak into the Cycle—including The Wizard of Oz, Harry Potter, The Seven Samurai, and The Magnificent Seven.

There are deep autobiographical revelations in The Dark Tower—in fact, Stephen King appears as a very important character at one point. This lead to the accusation King was indulging in ‘meta-fiction’, in which authors self-consciously deal with the shifting relationships between fiction and reality. The author accepts the label but not the implication of elitism, noting “many of my fictions refer back to Roland’s world and Roland’s story,” and as “I was the one who wrote them, it seemed logical I was part of the gunslinger’s ka.” In fact, the concept works well here: from the comedic scene where one Stephen King meets his own character, and in shock, falls on his proverbial in a lake; to a reworking of the 1999 road accident in which the author nearly died.

In 2007, Marvel began an expansion of the Dark Tower mythos with

The Crimson King goes mediaeval on a hapless Roland.

the publication of a series of comic books and graphic novels, Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. King is the ‘Creative Director’ for the series, having determined the overarching storyline and retaining final approval over every published panel. Robin Furth, King’s research assistant on the later Dark Tower novels and a talented freelance writer in her own right, has the task of converting the information into plotting the front-story for the comic section of the publications, and writing the back-story for the prose section at the end of most editions. To her credit, some of the most keenly sought information is Furth’s telling of the myths and legends of All-World society. That in itself is a sign of the fans’ deep hunger for ever more information about Roland’s world.

Once each story-line is agreed, comic book legend Peter David scripts it, and Jae Lee and Richard Isanove provide the spectacular art; these contributions alone more than justify the comics’ cover price.

The Marvel series is currently intended to comprise 31 comics over five ‘arcs’ (a mini-series of comic books), forming a prequel to King’s novels. Each arc will be collected in a hardcover graphic novel, but serious fans should beware that the must-have prose material will not be collected therein. My best advice is to collect the original comics first, and then the hardcover collections if the extra expense can be afforded. The first arc of seven issues, The Gunslinger Born, was Marvel’s highest-selling new title in many years and sales have held in the hundreds of thousands per issue.

It is such a lucrative new franchise that King experts expect it to be extended across the entire Dark Tower timeline, potentially hundreds of comic books over a multi-year period. 2008’s second arc runs under the title The Long Road Home and has already provided some surprises (including a shocking flash-forward in the style recently made popular

by TV’s Lost). The first issue of this arc outsold any other comic book released that month by a whopping 20%!

All these comics are currently available at specialist stores throughout Australia and on-line.

Hard-core Dark Tower fans, displaying the ardent passion of Trekkies, are deeply split on the potential for the Dark Tower on the screen.

The complexity of the storyline itself would call for at least four mov13

Books

A guided tour through

ies, but perhaps the better solution would be a TV series over a number of seasons, along the lines of Lost or The Dead Zone, allowing time to do justice to King’s vision. It is unclear whether King really sold an option to Lost’s Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof as rumoured, but their colleague J. J. Abrams claimed, as recently as February, that he and Lindelof were “in the very early stages of doing an adaptation of the Dark Tower series.” Apart from plot complexity, other challenges facing any filmmaker include casting (check out the vitriolic arguments on web discussion threads), translating its deep philosophic vision, and as in many King adaptations, the possibility of bringing the tone to life. This has only been achieved on rare occasions—The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption, and Misery spring to mind. The Dark Tower will not translate in the simple Disney-esque manner of Harry Potter, but requires the deft touch Peter Jackson brought to the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

With seven novels, many related stories and a comic book series, one would be forgiven for not knowing where to begin the trip with Roland towards the mysterious Dark Tower. Many readers find the first novel, The Gunslinger, dense and difficult. King recognised this and released a revised version in 2003, but even that is far from the usual easy-to-read King work. My advice is start at the second novel, The Drawing of the Three, and read through

The Dark Tower

Roland Deschain’s nemesis, The Crimson King, plots the downfall of Roland’s world

to the third, The Wastelands. By that stage, readers are generally hooked and interested enough in Roland’s back-story to wade through The Gunslinger. Then return to the final four novels. The comic books can safely wait until all the novels are consumed—with the bonus that the time taken reading the novels will deliver many more issues! Or they can be read quite separately.

With The Dark Tower Cycle, King has delivered

a fantasy that will outlive its author—creating an entirely new world full of defined geography, culture, language, and history, challenges of epic proportion, and legendary characters for whom readers develop an empathy for their struggles that induces both laughter and tears. Those who enjoy fantasy will devour The Dark Tower; and those who enjoy Stephen King but feel loyal to his horror will not be disappointed by this epic work. n

The Dark Tower for Constant Readers

THe Dark Tower Resources

Dark Tower novels

Websites

The The The The The The The

www.stephenking.com/darktower —Official Dark Tower site

Dark Dark Dark Dark Dark Dark Dark

Tower: The Gunslinger Tower II: The Drawing of the Three Tower III: The Wastelands Tower IV: Wizard and Glass Tower V: Wolves of the Calla Tower VI: Song of Susannah Tower VII: The Dark Tower

www.marvel.com/comics/dark_tower —Marvel Comics site www.thedarktower.com —fan site www.darktowercompendium.com —fan site

Related Stories Bag of Bones; Black House; Desperation; Everything’s Eventual and The Little Sisters of Eluria (collected in Everything’s Eventual); Eyes of the Dragon; From A Buick 8; Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling and Low Men in Yellow Coats (collected in Hearts in Atlantis); Insomnia; It; The Mist; The Regulators; Rose Madder; Salem’s Lot; The Stand; The Talisman Comics Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Long Road Home (6 issues)

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Books The Road to the Dark Tower by Bev Vincent (brilliant explanation of the entire series, including the background to its writing). “Opens doors to Roland’s world that not even I knew existed.” – Stephen King The Dark Tower: A Complete Concordance by Robin Furth (an indispensable encyclopedic guide to terms, geography, characters, history and much more). “I found this overview of In-World, Mid-World, and End-World both entertaining and invaluable. So, I am convinced, will you.” – Stephen King

C u r r e n t A ffa i r s

Olympic shame:

China’s ghost ban

I

n the lead up to next month’s Olympics in Beijing, China has pulled out all stops to ‘clean up’ its image. Instead of cracking down on its atrocious human rights record, the Communist regime’s General Administration of Press and Publications has banned all media depicting “wronged spirits and violent ghosts, monsters, demons, and other inhuman portrayals, strange and supernatural storytelling for the sole purpose of seeking terror and horror.”

The ban is intended to “control and cleanse the negative effect these items have on society, and to prevent horror, violent, cruel publications from entering the market through official channels and to protect adolescents’ psychological health.”

Sure.

Exit the dragon This may seem to be ‘just’ a case of censorship, but consider the wider ramifications.

Thousands of years’ worth of China’s rich cultural history has been officially expunged because a short-sighted government wants to sweep what they consider to be their cultural baggage under the carpet for a sporting event that lasts two weeks. No longer will we see classics like A Chinese Ghost Story and hundreds of similar films. Given the zealousness of the ban, it could be extended by hard-nosed officials to the more supernatural martial arts movies (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, anyone?)

So much for China’s promised Olympic liberalisation.

Perhaps China should be embracing its ghosts

instead of creating them? With the world’s highest official execution rate, rather than focussing on entertainment censorship, more serious social concerns such as Tibetan oppression, the one-child policy’s skew towards boys (and the resultant murders of thousands of unwanted girls), or the humane treatment of dissidents should be higher on their preOlympics agenda.

This is far from the first case of heavy-handed censorship originating from Beijing. The Chinese version of the internet has so many holes, it more closely resembles a piece of string than a web! In fact, the website www. greatfirewallofchina.org ran a free service that tested whether a site would be censored in China, but due to excessive website bans, they removed the service (presumably because that many sites were banned, it was hardly worth maintaining the service!).

Western media blackout A more resonating concern is the lack of coverage this issue has had with the western media.

Reuters initially reported on the story in February with a brief, almost flippant piece titled

By Shane Jiraiya Cummings

“Regulators now spooked by ghost stories”.

Free speech is the catchcry of the media, but it seems defending the concept is no longer in vogue. Perhaps the media, like the general public, has been too numbed by the War on Terror scare campaign to consider censorship a serious issue?

Media self-interest could be one explanation.

Why antagonise the Chinese government before the Olympic Games when there are media rights and commercial sponsorships to protect?

There’s dropping the ball by simply not reporting a story and then there is actively not reporting that story. The western media have come close dangerously close to the latter with this one.

Or perhaps it is because the censorship is in China and not Australia, UK, or USA? Imagine the outcry if the US government was determined to put an end to horror and thriller movies in that country – there goes a sizeable chunk of Hollywood’s profits! And if the ban was extended to the violent movies that have been Hollywood’s bread and butter blockbusters for the last thirty years? The protests would be heard as far away as Tasmania!

But if it’s in China, it’s just amusing.

Fittingly, the media outlet that gave this issue the biggest airing was Channel 10’s satirical current affairs program Good News Week.

Citing the original Reuters story, host Paul McDermott said, “Of course, in China, when something goes bump in the night, it’s usually the secret police; it’s usually one of your relatives being executed… [Horror censorship] is a good move. When you’re watching your step to make sure you don’t tread on any baby girls left in the street to die, you don’t want to be distracted by a poster for Gremlins 2.” n

Who ya gonna call? The ghostbusters have found a new home in China.

15

Fiction

Stephen King’s Graduation Afternoon J

anice has never settled on the right word for the place where Buddy lives.

It’s too big to be called a house, too small to be an estate, and the name on the post at the foot of the driveway, Harborlights, gags her. It sounds like the name of a restaurant in New London, the kind where the special is always fish. She usually winds up just calling it ‘your place’, as in ‘Let’s go to your place and play tennis’ or ‘Let’s go to your place and go swimming.’

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It’s pretty much the same deal with Buddy himself, she thinks, watching him trudge up the lawn toward the sound of shouts on the other side of the house, where the pool is. You didn’t want to call your boyfriend Buddy, but when reverting to his real name meant Bruce, it left you with no real ground to stand on.

Or expressing feelings, that was that. She knew he wanted to hear her say she loved him, especially on his graduation day—surely a better present than the silver medallion she’d given him, although the medallion had set her back a teeth-clenching amount—but she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t bring herself to say, “I love you, Bruce.”

The best she could manage (and again with that interior clench) was “I’m awfully fond of you, Buddy.” And even that sounded like a line out of a British musical comedy.

“You don’t mind what she said, do you?” That was the last thing he’d asked her before heading up the lawn to change into his swim trunks.

“That isn’t why you’re staying behind, is it?”

“No, just want to hit a few more. And look at the view.” The house did have that going for it, and she could never get enough. Because you could see the whole New York cityscape from this side of the house, the buildings reduced to blue toys with sun gleaming on the highest windows. Jan­ice thought that when it came to NYC, you could only get that sense of exquisite stillness from a distance. It was a lie she loved.

“Because she’s just my gran,” he went on. “You know her by now. If it enters her head, it exits her mouth.”

“I know,” Janice said. And she liked Buddy’s gran, who made no effort to hide her snobbery. There it was, out and beating time to the music.

They were the Hopes, came to Connecticut along with the rest of the Heavenly Host, thank you so much. She is Janice Gandolewski, who will have her own graduation day—from Fairhaven High—two weeks from now, after Buddy has left with his three best buddies to hike the Appalachian Trail.

She turns to the basket of balls, a slender girl of good height in denim shorts, sneakers, and a shell top. Her legs flex as she rises on tiptoe with each serve. She’s good-looking and knows it, her knowing of the functional and non-fussy sort. She’s smart, and knows it. Very few Fairhaven girls manage relationships with boys from the Academy—other than the usual we-all-know-where-we-are, quick-and-dirty Winter Carnival or Spring Fling weekends, that is—and she has done so in spite of the ski that trails after her wherever she goes, like a tin can tied to the bumper of a family sedan. She has managed this social hat-trick with Bruce Hope, also known as Buddy.

And when they were coming up from the basement media room after playing video games—most of the others still down there, and still with their mortarboards cocked back on their heads—they had overheard his gran, in the parlour with the other adults (because this was really their party; the kids would have their own tonight, first at Holy Now! out on Route 219, which had been fourwalled for the occasion by Jimmy Frederick’s Dad and Mom, pursuant to the mandatory designated-driver rule, and then later, at the beach, under a full June moon, could you give me spoon, do I hear swoon, is there a swoon in the house).

“That was Janice-Something-Unpronounceable,” Gran was saying in her oddly piercing, oddly toneless deaf-lady voice. “She’s very pretty, isn’t she? A townie. Bruce’s friend for now.” She didn’t quite call Janice Bruce’s starter-model, but of course, it was all in the tone.

She shrugs and hits a few more balls, legs flexing, racket reaching.

The balls fly hard and true across the net, each touching down deep in the receiver’s box on the far side.

They have in fact learned from each other, and she suspects that’s what these things are about. What they are for. And Buddy has not, in truth, been that hard to teach. He respected her from the first—maybe a little too much. She had to teach him out of that—the pedestalworship part of that. And she thinks he hasn’t been that bad a lover, given the fact that kids are denied the finest of accommodations and the luxury of time when it comes to giving their bodies the food they come to want.

“We did the best we could,” she says, and decides to go and swim with the others, let him show her off one final time. He thinks they’ll

have all summer before he goes off to Princeton and she goes to State, but she thinks not; she thinks part of the purpose of the upcoming Appalachian hike is to separate them as painlessly but as completely as possible. In this, Janice senses not the hand of the hale-and-hearty, good-fellows-every-one father, or the somehow endearing snobbery of the grandmother—a townie, Bruce’s friend for now—but the smiling and subtle practicality of the mother, whose one fear (it might as well be stamped on her lovely, unlined forehead) is that the townie girl with the tin can tied to the end of her name will get pregnant and trap her boy into the wrong marriage.

“It would be wrong, too,” she murmurs as she wheels the basket of balls into the shed and flips the latch. Her friend Marcy keeps asking her what she sees in him at all—Buddy, she all but sneers, wrinkling her nose. What do you do all weekend? Go to garden parties? To polo matches?

In fact, they have been to a couple of polo matches, because Tom Hope still rides—although, Buddy confided, this was apt to be his last year if he didn’t stop putting on weight. But they have also made love, some of it sweaty and intense. Sometimes, too, he makes her laugh. Less often, now—she has an idea that his capacity to surprise and amuse is far from infinite—but yes, he still does. He’s a lean and narrow-headed boy who breaks the rich-kid-geek mould in interesting and sometimes very unexpected ways. Also he thinks the world of her, and that isn’t entirely bad for a girl’s self-image.

Still, she doesn’t think he will resist the call of his essential nature forever. By the age of thirty-five or so, she guesses he will have lost most or all of his enthusiasm for eating pussy and will be more interested in collecting coins. Or refinishing Colonial rockers, like his father does out in the—ahem—carriage-house.

She walks slowly up the long acre of green grass, looking out toward the blue toys of the city dreaming in the far distance. Closer at hand are the sounds of shouts and splashing from the pool. Inside, Bruce’s mother and father and gran and closest friends will be celebrating the one chick’s high school graduation in their own way, at a formal tea.

Tonight the kids will go out and party down in a more righteous mode.

Alcohol and not a few tabs of X will be ingested. Club music will throb through big speakers. No one will play the country stuff Janice grew up with, but that’s all right; she still knows where to find it.

When she graduates, there will be a much smaller party, probably at Aunt Kay’s restaurant, and of course, she is bound for educational halls far less grand or traditional, but she has plans to go farther than she suspects Buddy goes even in his dreams. She will be a journalist.

She will begin on the campus newspaper, and then will see where that takes her. One rung at a time, that’s the way to do it. There are plenty of rungs on the ladder. She has talent to go along with her looks and unshowy self-confidence. She doesn’t know how much, but she will find our. And there’s luck. That, too. She knows enough not to count on it, but also enough to know it tends to come down on the side of the young.

She reaches the stone-flagged patio and looks down the rolling acre of lawn to the double tennis court. It all looks very big and very rich, very special, but she is wise enough to know she is only eighteen. There may come a time when it all looks quite ordinary to her, even in the eye of her memory. Quite small. It is this sense of perspective before the fact that makes it all right for her to be Janice-Something­-Unpronounceable, and a townie, and Bruce’s friend for now. Buddy, with his narrow head and fragile ability to make her laugh at unexpected times. He has never made her feel small, probably knows she’d leave him the first time he ever tried.

She can go directly through the house to the pool and the changing rooms on the far side, but first she turns slightly to her left to once again look at the city across all those miles of blue afternoon distance.

She has time to think, It could be my city someday, I could call it home, before an enormous spark lights up there, as if some God deep in the machinery had suddenly flicked His Bic. She winces from the brilliance, which is at first like a thick, isolated stroke of lightning. And then the entire southern sky lights up a soundless lurid red. Formless bloodglare obliterates the buildings.

Then for a moment they are there again, but ghostlike, as if seen through an interposing lens. A second or a tenth of a second after 17

Fiction

that they are gone forever, and the red begins to take on the shape of a thousand newsreels, climbing and boiling.

8tephen King’s

Graduation Afternoon

It is silent, silent.

Bruce’s mother comes out on the patio and stands next to her, shading her eyes. She is wearing a new blue dress. A tea-dress. Her shoulder brushes Janice’s and they look south at the crimson mushroom climbing, eating up the blue. Smoke is rising from around the edges—dark purple in the sunshine—and then being pulled back in. The red of the fireball is too intense to look at, it will blind her, but Janice cannot look away.

Water is gushing down her cheeks in broad warm streams, but she cannot look away.

“What’s that?” Bruce’s mother asks. “If it’s some kind of advertising, it’s in very poor taste!”

“It’s a bomb,” Janice says. Her voice seems to be coming from somewhere else. On a live feed from Hartford, maybe. Now huge black blisters are erupting in the red mushroom, giving it hideous features that shift and change—now a cat, now a dog, now Bobo the Demon Clown—grimacing across the miles above what used to be New York and is now a smelting furnace. “A nuke. And an almighty big one. No little dirty backpack model, or—” Whap! Heat spreads upward and downward on the side of her face, and water flies from both of her eyes, and her head rocks. Bruce’s Mom has just slapped her. And hard.

“Don’t you even joke about that!” Bruce’s mother commands. “There’s nothing funny about that!”

Other people are joining them on the patio now, but they are little more than shades; Janice’s vision has either been stolen by the brightness of the fireball, or the cloud has blotted out the sun. Maybe both.

“That’s in very ... poor ... TASTE!” Each word rising. Taste comes out in a scream.

Someone says, “It’s some kind of special effect, it has to be, or else we’d hear—” But then the sound reaches them. It’s like a boulder running down an endless stone flume. It shivers the glass along the south side of the house and sends birds up from the trees in whirling squadrons. It fills the day.

And it doesn’t stop. It’s like an endless sonic boom. Janice sees Bruce’s gran go walking slowly down the path that leads to the multi-­car garage with her hands to her ears. She walks with her head down ­and her back bent and her butt sticking out, like a dispossessed war-hag starting down a long refugee road. Something hangs down on the back of her dress, swinging from side to side, and Janice isn’t surprised to note (with what vision she has left) that it’s Gran’s hearing aid.

“I want to wake up,” a man says from behind Janice. He speaks in a querulous, pestering tone, “I want to wake up. Enough is enough.”

Now the red cloud has grown to its full height and stands in boiling triumph where New York was ninety seconds ago, a dark red and purple toadstool that has burned a hole straight through this afternoon and all the afternoons to follow.

A breeze begins to push through. It is a hot breeze. It lifts the hair from the sides of her head, freeing her ears to hear that endless grinding boom even better. Janice stands watching, and thinks about hitting tennis balls, one after the other, all of them landing so close together you could have caught them in a roasting pan. That is pretty much how she writes. It is her talent. Or was.

She thinks about the hike Bruce and his friends won’t be taking. She thinks about the party at Holy Now! they won’t be attending tonight. She thinks about the records by Jay-Z, and Beyoncé, and The Fray they won’t be listening to—no loss there. And she thinks of the country music her Dad listens to in his pickup truck on his way to and from work. That’s better, somehow. She will think of Patsy Cline or Skeeter Davis, and in a little while she may be able to teach what is left of her eyes not to look. n

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w i t c h c r af t

Black

Cauldr

n

The Dark of the Year Margi Curtis & Leigh Blackmore

O

n an autumn evening just after ANZAC Day, all over Australia, thousands of Pagans and Witches celebrate another ceremony known as Samhain.

“It is Samhain and the Veil is thin …”—so goes the Wendy Rule lyric. But what does it mean?

Samhain (generally pronounced Soween) is a Celtic word for an ancient pagan festival also known as All Hallows’ Eve or Hallowe’en. It is one of eight festivals celebrated throughout the Wheel of the Year.

Many Aussies celebrate Halloween along with our Northern Hemisphere cousins at the end of October. Halloween is usually a time for indulging in the macabre: dressing up as witches, fairies, ghosts, skeletons, and monsters. Children play ‘trick or treat’—though receiving sweets from strangers now has sinister connotations. All Hallows’ Eve has become trivialised, commercialised, Harry Potterised.

So why, at the end of April, do we see an increasing number of Jack-o-Lanterns appearing and Halloween Balls advertised in our major cities? And what has that got to do with the “thin veil”?

Here lies a dilemma for those practicing magic in Australia. Our practices grew out of a diverse range of Northern Hemisphere traditions creating moving ritual encounters between human realms and the realms of faery. In the last twenty years, Australian pagans have become aware that to strengthen our magic, we must better attune ourselves to the ancient forces of the south.

So, with respect, Australian Pagans invert the Wheel of the Year. When the north celebrates May Day or Beltane, we celebrate Samhain.

April 30th lays exactly half way between Autumn Equinox and Winter Solstice. While the north is entering a spring resurgence, the southern growth is slowing down. At this time, we become more psychically open; we perceive dimensions that at other times remain “veiled”.

Samhain is the Witches’ New Year. “Begin

in the dark of the year, when there comes a crack in time, a moment when the veil is thin and those who have gone before us and those who will come after us are not separate from us” (Starhawk, The Spiral Dance). We use divination and trance to commune with beings of elemental nature. We honour and make offerings to our ancestors and recall that “What is remembered, lives!” It is a time to visit graveyards, if you have the courage to seek contact with those who have passed on.

For “… the gates of life and death are opened: the Sun Child is conceived; the dead walk, and to the living is revealed the Mystery: that every ending is but a new beginning. We meet in time out of time, everywhere and nowhere, here and there, to greet the Lord of Death who is Lord of Life, and the Triple Goddess who is the cauldron of rebirth.”

(Starhawk, The Spiral Dance) Leigh Blackmore is a writer, occultist, and O.T.O. initiate who works with the Western ceremonial magic traditions.

Margi Curtis is a writer and witch in the Reclaiming Tradition of the Craft.

Travelogue: Wolfe Creek, Western Australia

C

huck your gear into the ute, take a long dusty drive, and pitch a tent near Wolfe Creek, a giant meteorite impact crater (astrobleme), just over 100kms south of Halls Creek in WA’s Kimberley region (and over 1,000kms from WA’s capital, Perth). The crater is around 300,000 years old, with a diameter of 875m and a floor-to-rim height of 60m.

Wolfe Creek is a desolate patch of nothing, albeit a fascinating patch of nothing, and served as the locational inspiration for the Aussie horror flick Wolf Creek (note the dropped ‘e’, lending the movie title a more insidious quality). There’s remote and then there’s Wolfe Creek. If a psycho like Mick Taylor caught you out here, no one would hear you scream.

Enjoy your travels!

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Books

A word with the president Dr Marty Young

D

r Marty Young is the founder and president of the Australian Horror Writers Association (AHWA), a group of dark fiction writers that has been steadily gaining members as the genre regains popularity since the late 1990s trough.

BLACK: The Australian Horror Writers Association, huh?

Marty Young: The AHWA started as a yahoo group called Southern Horror back in 2002 (no one was murdered). The plan was to create an active community of Australian horror writers, one that could help the development and evolution of the genre while raising the public awareness and changing the perception of Horror itself. It was a slow and arduous ride, but the organisation officially launched in 2005.

We now have more than 150 members, and run annual competitions, mentor programs, international podcast shows each Halloween, on-line chats with renowned horror writers, and this year, we launched Midnight Echo, the official magazine of the AHWA. BLACK: What motivated you to form the AHWA in the first place?

MY: One of my first aims was to join a writing group and as horror had always been my passion, it had to a horror one. But that turned out to be a difficult thing to do. Horror was a bit player, the shunned little brother of science fiction and fantasy. People just didn’t like that H-word. I could nearly see these writers, the poor buggers, sitting in a dark corner with no one wanting to talk to them. So the only sensible thing to do was to start a group that focused specifically on horror.

up there with the world’s best. It’s a shame these writers aren’t more widely known and respected in their home country.

BLACK: You’ve done a lot of research on 19th and 20th century Australian supernatural fiction and ghost stories. What trends did you uncover?

MY: Many of the very early stories were psychological in nature and dealt with fears and terrors that were real, or at least caused by real situations (e.g. loneliness and isolation).

A lot of these stories depicted violent acts but that was only a reflection of society at the time. Early Australia was a tough place to live.

The supernatural wasn’t far away though, and in fact, ghosts have been here from very early on (e.g. Fisher’s Ghost; A Legend of Campbelltown, 1836). But that’s not really surprising when you think about it. The desert was a good place to die, an easy place to die. By that I mean it’s simple to imagine lots of people dying in the outback, in mining accidents, out prospecting, or getting lost. The barren deserts were quickly filled with spirits—interestingly, there were very few supernatu-

There had been Australian horror writing groups before; back in the 1990’s there was the Melbourne Horror Society and the Sydney Horror Writers—originally the Gargoyle Club.

Fortunately, technology has made it easier to connect people across the country and that meant there was now a better chance of an Australian horror writing organisation working than there ever was before.

BLACK: The current state of Australian horror fiction?

MY: AHWA membership is continuously increasing, so it’s plain to see that interest in horror fiction is there and is definitely on the rise. As far as the quality of writing within the genre goes, well, it’s right 20

BLACK A u s t r a l i a n D a r k C u l t u r e M a g a z i n e

ral stories involving indigenous people.

The overtly supernatural—vampires, demons, monsters, sub-human beings—turned up in force the 1880s1890s and have been present regularly ever since in varying degrees and cycles of popularity.

The most notable aspect of early colonial stories is that they had a stronger sense of being Australian than modern stories. Here were these people, building a new colony on the far side of the world in an almost apocalyptic world, surrounded by incredibly harsh bush, apparent savages, and strange wildlife. The mines were soon filled with ghosts, the outback driving settlers mad—the stories could only be Australian. If you want a true sense, a very real understanding of Australian life in the late 1800s/early 1900s, then read these stories.

BLACK: From that research, are there any unearthed gems you would recommend?

MY: Hume Nisbet is one of my colonial favourites. He wrote numerous supernatural short stories around the turn of the 20th century.

Mary Fortune is another. She was one of the world’s first female crime writers and the first Australian writer of crime. Along with her 500-odd detective stories, she also wrote a number of great ghost / horror stories. Ernest Favenc is probably best remembered as a famous Australian explorer, but he’s another colonial writer I’d recommend.

Guy Boothby, Edward Dyson, HB MariottWatson, Barbara Baynton (whose gothic stories portrayed just how difficult it was for women in early Australia)—the list goes on.

Even Marcus Clarke, Henry Lawson, and Louis Becke wrote horror stories.

Not all of these early tales are written in archaic styles of flowery prose and page-long paragraphs, either—many of them read like contemporary stories—and they are culturally rich. They provide a strong sense of being Australian, of what it meant to live here during the early days. Of how hard that life was, and this is part of what makes these stories so damn good.

Once you move into war-time Australia, there are numerous ‘forgotten’ Australian writers of ‘horror’; Dulcie Deamer, Max Afford, Alan Connell… One in particular is the Aborigine David Unaipon, the face on the Australian fiftydollar bill. He wrote stories that explored traditional Aborigine legends and one of them, ‘Yara Ma Tha Who,’ tells the tale of Aboriginal vampires.

BLACK: Is there such a thing as the ‘Aussie horror story’?

MY: I think older stories are far more Australian than modern ones because today’s society is integrated across the world. Nearly everything and everyone is connected. Isolation has lost much of its intimidation, and as such, we no longer have as distinct an identity as 100 years ago—or even 50 years ago.

There are certainly Australian stories, people surrounded by gum trees and koalas and kangaroos and desert skies, living Australian lives, but the ‘Australian horror story?’ I’m not sure there’s such a thing. Sure, themes like desolation, isolation and emptiness do exist in certain stories and we can possibly claim them, but those themes aren’t as fresh as they once were, nor as explicitly ours.

BLACK: Why do you think horror in literature is perceived as a dirty word yet horror movies flourish?

MY: It’s all to do with ignorance. There remains an ignorant preconception that horror must be all blood and guts and cheap dime store paperback pulp writing. But that is just plainly wrong. C’mon people! There’s a whole world of wonder out there just passing you by! And fortunately, the big name publishers are finally starting to realise this. Horror is slowly becoming popular again, only it isn’t being marketed as Horror.

Movie-goers are likely to be more forgiving than book readers. You don’t invest so much time with a movie as you do with a book so you’re more likely to give second chances.

BLACK: You’re an emerging horror writer yourself. What can we expect from you in the near future?

MY: I’m focusing on getting my novel published this year, so expect to see a book written by Marty Young sometime in the near future. I’m more at home writing novels but I always get pesky short stories poking into my awareness and demanding I write them out.

And will they all be horror? No. I’m passionate about horror but sometimes a story just wants telling and it picks me as its teller. n

Aussie horror fiction timeline 1836: First ghost story:

‘Fisher’s Ghost: A Legend of Campbelltown’ by John Lang

1867: First horror story by a female author: ‘The White Maniac: A Doctor’s Tale’ by Waif Wanderer (aka Mary Fortune) 1888: First

horror novel Phosphor: An Ischian Mystery by J. Filmore Sherry

1896: First story to feature an Indigenous ghost:

‘The Red Cap Spectre of the Robertson’ by E. Downs (The North Queensland Register)

1923: First horror story by an Indigenous author: ‘Yara Ma Tha Who’ by David Unaipon.

1941: First Australian Lovecraftian Mythos story:

‘Dr. Xander’s Cottage’ by Martin D. Brown and ‘Through the Alien Angle’ by Elwin G. Powers.

1974: Stephen King publishes his first novel, Carrie, sparking the worldwide popularity of horror in the late 1970s and 80s.

1984: First horror magazine

Australian Horror & Fantasy magazine (ed. Radburn & Studach)

1987: Terror Australis magazine (ed. Blackmore, Sequeira & Stevens) first published.

1992: First mass-market anthology:

Intimate Armageddons (ed. Bill Congreve).

1994: Bloodsongs magazine (ed. Masters, Proposch & Stevens) first published.

1996: Bonescribes: The Year’s Best Australian Horror (ed.

Congreve & Hood) published.

2003: Award-winning anthologies Southern Blood (ed. Bill Congreve) and Gathering the Bones (ed. Campbell, Dann & Etchison) published.

2004: First professional online magazine Shadowed Realms (ed. Angela Challis).

2005: Australian Horror Writers Association founded.

2006: Lothian Books’ Dark Suspense novels published.

2006: Australian Dark Fantasy & Horror anthology series (ed. Angela Challis) first published.

21

Gaming

Black \ Slash

Click here for Death Luke Challis

I

nquiring minds want to know: Do violent games beget violent citizens?

The debate isn’t exclusive to video games, of course. Most forms of artistic expression butt heads with society’s conscience-o-stat at one stage or another. Then in 1999, it came to light that the boys responsible for the Columbine High School massacre were fanatical players of the classic game, DOOM. Now, let’s be honest. Anyone who can take a game—in which you are Earth’s last hope in the fight against the evil hordes of Hell—and turn it into the cold-blooded murder of unarmed and helpless teenagers is seriously deranged, and no less than a coward. Not only that, but by expressing a sense of boredom while killing their classmates, the boys responsible have demonstrated, without a doubt, that the satisfaction found in violent games cannot be transposed into the real world. I can only hope these boys spend eternity with the realisation

that their ‘power’ over the ‘weak’ is just as empty as their meaningless lives.

It may come as no surprise that the latest craze in video game controversy has hit the news and politics around the world. I’m talking about Grand Theft Auto IV by Roadstar. As the largest selling entertainment product of all time, ‘craze’ really needs to be capitalised and underlined—and printed in an expensive, exotic font.

What’s your poison? Sex? Drugs? Guns? Death?

This virtual world has is all. Thanks to the power of the silicon chip, this game is closer to reality that we’ve ever been. For me, that’s the appeal, and I’m forced to ask myself, “Why?� When the reality of killing the innocent in cold-blood is clearly a sad and hollow prospect, why would I seek more realistic game play?

Visceral, unpredictable, horrific violence—and here’s the clincher—without consequences.

I’m not talking about being shot or locked up

or killed ‌ I’m talking about the REAL consequences. These characters leave no grieving families ‌ no brilliant and promising lives cut short ‌ no risk of seeing the realisation that life is ultimately meaningless plastered on the face of your victim.

Instead, all that remains is a fantastic world that is a pleasure to look at, experience, and DESTROY! Go on a killing spree with a pistol, shotgun, grenades, assault rifle, sports car!

Run down pedestrians and watch their limp bodies bounce off on-coming traffic! Go on car-jackings. No! Go one better. Car-jack the taxi with the plucky young women in the rear seat. Hell yeah! Take her on the rollercoaster ride of her life, charging down streets at break neck speed, and running red lights. Go out of your way to terrify her: roll the vehicle, jump over ramps, drive off cliffs; better yet, drive down arcades and watch the helpless consumers flee screaming as you run down as many as you can. See blood on the windscreen and headlights, feel the car buck as your tyres tear up corpses—oh yeah, lets REALLY scar her for life!

Ahem ‌ maybe violent games don’t beget violent citizens—but do we tempt fate by giving people with grievances access to weapons and the means to refine their perversions?

Luke Challis is an Australian Ăźber-geek residing in Canada. He has a fascination with all things games related and has been known to wax philosophical.

Monster of the month

Cthulhu

“Cthulhu fhtagn!�

'2!0()# $%3)'. ) , , 5 3 4 2 !4 ) / . # / 2 0 / 2 !4 % ) - ! ' % '2!0()# 2%02/$5#4)/. $%3+4/0 05",)3().'

-/",)% %-!), RSC BIGPOND NET AU 22

BLACK A u s t r a l i a n D a r k C u l t u r e M a g a z i n e

G

reat Cthulhu was first created in 1928 by the grandfather of modern horror, HP Lovecraft, when he wrote his seminal story ‘The Call of Cthulhu’.

Cthulhu’s form varies, but It has been described as a grotesque amalgamation of “an octopus, a dragon, and a human�. More than just a monster, Cthulhu is the greatest of the Great Old Ones, cosmic beings of god-like power who lay in wait, undying, until the “stars are right� and they can once again terrorise the Earth. Cthulhu has proved so popular, a role-playing game (from Chaosium, USA) and an entire literary subgenre (the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’) has been named after It.

C u lt u r e

Terrorism, Superheroes, and Aliens The world of the dominatrix

By Gary Kemble

W

ho would have thought the war on terror, superheroes and predatory aliens had any relationship to the world of BDSM? A few hours in the company of Sydney-based professional Dominatrix Mistress Astrid Electra will put you well and truly in the picture ...

23

C u lt u r e

The world of the

Over twenty years, she has explored just about every fetish you can imagine (and probably a few you can’t). Her clients do request common fantasies—teacher/student, aristocrat/maid, jailer/convict—but others really like to push the boundaries. Or have them pushed?

“I’ve done everything from science fiction scenarios to medieval scenes to superhero-versusvillain role-plays straight out of Marvel magazines,” Ms Astrid said.

Abduction/hostage/interrogation/torture-based scenarios have become increasingly popular against the backdrop of the war on terror. Some come with very specific fantasies; others give Ms Astrid artistic license to take them on an erotic magical mystery tour.

“The spontaneity is just exhilarating,” she said. “It’s like theatre sports for perverts—I’m remaking reality, and they have no idea what happens next.

“Recently, I became a latex-clad nun to catch a guy stealing flowers from a graveyard to give to his mother. Over the next hour he was drugged, abducted, forced to worship me and beg forgiveness, then ritually raped, murdered, and enslaved to a coven of vampires. It beats the shit out of having a real job,” she quipped.

dominatrix

and power began secretly with cross-dressing in early childhood before adolescence saw innocent daydreams coalesce into a more erotic D/s context.

A curious young mind went into overdrive, discovering the fetish scene and subsequently seeing professional Mistresses to expand her horizons. She says some of them were totally amazing people who inspired and encouraged her to become who she is today, while others were less impressive. Those passionate Dominants became her role models, and as Ms Astrid immersed herself into the subculture, BDSM became her life’s passion.

“The concept of taking something I loved and making a living from it just enthralled me,” she said.

Learning the ropes By the time Ms Astrid was conducting BDSM sessions on a professional basis in her mid 20s, she’d spent 10 years learning from Dominants who were at the top of their craft,

The switch Ms Astrid began her exploration of the fetish paradigm in her mid-teens as a submissive before assuming the mantle of dominance in her mid-20s. Those early submissive experiences have proven invaluable in her ascendant role.

“Being a good Dominatrix has more to do with empathy and insight than just having a dominant personality per se. It’s the intimate understanding of other people’s fears and desires that gives me the power to control them.

“This notion that someone is naturally dominant or truly submissive has gained currency in the D/s cyber culture, but it’s a fallacy. Human beings are multifaceted. The more adventurous of us, unsurprisingly, enjoy numerous different roles from time to time.

“That said, to seek power merely out of narcissism or insecurity is unethical and ultimately self-destructive. A Dominant, as any good leader, seeks to understand and ultimately empower their subjects. To do that well in a D/s context requires a very specific set of interpersonal skills plus the technical competence necessary to dominate in a safe, mutually consensual, and risk-aware fashion that is ultimately empowering for all parties involved.”

So like anything in life, becoming a good Dominatrix takes passion, commitment, and a lot of hard work.

Ms Astrid believes her fascination with gender

24

BLACK A u s t r a l i a n D a r k C u l t u r e M a g a z i n e

“There was no better way to learn the ropes than being entwined in someone else’s,” she said.

“But in retrospect, my most valuable asset as Dominatrix was journey to self-acceptance as a transsexual. My transition to living as a female had given me at 27 an insight into gender power relationships and human psychosexuality that the most gifted genetically born female Mistresses don’t usually attain until their early 40s. I also understood how the power of selfacceptance and understanding could transform your life.”

The creative and intellectual challenge of developing new techniques and scenarios aside, Ms Astrid finds the most stimulating aspect of her work to be the sense of connectedness she feels with her clients.

“It’s just amazing when a virtual stranger walks into your dungeon and allows you to crawl deep

inside their psyche and explore their darker desires. My ultimate reward is always that look on a client’s face when I’ve just totally rocked their world,” she said.

The worst part of being a professional Dominatrix is dealing with the misconceptions of the general public.

“Most people write it off as merely perverted sex. It’s actually the exploration of the human condition through power exchange,” she said.

“It’s about learning who we really are.”

Ms Astrid admits some sessions are fairly intense, leaving her psychologically and physically drained, but she finds it a very satisfying kind of exhaustion.

“Its probably analogous to what a rock star feels after they come off stage. It’s exhilarating. Getting so well paid to do something I absolutely love feels almost criminal,” she said.

Tradies and traders Interestingly, Ms Astrid sees as many tradesmen as she does high-powered businessmen and jurists, imploding the stereotype of powerful men seeking out a Dominatrix to hand over control.

“Wealthy people have more financial capacity to seek out a professional Domme to explore their fetishes, but the desire itself seems to be almost archetypal,” she said.

“I believe our predisposition to fetishist desire is a function of evolutionary biology—a by-product of natural selection. As with bisexuality—it’s a combination of cultural and social mores, or the incapacity to find someone to share it with that prevents many people from actually exploring it. Wealthy, well-educated professionals just have greater opportunity to over come those barriers.”

The rise of raunch Ms Astrid agrees that the rise of raunch culture has seen fetish imagery become more mainstream, with the Internet allowing people to explore their fantasies safely and anonymously.

“It’s also no longer considered so transgressive to go to a club like Hellfire at the weekend,” she said.

“But for most, it’s still very much about dressing up, becoming someone else for the evening and maybe having a little kinky sex afterwards. A relatively small proportion of people in the scene ever immerse themselves deeply enough to fully comprehend why others make it our life’s passion.”

Ms Astrid equates that with other pursuits like sport music and art.

Whilst it’s only ever going to be a hobby for most people, for some it becomes all consuming.

“The great thing is that it’s now more accessible and acceptable than ever to at least acknowledge an interest in BDSM,” she said. n

Dark

C u lt u r e

Deeviations

Corsets and Consequences

Bella Dee Bella Dee

A

ll gussied up. That’s how my Great Aunt Wilhelmina used to put it. My Great Aunt Wilhelmina, who would cling to the corner of her four-poster bed while my ten year old fingers tugged fiercely at the strings of her best steel-boned corset. “Tighter than that, dear girl,” she would cry. “I do not need to breathe!”

Once we were done, and her waist was cinched smaller than my own, I would watch as she slipped into one of her slinky, swirly, ever-so-swanky evening gowns. And I would swear by my poor chafed hands that I would never, ever allow myself to be laced into that hideous instrument of torture known as a corset.

Until, of course, the day I did just that.

My dearest friend, Cassiopeia, is solely and wholly to blame for my instant intoxication and runaway obsession with corsetry. It was Cass who decided that a hand-sewn, double-laced Victorian overbust corset made from burgundy red velvet and trimmed with black Spanish lace would be the perfect eighteenth-and-a-half birthday present.

From the moment I put it on, I was hooked. Quite literally!

Here’s a little secret for the uninitiated: corsets do not hurt. Properly made, fitted, and worn, a good corset will support rather than constrict; empower rather than demean; protect rather than punish.

Wearing a corset feels like being embraced by giant hands, strong hands, safe hands that refuse to allow you to slouch or slump or runaway to hide in a corner. A corset is a delicious combination of allure and armour. It’s being in the spotlight, my dearies. It’s being seen.

But do be careful. Choose your corsets wisely. Select a size not more than four or five inches smaller than your natural waist unless, like my Great Aunt Wilhelmina, you really don’t need to breathe. Or drink. Or remain conscious. Choose a style you feel comfortable wearing, and if you have no little helper readily at hand, one you can lace up yourself. Prepare to spend a reasonable amount for a corset that is properly designed and boned for support. (Cheap corsetry is the falsest of economies!) Most importantly, choose a corset—both size and style—that flatters you. You should be a tempting, curvaceous glass of fine red wine, not a pot of badly-poured beer frothing uncontrollably over the rim and pooling at the base!

Lastly, my dearies, prepare yourself for addiction. For if there is such a thing as too many corsets, more resilient souls than I are yet to discover it Intrigued, but unsure where to begin? If you’re in the Sydney area, sashay your pretty behind along to Gallery Serpentine and browse their extensive range of truly exquisite—and very reasonably priced—corsetry. For those with more lavish tastes, Vicious Venus in Melbourne will be sure to satisfy with their unique, award-winning designs and contemporary flair. Both labels also offer custom design services and accept mail orders via their websites.

Shoo now, go forth and corset thyself. And should you find it not to your taste, Bella Dee will be only too delighted to adopt any acquisitions you might have made along the way ...

Bella Dee is a Sydney-based writer and respected animal psychologist, specialising in feline insecurity disorders

25

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Pick up a 3 or 6 issue subscription of Black magazine for only $22.95 or $43.95 (postage within Australia is free!) at:

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Australian Dark Culture Magazine

Issue 2: Features Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki from TV’s hit series Supernatural, and plenty more!

On sale mid September.

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26

Book, Film, and Game reviews

The Incredible Hulk Directed by Louis Leterrier Stars: Edward Norton, Liv Tyler, Tim Roth Leterrier enters the superhero franchise with a solid in-name only sequel that ticks all the right boxes, but still manages to come out of the wash short.

Set five years after the events of the initial film, Bruce Banner (played by Norton) is on the run from the US military and trying to find a cure for his condition. When he once again crosses paths with his former love (Tyler), she unlocks a hint of humanity in the Hulk beast and allows Banner hope for the first time things may be bet-

ter. But when the military unleashes the super beast Abomination (Roth), Banner realises he must embrace the anger if he’s to save the one he loves.

The film is a vast improvement on the first big-screen outing. The action is bigger and better, the cast (minus an indifferent performance

by Roth) is right, and the inner emotional turmoil, which was a feature of the Lee production, is just as powerful. You should be jumping out of your seats with excitement, but you don’t.

The failure to enthral, even when the Hulk and the Abomination battle it out in

The Happening Directed by M. Night Shyamalan Stars: Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo Grand ideas are wasted in this disappointing effort by M. Night Shyamalan that sees the director shelve his bag of tricks for a more traditional form of ecological thriller.

When an airborne virus causes entire US cities to stop and kill themselves, a small band of friends join thousands of others fleeing to rural areas. But as the attacks begin to target smaller and smaller groups,

they soon find themselves alone and searching for answers against a relentless kind of new enemy.

It’s a film that you want to like, and at first Shyamalan plays the formula well, captivating the audience with a barrage of tragic, unsettling violence while subtly introducing a growing sense of isolation. But when it’s time to reveal his hand, Shyamalan drops the ball, turning what should be a chilling new ecological threat into a bumbling, laughable foe.

Shyamalan spends so much time ramming home his en-

a CGI free-for-all, suggests that the problem lies not in the application, but the source material. The Hulk is a classic tale of Jekyll and Hyde, and should be a representation as such, but sadly there is something lacking in a hero whose onscreen persona is running around with a three-yearold temper tantrum.

Leterrier tries to combat this by creating a King Konglike empathy with the character, but unlike Kong, you lack that emotional connection. When the green beast yells “Hulk smash!”, you can’t help but look for his diaper, and this child-like persona makes it hard to believe he’s doing it all for the woman he loves.

The film is good and easy to enjoy. It just doesn’t trigger the boyish glee that it should.

— Mark Smith-Briggs

vironmental message that the characters never get past any kind of superficial development, and once the initial mystery is revealed (and it’s done early and often), any real interest begins to wane. Walhberg and co. try their hardest with the material, but even they fail to sound convincing with a script that has less subtext than a Home and Away episode.

When people aren’t talking, Shyamalan does manage to string together a handful of tense, atmospheric scenes, but it seems that most of his attention is centred on trying to prove he has more up his sleeve than just the twist ending.The result is an unpolished concept that’s full of brilliant flashes, but not much more.

Snapshot Film reviews

By Mark Smith-Briggs

Cloverfield (2008) A group of partygoers capture a creature’s attack on New York on their handycam in this exceptional giant monster movie. Shaky hand-held footage, realistic characters, and excellent CGI effects make this a tense, refreshing take on the genre.

Awake (2008) Christensen plays a wealthy business-mogul who learns of a plot to murder him while drugged during a transplant operation in this nail-biting thriller. A claustrophobic premise and a lingering dread make this a rewarding, intense viewing experience.

Rogue (2007) A tourist group is hunted by an oversized killer croc in this solid sophomore effort by McLean. Combining clever scares and beautiful location scenery, this doesn’t stray far from the creature feature formula but offers plenty of bite for its buck.

Southland Tales (2006) Grand ideas get lost within an intricately constructed plot in this brain-rattling cult thriller. The overuse of narration and the uneven blend of styles suggests that even Kelly didn’t have his head around things, leaving little hope for the viewer.

Day of the Dead (2008) Miner helms this above average direct-to-DVD remake about a mountain town overrun by a zombie plague.

Hardcore Romero fans may be disappointed with the effort, but there’s plenty of blood, guts, and gunfire to sate most gore hounds.

Shutter (2008) A ghostly presence haunts a newlywed couple’s photos, revealing a secretive, sinister past in this dull American remake. It’s a case of seen it all before, as a cliché-riddled script and orchestrated scares struggle to leave any lasting impressions.

The Eye (2008) Alba plays a cornea transplant patient who sees horrific visions of the future in this by-the-numbers US remake.

The ghosts are creepy, and Alba shows she’s more than just a pretty face, but horror fans will be able to unravel the mystery well before the mid-point.

—Mark Smith-Briggs

27

Reviews Dreaming Again, edited by Jack Dann

Infected by Scott Sigler

Fiction: HarperCollins/Voyager, 2008

Fiction: Random House, 2008

The engravers will be preparing to etch this collection’s title into awards this year.

Dreaming Again’s editor Jack Dann has assembled 35 Australian writers to look at the wilder, darker side of fantasy, and for the most part, his labour of love works a treat.

Authors such as Isobelle Carmody, Kim Wilkins, Stephen Dedman, Jason Nahrung, Garth Nix, Sara Douglass, Simon Brown and John Birmingham lend their talent to short fiction with time-travelling suitors, outback vampire hunters, reworked fables, trolls and werewolves, ghosts, Egyptian curiosities, seaport adventures, ravenous camels, and train-stop mysteries.

Whilst all stories are decent to outstanding, for all the talent of writers, it was disappointing that quite a few lacked an Australian setting or genuine feel (often stereotypical icons seemed thrown in). So much wonderment in this land is a calling for the fantasy writer, but alas … the stories were enjoyable nonetheless.

And sometimes the fantasy element is razor-thin, a by-product of publishers relabelling genres (such as horror to dark fantasy), but whereas this could be a failing, it ultimately shows how fantasy lends itself to many other styles. You will appreciate fantasy in a different light after this anthology. I advise you read one story per day, ruminate, enjoy.

—Craig Bezant

The Good Guy by Dean Koontz

Gritty urban prose, meets science fiction, meets old fashioned horror in a new, modern way. Infected is a fast paced romp through more blood and gore than I’ve read in ages. Sigler presents a new threat to world peace from a galaxy far, far away that Captain Kirk, The President, and CIA agent Dew Phillips, can’t do anything about. This author presents an interesting twist on invaders from outer-space that grips the reader and rarely lets go. Those who like their reading sprinkled with copious amounts of profanity and bloodlust, and don’t mind the occasional intrusion by the author, will love this apocalyptic tale.

—Brenton Tomlinson

The Steel Remains by Richard Morgan Fiction: Hachette Livre/Gollancz, 2008 Fans of fluffy fantasy beware, Richard Morgan has stepped onto the battlefield. Better known as the author of uber-violent SF-noir, Morgan has turned to the fantasy genre with a new trilogy that is sure to shake things up. Harking back to the gritty days of Sword and Sorcery, with obvious homages to Moorcock and Poul Anderson, The Steel Remains delivers little original plot. What it does dish up is a dark and exciting character-driven tale full of violence, sex, and razor-sharp dialogue that doesn’t let up from first till last. An exciting romp, but definitely not for the squeamish.

Fiction: HarperCollins 2008

—Andrew McKiernan

The Good Guy, is a high-octane thrill ride.

The plot focuses on Timothy Carrier, a stone mason who lives what appears to be a simple life. However, this all changes dramatically when he interferes with the contract killing of Linda Paquette. After warning her of the impending doom, the pair instigate a cat and mouse chase with a truly chilling psychopath.

The Good Guy is an exhilarating read that will have you engrossed to the last page.

However, after it’s all over, the contrived ending leaves the reader feeling cheated.

—AD John

The Scent of Shadows by Vicki Pettersson Fiction: HarperCollins 2008 Joanna Archer is a heiress and photographer who finds herself drawn to the shadows. On the eve of her 25th birthday, some of those shadows find her. She is drawn into the hidden world of the Zodiac and a war between Light and Shadow. Gritty and violent in some parts, and almost fluffy chick lit in others, this book is deeper than some of the other urban fantasy around and Pettersson’s world is intruiging. She is a competent author, and this book is worth the read. It’s going to be interesting to see where the series heads.

Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill Fiction: Hachette Livre/Gollancz, 2007 Heart-Shaped Box won the 2007 Bram Stoker Award for First Novel. It has even been optioned as a movie.

The novel focuses on Judas (Jude) Coyne, a fifty-four-year-old death-metal god. He’s on the final strings of his career, living off royalties and the false image he created. He also collects ‘dark’ objects, like a three hundred year-old witch confession. Hence the kickoff – Jude’s agent receives an email about a website auctioning an authentic ghost. Jude cannot resist, thinking it nothing more than a laugh.

Oh, is he wrong, soon receiving a heart-shaped box containing a skeletal, hypnotising ghost with a score to settle.

Heart-Shaped Box has it all – ghostly voices on the airwaves, dogs barking at lurking spectres, Ouija boards, eerie mirror visions. My favourite was having Jude’s dogs’ souls leap out of their bodies to attack the ghost.

The novel’s thriller pace is also one of its best features. Hill has written like a snappy journalist – short, sharp sentences, small chapters teasing you forward – perfect for such a novel.

If you love horror, or even just a novel that takes you on a wild ride, you have no excuse if this isn’t on your bookshelf.

—Craig Bezant

—Stephanie Gunn

Read more 28

stralian Da

rScope, The Au

e at Horro reviews onlin

BLACK A u s t r a l i a n D a r k C u l t u r e M a g a z i n e

logspot.com

orrorscope.b

zh Log: http://o rk Fiction Web

The Ninth Circle by Alex Bell

Fivefold by Nathan Burrage

Fiction: Hachette Livre/Orion 2008

Fiction: Random House, 2008

Our protagonist wakes in a pool of blood, a large sum of money nearby, memories of himself gone.

He is in Budapest, seems to speak many languages, can take on a gang without blinking yet finds blood nauseating. He eventually learns he is Gabriel Antaeus, named after an angel and a demon.

Then Gabriel discovers his manuscript, proposing Dante’s circles of hell were real, and stranger things occur. A burning man keeps appearing; and Gabriel’s teenage neighbour is pregnant via Immaculate Conception. The Ninth Circle is written as journal entries, with research disguised amongst prose (both elements insightful and downfalls).

Worth a read for the imaginative use of theology alone.

—Craig Bezant

All Together Dead by Charlaine Harris Fiction: Hachette Livre/Gollancz, 2008 Sookie Stackhouse is a telepathic waitress in a world where vampires live publicly, but shapeshifters still live underground. In this book, she attends a vampire summit as a “human Geiger counter” for a vampire queen. And of course, has issues on the romance front. Harris’ writing is simplistic at times, and downright frustrating at others. Still, her style fits well with the nature of this book, which leans towards the lighter side of paranormal romance, despite some traumatic events. Worth a read if you’re looking for something light and fun, but don’t expect it to change your world.

—Stephanie Gunn

Australian Dark Fantasy and Horror 2007, edited by Angela Challis Fiction: Brimstone Press, 2007 This is an outstanding anthology of tales within the genres of dark fantasy and horror, covering the complete gamut from suspense to traditional horror, from serial killers to fantasy. This is not simply an ‘anthology’. The introduction and appendices offer an extensive overview of various key genre resources and publications. So before you even begin reading the stories, you get some great resources not found in other publications.

All of the stories in this volume are interesting, thought-provoking, and creative. They epitomize the innovative edge of Australian dark fiction.

This is a must have volume: while the 2006 edition was great, the 2007 volume is superb.

—Robert Black

Pitcairn: Paradise Lost by Kathy Marks Non-fiction: HarperCollins 2008 Pitcairn was the island to which the Bounty mutineers fled following their legendary fracas with William Bligh. For generations it has had a reputation as an island paradise peopled by God-fearing inhabitants and earned a fanatical group of admirers worldwide, even among those who’d never set foot on the ‘rock’. Kathy Mark’s book reveals how the whole rotten edifice came tumbling down in 2000 when British police investigated a rape complaint in the tiny community of 47. Subsequent enquiries revealed generations of child abuse shrouded in a culture of denial. This book is disturbing in the extreme, yet impossible to put down.

—Tony Owens

Already an innovative and respected storyteller in the shorter format, Nathan Burrage has now crossed the threshold of publishing his first novel, Fivefold.

James Steepleton is a British twenty-something almost any young man can relate to: James is in trouble after running afoul of the law in a drink-driving accident and it suddenly falls to his friends to provide the necessary support – financial and emotional – so James doesn’t have to do a stint behind bars and ruin his bourgeoning acting career. No secrets are given away by revealing his friends are the Fivefold: a cabal of individuals blessed with untapped secrets resembling powerful manifestations of the Mysteries: psychic, extrasensory, and mystical abilities.

Fivefold is just plain entertaining. With synaptic sparring, mental warring, and clandestine cabals, Fivefold is an impressive debut and a novel that could, perhaps, teach veterans a thing or two about the game.

With many layers to the plot, there are philosophical undertones on the nature of pain and pleasure,and whether eternal ecstasy and agony are fundamentally one and the same. You’ll be surprised, on numerous occasions, of the direction and turns the book takes.

—Matthew Tait

Mister B. Gone by Clive Barker Fiction: HarperCollins 2008 “Burn this book.” Who could resist that as the first line of a novel?

Awaiting you therein? War between Heaven and Hell. Demons, spirits, angels, allied slaughters.

Each black letter an unholy mouth. Between the lines ... a devil. Jakabok Botch is trawled up from the Ninth Circle of Hell. The rest – a travelogue of the damned. A road movie for demon lovers. Barker burst onto the scene in the eighties, the Elvis of Dark Fiction. But Clive has long since left that building. This is Barker doing stand-up comedy, but he’s standing on a scaffold, a noose in his hands. Read it. Burn it.

Watch what rises with the smoke ...

—Stephen Studuch

Raising the Dead by Phillip Finch Non-fiction: HarperSport, 2008 There are no zombies but lots of real-life tension in this account of two “extreme-sport” divers who in 2005 set out to “rescue” the body of another diver who perished a decade before in Bushman’s Hole in the Kalahari Desert.

Finch’s book offers a riveting account of the dive, which took the pair more than 250 metres down into an impenetrable chthonian darkness and would prove deadly for one of them.

Written in an unadorned, deceptively plain style – though effectively structured and immaculately detailed – the book relies on the inherent fascination and horror evoked by the story to grab the reader’s imagination, offering all the mad heroism and claustrophobic intensity of a dark thriller.

—Robert Hood

DVD and game reviews next page

29

Reviews Death Note

The Abominable Snowman

Horror/fantasy (DVD): Madman Entertainment

Horror (DVD): Hammer/Umbrella Entertainment, 1957

A notebook which causes the death of those whose name is written in its pages turns a teenager’s fight for justice into something much darker in this excellent cross-genre effort from Japan. Combining themes from a coming-of-age superhero fable with the cat-and-mouse games of a suspense thriller, this double movie pack sets itself apart through rich characters and an exploration of moral ambiguity.

Fans of the Manga series may have some complaints – large strokes of the original story are brushed over to condense it into four hours – but for most this is a great introduction into the Death Note phenomenon.

—Mark Smith-Briggs

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street Horror/musical (DVD): Warner Bros, 2007

Directed by Val Guest This early monster flick stands out for its intelligent script and excellent acting from Peter Cushing and Forrest Tucker. These play Altruistic Scientist and Greedy Hunter respectively – both on a quest to find the legendary Yeti but with different motives. What they find is not what either expected. Not at all like the typical modern action-packed horror thriller, The Abominable Snowman is a thoughtful sci-fi drama more interested in ideas than gore.

Brides of Dracula Horror (DVD): Hammer/Umbrella Entertainment, 1960 Directed by Terence Fisher Though a sequel to Hammer’s 1958 mega-hit Dracula, this film features neither Christopher Lee nor the Count himself. Peter Cushing, however, reprises his role as vampire hunter Van Helsing, this time on the trail of a vampiric Baron and his wives. Though it feels a bit truncated, it’s an effective example of Hammer’s lush gothic style – and Peter Cushing is always good value.

Directed by Tim Burton Starring Johnny Depp, Helena BonhamCarter, Alan Rickman.

As Sweeney Todd opens, the titular character – a barber falsely transported – returns to London seeking both his family and bloody vengeance. But murder requires practice, and the pie-shop owned

by Todd’s landlady requires supplies … To call this movie ‘gory’ woefully underplays the sheer volume of red stuff splattering about. The leads all turn in excellent performances, the plot delivers sufficient twists to stay ahead of expectations, and the musical numbers are complex, brash, and alternately dark or humorous as dictated by the mood of the moment.

A definite must-see.

The Evil of Frankenstein Horror (DVD): Hammer/Umbrella Entertainment, 1964 Directed by Freddie Francis Third – and least – of Hammer’s sequence of Frankenstein films starring Peter Cushing as the good Doctor. With a plot that involves the usual body-part gathering and re-animation, the film suffers from not being directed by Terence Fisher, who otherwise brought his personal vision to the series. Cushing is good and the movie serviceable, if not up to the others. Continuity with the previous films is largely ignored.

—Robert Hood

—Chuck McKenzie

City of Villains Superhero MMORG: NC Soft World domination has never been so much fun! Comic book fans can now live out their dreams of being a superhero – or supervillain – in NC Soft’s online RPG City of Villains (COV). MMORG’s are a dime a dozen, with fantasy (World of Warcraft and its ilk) the dominant player, so it is refreshing to have a different gaming experience. City of Villains is the standalone sequel to City of Heroes (COH), but purchasing COV allows you access to both games. A monthly fee is charged for continued online participation.

One of the most compelling aspects of COV is the highly detailed character creation – you get to choose from offensive and defensive superpower sets (based on archetypes and origins), choose a physique (from brainy nerd to hulking colossus!), and design a costume. Investing in the right powers is critical in the early levels, although banding together with other players into teams and supervillain groups is encouraged, which leads to building a supergroup secret lair later in the game and base raiding for some intense player vs player (PvP) action.

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Villain archetypes determine how you play the game. For example, the mastermind can summon henchmen to do his or her bidding (with lackeys ranging from street thugs, ninjas, the undead, and robots!) but needs to play it safe. Stalkers skulk in the shadows, Dominators and Corrupter wield impressive powers from afar, and Brutes wade in, boots and all!

The storyline hinges on advancement within Arachnos, the paramilitary organisation that controls the Rogue Islands, just off the US east coast (and COH’s fabled Paragon City). Gameplay is a mix of mapexploring random encounters and set missions allocated by contacts in each city of the Islands, which advance the plot. There are plenty of cool side missions, too, including raids on Paragon City, bank robberies, and several extensive PvP areas. The missions become a little repetitive at higher levels, but to NC Soft’s credit, they are continually adding ‘chapters’ to the game every month that allow for new types of missions and special threats (such as the Rikti alien invasion). Other enhancements include an invention system and collectable power ups.

Highly recommended for anyone on a power trip!

—Shane Jiraiya Cummings

HorrorsStore

Books

in

a VERY NASTY HABIT Chuck McKenzie

P

sst! Hey, you! Yeah, you! buy some horror fiction?

Wanna

No, no, don’t walk away! Okay, look, too scary, yeah? Too dark? Too extreme? Hah! That’s what they want you to think—bloody literati toffee-nosed snobs!

Let me tell you something, man—everyone’s into horror these days! No, really—everyone!

Did you know that sales of speculative fiction over the 2007/2008 financial year increased twenty-four percent on the previous year?

Nielsen Bookscan doesn’t lie, man! That’s thirty million dollars spent on SF, Fantasy, and Horror, man! An increase of $168K! And that’s excluding Harry Potter!

Yeah, alright, so that figure covers a helluva lot of SF and fantasy—okay, mostly SF and fantasy— No, no, wait, don’t go, hear me out! Cos, see, a

Books

Josephine Pennicott

huge slice of fantasy is actually horror! Straight up! Thing is, they don’t call it horror anymore.

Well, you know how it is—horror’s that nasty, cheap, badly written stuff you find at the bottom of remainder bins. Very bad for you—or so they’d have you believe. So what they’ve done is come up with sanitised terms for it, like ‘Paranormal Romance’, or ‘Supernatural Fiction’. Huh! ‘Horror Lite’ I call it. And don’t even get me started on ‘Dark Fantasy’— No, it’s not fantasy, that’s the thing! It’s horror! Here, just take a look at this—the Simon & Schuster March 2008 Romance stock-list. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking—ripping bodices and heaving bosoms. Well take a closer look.

See that? Out of the 211 titles listed, sixtyone are specifically marketed as ‘Paranormal Romance’, and another forty-seven deal with vampires, werewolves, and demons! What’s my point? Well, think about it—vampires,

Criminal Noir

Dining with Death: Mo Hayder

N

ecrophiliacs, live birds sewed into chests, bayoneted babies, rape scenes involving children that will haunt you forever—and these are the lighter moments in the intelligent, suspenseful, and beautifully written novels of Britain’s Mo Hayder.

I’d never attended a literary lunch before, but when I saw Mo was hosting one during the Sydney Writers’ Festival, I booked immediately to join a party of six. “I love psychopaths, don’t you?” says the first man I meet. “I’d love a cage of them in my lounge-room to study.” Ahem. It seems I have finally found my tribe.

When Mo arrives, it’s as if sunshine enters the room. “Josephine!” She embraces me in a very un-English manner. “Did you bring your daughter? My daughter came to meet her!” Yes, the blonde smiling beauty who has reduced me to looking under my bed at night is also a mother.

Mo’s current bestseller Ritual is dedicated to, and partly based on, ‘Adam’—a boy whose mutilated body was found in the Thames seven years ago. He was a victim of muti or African Black Magic, with the draining of blood indicating a Nigerian ritual, and was specially brought from Africa to London to be sacrificed. It’s this clash of cultures that fascinates me. I grew up in Papua New Guinea when headhunting still occurred and reports of magical rituals such as raising people from the dead were common.

I’ve always regarded Mo as courageous to have no writing taboos. Ritual isn’t as graphic as some of her previous books, although it contains torture scenes that would bring tears to a lot of blokes’ eyes. “I don’t set out to shock,” Mo explains in her gentle voice. “I write about what shocks me. It shocks me that women and children are abused in the way they are. It’s a cathartic action for me to write it out.”

A writing colleague once told me, “I love

werewolves, and demons are undisputed denizens of the horror genre, yeah? And yet, here they are being touted as part of a romance catalogue. And romance is the biggest-selling genre in the world, right?

So what are all those millions of romance enthusiasts really reading?

Yeah, exactly. And it hasn’t done them any harm, has it?

So? How about it? Nothing to worry about— start with a bit of the soft stuff. A little Marta Acosta. Some Sherrilyn Kenyon, Kresley Cole, Anne Morgan, or Gena Showalter. Not too scary, not too dark.

And if you like that, then maybe you could try something slightly darker—just slightly, I promise. Stephen King? Dean Koontz? Both considered ‘mainstream’ these days. Or perhaps something ‘Classic’ like Dracula or Frankenstein.

Of course, if you really get a taste for it … well, I’m sure I can get my hands on something … harder. A little Brett McBean, maybe? Or some Kim Wilkins? Jonathan Maberry? Sarah Langan?

Trust me, you’ll like it. I can guarantee you’ll be back for more.

Like I say—everyone’s doing it.

Chuck McKenzie is a Melbourne-based author, editor, and bookshop manager.

your stuff, Josephine, but it’s so dark and harrowing! Can’t you intersperse it with some humour?” And one judge of a short story competition said of my entry, “If Josephine Pennicott really thinks like that, she should see a psychiatrist!” But I believe death and suffering deserve respect when you write about them—not jokes or a false, sneaky peek at the violence. Victims like ‘Adam’ deserve more. Their screams deserve to be recorded faithfully.

Society is often reluctant to examine its dark side. Mo’s US publishers, for example, asked her to remove the word ‘paedophile’ from The Treatment, her novel about paedophilia. And this from a country with so many instances of child abuse!

In Mo, I’ve found a writing soul-sister who understands the darkness sometimes needs to be confronted. If that’s the way your mind works, go with it, Mo advises. Just follow it.

For Mo, the act of imagining the worst protects her against it coming true. She believes that by absorbing the evil she absolves it of power and energy.

Her other writing advice is that old adage: write what you love to read. I know I’ll be reading Mo Hayder for a long time to come.

Signing off with a Bloody Quill.

Josephine Pennicott is a crime writer who has published three dark fantasy novels and won both the Scarlet Stiletto and Kerry Greenwood Prize.

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Books

Nathan Burrage Fivefold

mystical thrills

D

an Brown’s mystical thrillers have been big business at bookstores (despite the lacklustre movie adaptation of The Da Vinci Code). This year, Sydney author Nathan Burrage made his mark in the mystical thriller field with his debut, Fivefold.

BLACK: You have a steady list of short fiction credits over the last decade but you’re only now releasing your debut novel FivEFOLD. Did you make a conscious decision to switch to the longer form?

Nathan Burrage: There’s a certain degree of circularity in having FIVEFOLD published, as it was my first serious attempt to write fiction.

I finished the first draft of the novel back in the middle of 1999. Blissfully unaware of how much further work was required, I promptly submitted it to an agent, had it returned even more promptly, and then sought a manuscript assessment. The critique was professional and did me the courtesy of being honest; I had a good story but I needed to dramatically improve my ability to tell it.

After some moping about, I joined the NSW Writers’ Centre and started writing short stories as a training ground for longer works. I spent the next few years writing short fiction, attending writing courses, most notably Clarion South, and slowly built up the bibliography of 20 odd short story credits that I have today. Along the way, FIVEFOLD underwent a number of redrafts, slowly tightening and improving each time.

BLACK: Fivefold is billed as a ‘mystical thriller’ and its plot hinges on the mysticism of the Kabbalah. What makes the Kabbalah such good source material and what drew you to it?

NB: I remember reading a FAQ about the Kabbalah in 1996 or 1997. While this document assumed knowledge that I didn’t have, it was enough to snare my interest. The imagery and rituals discussed, the underlying cosmology of the universe it described, all of this material fitted perfectly with the themes I wanted to explore in FIVEFOLD. As to why the Kabbalah is great source material, I think the answer lies in how much it has influenced the western occult tradition. And 32

who can resist the Kabbalist’s claim of holding the key to a secret meaning to the Torah, the first five books of the Bible?

BLACK: Do you fear some religious critics could denounce the novel because of its subject matter?

NB: I certainly hope so ... look what it did for Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code!

I’d be very surprised if the novel ever received serious religious criticism. While I’ve amalgamated elements of the Kabbalah into the plot, no particular religious institution or faith is singled out. And when the subject matter of a novel is so clearly fictional, I find it hard to imagine anyone mounting a serious complaint. In some respects it would almost be a compliment if they did, because an objection would imply a degree of plausibility normally reserved for non-fiction.

BLACK: What would you say to critics who imply FIVEFOLD is just another Da Vinci Code clone?

NB: First and foremost – please buy a copy and make an informed opinion.

Second, FIVEFOLD was written long before the Da Vinci Code was released. Even so, I suppose they share a similar pedigree in that both books are set in contemporary times, deal with ancient religious conspiracies, and are both well-paced reads. The comparison ends there, though. FIVEFOLD doesn’t mention Jesus Christ or the Roman Catholic Church, and the use of the Kabbalah really sets it apart from other books in the same genre.

BLACK: Tell us about your next book – is it a sequel to FIVEFOLD? NB: My second novel is set much earlier in history and acts as a loose prequel to FIVEFOLD. The story moves between two different time periods and will be a substantially larger work than the first book. While it can be read independently of FIVEFOLD, it will, however,

BLACK A u s t r a l i a n D a r k C u l t u r e M a g a z i n e

answer some important, unresolved questions from its predecessor.

BLACK: Do you have any other novels or stories in the works?

NB: I have some short stories that will be appearing in local magazines this year. Keep an eye out for Macabre: A Journey Through Australia’s Darkest Fears and Issue 40 of Aurealis Magazine.

BLACK: Authors can be precious at times – what are some of your worst habits as an author?

NB: Impatience is probably King in my literary realm. I become impatient with meandering, slow reads. I become impatient with submissions that take months to be acknowledged, and most of all, I become impatient with my own progress. And if impatience is King, then over-analysis of my work is probably Queen.

BLACK: Who would win in a three-way deathmatch between you, Dan Brown, and Matthew Reilly NB: I reckon my chances are better than fair.

After all, Brown would summon a horde of fanatical but tortured albino monks to his aid.

Reilly, on the other hand, would hand-pick a squad of highly trained, heavily armoured, and emotionally underdeveloped, uber-warriors. While those two forces vie for dominance, I’d be hiding in the shadows behind an enormous wall of rejection slips summoning demons from the sixth layer of Sheol to mop up the survivors.

Yeah, better than fair, I reckon. But I’m buggered if I step outside the pentagram ...

Read a review of FIVEFOLD on page 29.

Enter the FIVEFOLD competition on page 47.

Books

A ustralia ’ s Dark

past

Beware Dr Nicola!

James Doig

D

ark fiction is close to my heart.

As a kid, my dad gave me a battered, dog-eared paperback of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Haunter of the Dark, and it was the first book that really scared the hell out of me. I didn’t fully grasp the significance of those stories then, couldn’t comprehend the power of Lovecraft’s vision, but I was swept away by the sense of awe, of cosmic dread. That was enough for me. I wanted more. It didn’t take me long to realise that best stuff, the really fine ganja that mixes reverence and dread, wonder and sublime beauty was written a long time ago by the likes of Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood.

And a real surprise was that a lot of that early stuff was written by Australians.

Take Guy Boothby for instance, a hugely popular writer of adventure stories and supernatural thrillers at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Boothby was Australian through and through; his grandfather was a judge of the Supreme Court of South Australia, and his father was a member of the South Australian Legislative Assembly. Guy Boothby himself was secretary to the mayor of Adelaide before he took up writing full time.

His first book, On the Wallaby (1894), recounted his outback journeys with his brother, and his first novel, published in the same year, was an adventure yarn called In Strange Company.

The following year, in 1895, he moved permanently to England, eventually settling in Dorset where he dabbled in farming and dog-breeding. In the same year, he published A Bid for

a Fortune, or Dr Nikola’s Vendetta, the first in a series of five novels involving Dr Nikola—a mysterious figure possessed of strange powers, seemingly endless wealth, grotesque servants, and an ever-present jet-black cat named Apollyon.

The best books in the series are Dr Nikola (1896) and Dr Nikola’s Experiment (1899). The former is set in China and Tibet and recounts Nikola’s efforts to steal an ancient book from a Tibetan monastery that he believes holds the secret of immortality. Dr Nikola’s Experiment has Nikola attempting to ‘revolutionise science’ in his efforts to find the secret of eternal life. The novel culminates in fine horrific style with Nikola’s semi-human and sub-human ‘patients’ let loose on the Northumbrian countryside.

Other must-read Boothby novels are Pharos, the Egyptian (1899), about a diabolical mummy that the hero inherits from his father, and The Curse of the Snake (1902) in which the protagonist’s love interest is compromised by his friend who is influenced by a rather nasty snake. Boothby also wrote fine horror stories like ‘Remorseless Vengeance’ and ‘The Death-Child’.

Tragically, his life was cut short at the age of 38 by pneumonia, but Boothby’s reputation has remained pretty solid over the years, and his best books, including the Nikola novels, have been reprinted in recent years by independent publishers.

James Doig—by day, Dr Jekyll of the National Archives in Canberra; by night, Mr Hyde of Australia’s weird history.

P N x

?

What’s Inside the Box?

Film

The

Zombie Diaries goes global

By Gary Kemble

I

n October 2006 Michael Bartlett and Kevin Gates premiered their low budget horror flick The Zombie Diaries at a small multiplex at Letchworth, north of London.

Not quite two years later, the British filmmaker’s vision of the undead uprising has gone global.

“I am very excited at the thought of seeing the movie in Japan, Korea, etc,” he said.

“The German DVD is a metal case two-disc special. It’s crazy! This is our little movie that Kevin and I made for next to nothing a few years ago and suddenly it is selling all over the world.

“We recently saw the Chinese bootleg. You know you have done well when some Chinese guy tries to flog you a copy of your own movie in a pub.”

The Zombie Diaries chronicles the zombie apocalypse via three video diaries: a film crew making a documentary about bird flu; a trio of scavengers picking over the ruins of society in the months after the outbreak; and a band of survivors trying to zombie-proof their farm house.

In the ultimate case of ‘great minds think alike’, George A Romero used a similar approach in his 2007 film Diary of the Dead.

After climbing to #4 on the Virgin Megastore DVD chart in the UK, The Zombie Diaries was picked up by the Weinsteins and is slated for an August release in the US, following hot on the heels of Romero’s Diary.

Bartlett said the experience of making a film with next to no money (chronicled in depth on makingthefilm.com) has opened doors for he and Gates.

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“I was speaking to a few exec producers recently at a law firm in London, and one guy literally jumped over a table to shake my hand when he heard the investment-return ratio for Zombie Diaries,” he said.

“I think it’s not just the film, though—it’s also Kevin and I as people.

There a lot of people in the industry who are filled to the brim with BS. “Kev and I are very matter-of-fact —we’re not ‘blaggers’—we met plenty in Cannes!—and people like that about us.

“We’re straight talking and are very blunt and honest about what we want to do next and who we want to work with.”

No karaoke movies The two are now working on their next project, although Bartlett is keeping his cards close to his chest.

“All I will say is that —like Zombie Diaries—this film is a sophisticated

horror film that doesn’t dance to the same old tunes,” he said.

“I think the industry has too many directors making ‘homage’ movies without adding anything new, and our film will definitely add something new I can promise you.

“There is a saying I heard recently—homage without innovation isn’t homage—it’s karaoke. And Kev and I aren’t looking to make karaoke movies.”

Bartlett said this time around, they will have enough money to employ a decent-sized crew.

“I am going to produce the film; Kevin will write it; we’ll co-direct again,” he said.

“I’ve become so well-versed in all the pitfalls of film production that I will make sure the next film runs like a well-oiled machine.”

Bartlett is also planning on distilling his experience into a guide book for guerilla filmmakers – about 100 to 150 pages long.

“People don’t want to wade through crap—they want the answers immediately and my book will provide that,” he said.

Facing the darkness One of the ideas explored in The Zombie Diaries is that, if there was a zombie uprising, maybe the undead legion wouldn’t be the worst thing you had to deal with.

Bartlett said horror films play an important role in getting people to consider society’s dark side.

“Irreversible, for example, is a great horror film about the act of rape and how it destroys a person,” he said.

“When the film ended and the subtitle appears: ‘Time Destroys Everything’. It left me stunned and I needed a few minutes to absortb and digest what I had seen.

“As I’ve said in many interviews, Zombie Diaries is more about a study I read on male fantasies of rape than it is about zombies.

“Sometimes a film can shock you in the same sort of way that Bill Murray’s character is shocked out of his general apathy in the film Broken Flowers. That is a great thing.”

Despite the success of The Zombie Diaries, Bartlett sees dark times ahead for the undead.

“I think Day of the Dead and 28 Weeks Later temporarily killed the genre,” he said.

“I hope I am wrong and that World War Z can bring some respect back to the zombie film, but while people are out making music video-style trash like the two aforementioned films, credibility is just going to continue sliding and audiences are going to stop watching.” n

“Umm ... was I supposed to shoot him in the head or heart? Hold still, buddy, I only have one bulllet!”

WHat’s Inside the Box? Open one for yourself at

www.brimstonepress.com.au

C u r r e n t A ffa i r s

Shane Jiraiya Cummings

Black Flag

CENSORSHIP SMOKESCREEN

C

hina is not the only country with a heavy hand when it comes to the arts. Australia has a long and sordid history of censorship, and although we have come a long way in the last fifty years, conservatives reach for the censorship scalpel every few years when the public become aware of borderline cases such as the recent Bill Henson exhibition of adolescent photographs. A slightly different but equally hysterical censorship argument hit headlines in Australia last month: should government funding be withheld from artistic performances (films, plays, etc.) that depict smoking?

The Australian Medical Association’s (AMA) Victorian president Dr Doug Travis, himself a smoker of many years, instigated this most recent outcry with the aim of preventing more people from being influenced into taking up smoking (and the health problems the habit brings).

of alcohol or illicit drugs – yet where are the calls to cut funding to these productions? One of Heath Ledger’s final performances was in Candy, an Aussie movie about drug use. If we extrapolate the AMA’s logic, this film (and others like it) may never have been funded. And forget about seeing half of the productions at your local theatre!

Let’s call the AMA’s proposal what it really is: a straw man argument.

Sounds like a fair and reasonable argument —or is it?

With the persuasiveness of the AMA as a lobby group, a call like this could well be heeded by governments, and given the sad state of arts funding in Australia, this would be a travesty. A 2005 report from the Canada Council on public arts funding found Australia contributed just 0.14% of GDP to the arts, well below other western countries.

The ramifications of this call could be significant. It’s not just performance artists at threat. Potentially, films and books could also come under the censor’s guillotine. Many creators rely on government grants to support their careers (for example, the average novelist in Australia earns less than $11,000 year), so this call offers them a devil’s deal: compromise their artistic integrity or lose a significant portion of their income.

Many critically-acclaimed plays, films, and novels depict the often tragic consequences

With smoking such a devastating contributor to Australia’s health system, why not simply ban it? Of course, we all know that smoking is a huge revenue raiser for the government, so instead of banning it like illicit (and potentially less harmful) drugs such as cannabis, people like Dr Travis are looking to target the already fragile arts industry.

The arts depict real life situations, and smoking is one of them. Rather than concentrating on suppressing artistic expression, wouldn’t it be better to remove smoking from the fabric of our society? With cigarettes out of the picture, the arts will no longer have cause to depict their use—except as an antiquated curiosity.

Remove artists and creators—our culture builders—from Australian society and we all suffer. Remove smoking and we will all be healthier. Now, given the choice, what do you think should happen?

Shane Jiraiya Cummings is an award-winning editor, critic, and journalist. He writes dark fiction, too!

Black Mail You’ve read what our columnists have had to say. Now it’s your turn!

Agree or disagree with something in BLACK? Drop us a Black Mail and tell us all about it. We may even publish your Black Mail!

Tell us what’s on your mind at:

blackmail@blackmag.com.au

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C u lt u r e

+

Medicina

Dr Carissa Borlase

Macabre

Penile Parasites : A

cautionary tale of where you pee

W

ith diseases that make you vomit your own faeces, parasites that burrow their way out of your flesh like an alien, or gruesome genetic malformations, who needs imaginary horrors?

Watchers of House, or its soapier cousin Grey’s Anatomy, might have heard the urban legend of the penis fish, which is supposedly attracted by urine in the water and will swim up the stream of urine to lodge in a man’s penis. Here it indulges in a vampiric feeding frenzy, gouging the tender flesh to feed on the victim’s blood. It is also reputed to enter through the anus or vagina. For years, this was dismissed as an Amazonian legend until an actual case was scientifically documented.

The candiru (Vandellia cirrhosa) is a parasitic, freshwater catfish found only in the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers that is also known by the self-explanatory nicknames of the willy fish, the Brazilian vampire fish, and the toothpick fish. More feared than the piranha; it is thin, eel-shaped, and

translucent, and can grow up to 15cm long.

Contrary to popular belief, it is not attracted to ammonia or urine; although, it’s possibly attracted to the flow of water through the gills of its prey. When it finds its prey, it forces itself in through the gills, and using the razorsharp spines around its head, wedges itself inside the luckless victim. Its front teeth are perfectly designed to rasp away the flesh, and once accomplished, the candiru leisurely feeds upon its victim’s blood.

On October 24 1997, Silvio Barbosa, a 23 year old native of Itacoatiara, Brazil, was swimming in the Amazon River when he needed to pee. When he stood, thigh high in the water, and began urinating, a candiru leaped up the stream of urine and penetrated his penis. He grabbed at the fish, but it was too slippery and disappeared inside. He sought medical attention, but his story was greeted with disbelief; however, 4 days after the attack, with the parasite blocking his urethra, he developed fever, intense pain, swollen testicles, and extreme abdominal swelling from urinary retention.

The genitourinary surgeon, Mr Samad, who cared for the young victim, used an endoscope (a thin, flexible tube containing a camera) to look inside the penis to ascertain the truth. A 134mm long, 11.4mm wide fish was found dead inside his penis. The vampiric fish had become stuck at the urethral sphincter, where it had turned sideways and chewed through the tissue that forms the root of the penis (the corpus spongiosum) creating a hole through to his testicles. Fortunately for the patient, the vicious spines of the candiru had become relaxed by the early stages of decay, and it was able to be removed in one piece with minimal trauma. Silvio Barbosa suffered no long-term physical problems from his encounter with this legendary parasite, but can the same be said of the psychological trauma?

Carissa Borlase is a medical doctor with a healthy sense of black humour. She currently resides in Helsinki, Finland.

“Hmm ... something fishy going on down there?”

Don’t have time for long, boring novels?

Book of Shadows is an anthology of over 40 ultra short psychological and supernatural stories from some of the best dark fiction authors in the world.

Buy it now from Brimstone Press:

www.brimstonepress.com.au

Film

Behind The Apocalypse

By Chrissy Iley

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M. Night Shyamalan

M. Night Shyamalan’s movies evoke the fear of what you don’t see. Hidden forces etch their way into your psyche. Then there’s usually the twist, the shock, the reveal ...

39

I

t’s dark, as you’d expect from a man called Night. You wonder what is it about him that wants to scare people so much. I’ve read that he is mysterious, taciturn. We’ve seen him making Hithcockian cameo appearances in his own movies, which do nothing to reveal the character of the man. In fact, the opposite, they make him more mysterious, more cult. You feel he likes the ambiguity to remain unknown and unrevealed. Yet at the same time, he is one of the few directors whose name alone will open a movie. He is the star.

His first film was Praying With Anger. He wrote, directed, and starred in it. Self-financed when he was 21, it is about an American Indian going to India to find himself. Next was Wide Awake, about a young boy who is on a quest to be sure of God’s existence after the death of his grandfather. His third film was The Sixth Sense, which took over $700 million at the box office. Then came Unbreakable, Signs, and The Village. All box office giants, albeit with diminishing returns. The fairy tale Lady In The Water followed, which he talks about lovingly, even though it was a box office midget.

Night is a man worth millions yet commercial success is not the most important thing to him.

He wrote Stuart Little, one of the cutest movies ever, and The Happening is one of the most chill-

ing. He is not in the least bit scary, yet he wants to scare people. He needs to. But why?

He laughs a schoolboy laugh as if he’s been caught out by this observation. “I think it’s just a vocabulary that’s always appealed to me from when I was a kid. I can remember from eight or nine always leaning towards those things.

I never thought, ‘give me more drama, more romance, or more action’. I don’t even know how to do action.”

No, you just want pure terror. “I think suspense was always something I was drawn to. The thing we don’t see.”

But in this movie, we see it as well. “It’s a balance of the visceralness and yet the villain is unseen. You are constantly unsure if it is in the room or not, so you have a lot of fear from not seeing as well. By the end of the movie, you’re scared of everything.”

You wonder if he lives in a heightened reality where he himself is scared every moment. He talks as his mind is whirring unstoppably. “It’s not so much that I have always been scared. I have always searched, as you can see from the posters around us here. Praying was overtly spiritual. Wide Awake and Stuart Little were broader, the emotion on the sleeve, nothing suspenseful. And then I found I could tell a different sort of story ...”

How did you get the idea of a killer environmental force? “I was driving along on the Pennsyl-

Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel look for the twist in M. Night Shyamalan’s latest flick The Happening.

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BLACK A u s t r a l i a n D a r k C u l t u r e M a g a z i n e

vania Turnpike and it was lined by trees, just hanging over and bending. Just walls of trees and I thought we put this vile little vein of pollution right in the middle of a forest, we put it like a scar, and I thought if they ever turned on us, we’d be outnumbered.”

Universal fears are inspired from the minutiae of his life. “People find comfort in the things they know. Stephen King writes about Maine. So for me, it’s natural to build a body of work spinning around Pennsylvania. It’s about what you know and what you imagine. I don’t know where Night Of The Living Dead was set, but Pennsylvania would have been perfect. The Happening is set here because it helps the paranoia.”

In his films, Night likes to use unknowns. In his next movie, which is to be a Buddhist and Hindu influenced martial arts epic, he’ll use entirely unknowns. “I think it helps you let go of it. I try to not put too many stars in movies.

If a studio ever said, ‘we have Brad Pitt in this movie or we won’t make it’, I’d be ‘thanks, it’s been great’. I may choose Brad Pitt, but not for those reasons.”

Did you always get your own way as a child?

“Yes, I got whatever I wanted.”

The smile on his face is sweet and infectious. For this movie, he got Mark Wahlberg. “I had a strong urge to work with Mark. I wrote the character as a sweet guy who was good with kids, emotional and romantic. Not the tough guy most people

know him as. It’s a rare thing to be accessible and innocent, and he can do that. That’s how his family sees him, I’m sure. And for me, it makes things more authentic. Mark has a lightness and buoyancy, and the subject matter is really dark, so it balances the movie.”

Death was never more omnipresent than in The Happening. “If you thought you weren’t going to live until the next minute, the very next 60 seconds, and you had confirmation that it was all over, what would you say and who would you say it to?”

Recently Mark was asked what did he think of Night, and he said, “He’s sick.” Night greets this with guffaws of laughter. “That was a huge compliment for me. I mean, this is an extreme movie and that’s what he said after he saw it.”

That’s the question that he wants us all to ask.

And when I ask it back to him he says, “Immediately, I would want to console my children.

I would tell my daughter how beautiful it was when I heard her sing at the school recital.”

It’s still a puzzle to me that he’s created some of the most haunting, horrible scenes on film.

People jumping off buildings to their death. Was he inspired from 9/11 where we saw people launching themselves from the towers, floating as if in slow motion to their deaths? “No, not at all. What’s scary in this is the manner in which they are jumping: Methodically, without any movement to brace themselves and protect themselves. They are not jumping off to escape like they’re trying to get away from the building.

They are just jumping. This is a different type of scare. One is a shock scare and the other is scary because the idea is horrific.”

Does he have a fear he hasn’t exorcised in his movies? “I hate flying.” Maybe that’s why his movies are all set in Pennsylvania? “Could be.”

Nearly all his movies have a fascination with death. Does he think of it as the ultimate form of loss? “I think of it as the ultimate unknown, and that’s what causes us fear. We don’t know what happens when we die. There’s no factor that we can understand.”

Fear of flying is about fear of losing control?

“Probably, but that is a very bad thing to fear because your ultimate peace comes from flexibility; comes from being able to move on.”

Right now, do you feel you are a peaceful person? “I haven’t been in general, but right now I am pretty peaceful. The Happening has been almost idyllic. Fox seem to feel in their heart that they know what it is. It has been the easiest movie that I’ve ever made from the writing, the shooting to the editing. So yes, it’s helped me find peace.”

Typical Night. The scariest movie he’s ever made makes him feel most at one. n

Film

Dark Flix

Mark Smith-Briggs

Delayed Reaction

F

or too long, Australian horror fans have been at the mercy of US box office figures, with overseas reactions dictating what we see on our cinema screens. If a film underperforms in America, it is written off for Australian audiences, and pulled from international release or pushed back for months at a time. Often, by the time a film hits our big screens, it has already been released on DVD in the States and had every aspect of its plot, characters, and ‘shock’ ending splashed across the web. We deserve the same opportunities as overseas viewers and shouldn’t be regarded as just a last shop option to squeeze a few extra bucks out of a film.

Studios will argue that it is the cost of prints that cause such a delay. Film reels are often

shown in America before being packed up and sent here to be used on domestic screens. But with film delays often spanning six to 12 months, if they are shown at all, the argument wears a little thin.

One of the most blatant examples of the US dictating our schedule came last year with the movie Grindhouse. A gritty 1970s style doublefeature, complete with mock trailers and grainy vision, this much-hyped collaboration between Quinton Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez failed in its US opening weekend taking just US$11.6 million. After months of promising a unique moviegoing experience of ‘two movies for the price of one’ the film was pulled from release and split into two separate films with Dimension heads citing audiences weren’t ready for such a concept. Did we get a chance to prove them wrong?

No! Australia eventually got a cinematic release of Tarantino’s Death Proof in an extended two-

hour director’s cut, but Rodriguez’s Planet Terror (a superior film in my opinion) was shelved for a straight-to-DVD release. The changes also meant Australia never got to see the original cuts of the film or the trailers package.

Sadly, this kind of thinking is the norm. This year, we’ve had to wait months for films such as The Mist, Halloween, The Eye, Shutter, The Ruins (out Aug 7), and Funny Games (September).

Others such as George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead, Neil Marshall’s Doomsday, and a US remake of One Missed Call have by-passed us altogether, forcing us to wait for belated DVD releases.

Horror enthusiasts can either fall behind or find other means to check out the latest fright flicks.

I was able to buy US DVD copies of See No Evil and James Wan’s (Saw trilogy) Dead Silence more than a year before they were released here. I had a UK copy of Neil Marshall’s The Descent for more than two years.

Studios complain that piracy and international sales impact on our domestic figures, so how about giving us more reasonable release dates to work with? Aussies want to watch the latest horror films on the big screen, but we are not going to wait forever.

Mark Smith-Briggs is a Melbourne based journalist with a background in screenwriting and cinema studies.

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C u lt u r e Haunted Australia

Brisbane’s dead heart, still beating

By Gary Kemble

T

orchlight plays over tombstones, distant city lights throw overhanging trees into stark relief. A lithe figure draped in black appears from the murky gloom: it’s our guide, Lily, welcoming us to Toowong Cemetery, a place she has called home for more years than she cares to divulge.

Officially opened in 1875, the cemetery now occupies some 257 acres, nestled amongst the foothills of Mt Coot-tha.

Brisbane’s necropolis. Home to 120,000 souls.

Some are more lively than others, and if you believe the stories, home to a vampire and the Angel of Death himself.

Lily summons her faithful Gatekeeper, and the tour begins.

The Black Prince Champion boxer Peter Jackson is one of the many famous Queenslanders buried at Toowong, and despite resting beneath his elaborate memorial for over a century, he’s still itching to don the gloves once more.

After immigrating to Australia from the West Indies when he was 16, Jackson took up boxing, and in 1886 ‘The Black Prince’ as he was known, became the Australian Heavyweight Champion.

Jackson won many bouts in England and the US and could have become World Champion except reigning champion John L Sullivan refused to fight the Queenslander—because of the colour of his skin.

Legend has it that anyone brave enough to visit Jackson’s monument at the stroke of midnight by themselves will hear a bell ring—just before the fighter climbs from the grave for one last round.

Rare right hands Tour guide Lily

Photo credit: Amelia & Gary Kemble

42

The Gatekeeper sets his lantern down beside one of the many grave angels that pepper the cemetery grounds.

Lily tells us that in black magic, the angel’s hand can be used to represent the ‘Hand of Glory’—the right hand of an executed criminal—which can be used by sorcerers to conjure demons or even the Devil himself.

Restless McGregor The angels are also reported to watch visitors and flap their wings, but they are not the only statues with a restless nature.

The carving of Edward McGregor—a patron of the arts and proprietor of the Lyceum Theatre—is also known to be peripatetic.

Since McGregor’s death in 1939, many stories have been told of the statue moving of its own accord, the eyes blinking, the coat moving in the breeze.

Former groundsmen say they have come across the statue walking the grounds at dusk; it has been known to venture as far afield as the nearby botanical gardens.

And as we stand there in the darkness, torches trained on the statue, McGregor does indeed appear to sway back and forth. But maybe this is just a trick of the light?

All uphill from here As if wandering statues and black magic aren’t enough, Toowong Cemetery is also home to one of the four ‘magnetic hills’ in southern Queensland.

Legend has it that if you park your car on a certain section of Boundary Road, outside a white mausoleum, switch off your car and slip the gearstick into neutral, the car will roll uphill. Murdered twin sisters, their deaths unavenged, are reaching from the afterlife and pulling drivers towards their graves.

In The Ghosts of Toowong Cemetery, Brisbane ghost hunter and tour founder Jack Sim acknowledges that he could find no documented evidence of the double murder and that sceptics attribute the effect to an optical illusion.

The angels may have been purchased by the bereaved as a sign of Christian faith, but darker forces have coerced their power.

“Balls placed at the top of the ‘optical illusion’ roll down to the bottom, though it depends on the weight, the type of ball, and the amount of force applied to it,” he says.

Lily points out that this particular angel, like many at Toowong, is missing its right hand.

Not through senseless vandalism but rather deliberate removal.

“The truth in regard to Toowong Cemetery’s Spook Hill is that a section of road on the edge of the graveyard does indeed pull cars up it.”

Witches have been known to practise their dark arts in the cemetery grounds, especially on Christmas Eve, Halloween, New Years Eve, and Easter. Graves have been smeared with red and black candle wax, and even blood.

The missing hands are a further sign of sinister motives.

Blood money

BLACK A u s t r a l i a n D a r k C u l t u r e M a g a z i n e

One of the more ornate and well cared for tombs in the cemetery belongs to the Mayne family.

In the early 1840s, Patrick Mayne worked as a slaughterman in Brisbane. One night, while drinking in a local pub, he overheard a drunken man tell his friends he was carrying a large sum of money.

The next day the man, Robert Cox, was found butchered, body parts spread from the gutter (finger), to the street (disembowelled torso), to a nearby hotel (head).

William Fyfe was arrested, convicted of murder, and hanged. He protested his innocence until the very end.

A year later, Patrick Mayne had bought a butcher shop in Queen Street, Brisbane’s main thoroughfare, and went on to build a real estate empire.

In 1865, on his deathbed, Mayne allegedly confessed to Cox’s murder.

There are vents in the bottom of the Mayne family crypt, designed to allow water and the gases that form during decomposition to escape.

gers were called to exhume a body.

They were initially perplexed at the softness of the soil, which appeared to have been recently disturbed. Their unease grew when they saw the coffin nails had been driven out—from the inside.

Upon removing the lid, they were faced with a woman inside who had not yet decomposed—even though she had been buried many years.

One of the gravediggers reached in to touch her face. Her head rolled to one side and she smiled, revealing two rows of shark-like teeth.

The gravediggers dumped the coffin back in the hole, quickly refilled the grave, and ran.

Since then a woman dressed in black has been seen on a number of occasions, her smile revealing rows of razor-sharp teeth.

Death gazes down

However, at various times, a thick, red liquid has been seen flowing out of the vents and down into the gutter on 12th Avenue.

At Lily’s direction, at the intersection of 12th and 13th avenues the group forms a circle, and we all join hands.

While some say the water is stained by rusting metalwork, others believe it represents the blood on the hands of the Mayne family.

We’re going to attempt to summon the Angel of Death.

Shark-toothed grin In the dead heart of Toowong Cemetery, ancient gnarled trees fight for space amongst decaying tombstones and rusting wroughtiron.

Lily tells us that while homeless people often seek refuge in the cemetery grounds, they avoid ‘the grove’ on 12th Avenue—spooked by tales of dark shapes moving between the graves, or of people waking to find something clawing at their face.

Apparently, Toowong Cemetery has the dubious honour of being one of only two cemeteries in the world where a vampire is known to dwell. The other is Highgate Cemetery, London.

The story goes that many years ago, gravedig-

The dark-cloaked figure was first sighted in the cemetery during the Great Depression by children scavenging for food.

We lower our heads, and Lily recites the form of words used to call the Angel. On this particular occasion, the Angel decides to keep his own counsel.

“Maybe for the best,” Lily says.

Since the Toowong Cemetery ghost tours began in 1998, the apparition has been sighted 11 times, most recently late last year.

“It usually tends to appear when Mr Sim is doing the tour, it’s unusually drawn to him for some reason,” Lily says.

“I believe one evening, they had formed the circle, and called for the Angel—and it appeared right in the middle of the circle.

and only half of the group saw it and then it was gone. Quite terrifying.”

And while Lily has not seen the Angel herself, after the tour she tells me that over the years she has experienced things she cannot explain.

“The scariest thing that has happened to me was during a recent tour; myself and two clients had just walked to the end of the ‘valley of death’, and we were waiting for the rest of the group to join us when a very loud crash came from 12th Avenue just by the grove,” she said.

“It sounded like a tree had fallen over. I turned to look and saw a number of black shapes, possibly four or five, move quickly into the grove.

“The clients hearing the noise shone their torches up the avenue, but in the torch light nothing seemed to be out of place.

“Feeling a little frightened of the unknown, I asked my gatekeeper to inspect the grove and the other side of 12th Avenue while I continued on with my next story, but he could see no trace of the black figures or even the tree that the clients and I had heard fall.”

She says there are several possible explanations for the strange happenings at Toowong Cemetery.

“That ghosts are shadows of people that have been imprinted on a site, that they are a build-up of emotional energy in one place; there are even suggestions that some ghosts you come across were never human to begin with,” she says.

“Toowong Cemetery seems to have at least one of each of these types of spirits, which makes it such a fascinating place to spend time in.”

As the tour comes to a close, so do the gates behind me. I turn to bid Lily and her Gatekeeper farewell and catch a final glimpse of them as they slip back into the darkness. n

“It only appeared for about a second

Restless McGregor ... resting.

The ‘Black Prince’ of Toowong, ready to rumble with the living.

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Comics

4B

Colour lack

Getting the Act Together David Carroll

K

athy Baker walks up to her husband, asleep in bed. He wakes, groggily, and Kathy shoots him in the face.

Such is the beginning of Ma. B, a very stylish comic that first appeared in a limited edition preview in 2006. Kathy is soon on the run from both the cops and her husband’s psychopathic buddies, trying to keep her boys safe. But that shocking event was also the beginning of something else: the issue was published by a newcomer to the scene, and since then, Local Act Comics has flourished, producing challenging and entertaining work in a great variety of forms.

The company was created by Melbourne-based artist David Cunning. Crime, dark science fiction, horror, action, and gothic whimsy have all appeared under the LAC imprint, spread over almost 30 different titles. This prodigious output in just two years didn’t arrive entirely out of nowhere. People familiar with the fasci-

Music

nating, and sometimes ephemeral, local comic scene will recognise some older titles that have been given safe haven. For example, there is Troy Kealley’s Somewhere Weird horror anthology series that grew out of the huge and lovely Something Wicked in 2005. There is also Dicks from Thomas Bonin, a series about two private eyes facing extreme weirdness.

Kealley is back with the prolific Tonia Walden in Crouching Hamster, Hidden Squirrel, whilst Caanan Graal provides the charming Gypsy and the Astronaut and The Middle Ages.

As someone familiar with these names, I’m glad they’ve had this opportunity, and hopefully, they’ll become better known in the process. But there are plenty of newcomers as well, making their (often bloody) mark.

Graeme McDonald is the writer of Ma. B, and responsible for a lot of the predominantly ambitious material in LAC’s line-up. His other works include After Life, a single issue look at a dying Earth, and Vigil, an on-going series that skips between the Vietnam War and modern

e

Talie Helene

T

Like Australian artists in other mediums, many musicians find greater success in Europe or the US, than they do locally. Unfortunately, awareness of underground bands only breaks through into mainstream media when a van runs off the road—and suddenly The Red Shore become a household name. Distance and the expense of touring isolate each state music scene. Sure there’s MySpace … clogged with bedroom projects! But here you’ll discover 44

Heronimous Wang is another writer to look for, if harder to explain. He has produced a series of freaky gothic tales like Minerva & Me (which might be described as ‘Alice Down the Intestinal Tract’, or not) and Dial-A-Virgin (which covers the marginally more familiar territory of vampire dating). My favourite is Prometheus Pan, about a suicide that goes wrong—and keeps getting wrong-er.

Heronimous always works with an artist called Aska who provides suitably morbid illustrations. I also really like the work of Brian Laframboise on Sam Costello’s series of horror vignettes, Split Lip, and Gareth Colliton’s work on After Life. Dave Cunning, the publisher, provides some nice clean work on Ma. B and James Andre’s demonic Down Under. But no mention of art would be complete without Chicky Edward’s insane amount of detail on The Cyst—a tale about dragging an Australian comic out of the depths of hell.

It’s a tough gig, but Local Act seems to have it covered.

David Carroll is a Sydney based writer, collector, and committee member of the AHWA.

Waltzing Macabre

angelspit he Australian independent music scene—it’s an untrammelled sonic night! It’s not surprising that Australian music has a dark side—our bestknown folk song and ‘unofficial national anthem’ is, after all, a crime story—and a ghost story. When raised on Banjo Patterson’s blithely morbid lyrics, a nation’s taste for misadventure moves naturally to Nick Cave and his murder ballads.

policing, whilst a masked vigilante looks on from the shadows. These works represent an author with a sense of style and a deft touch for nasty detail, and I will be fascinated to see how he resolves his epic stories. McDonald also created Millie Piddley Pup, a kids’ comic about a crime-fighting dog—demonstrating his range.

the finest exponents of genres that slip under the radar on Triple J: ebm, psytrance, emo, screamo, gothabilly, horrorcore, grindcore, heathen metal, burlesque, sludge—as well as scrying those dark stars who marry the macabre with pop sensibilities. Maybe we’ll unearth the next Marilyn Manson? You never know …

Angelspit, a duo hailing from Sydney, are named after a Sonic Youth song and self-styled as ‘a riot grrl with a vocoder and a cyberpunk with a distortion pedal.’ Visually, the pair play with baroque and medical fetishism, smashing through the looking glass. Sound confusing?

Fortunately Chief Medical Synthologist Zoog is on duty to diagnose the relevant infectious grooves. “We write pop songs, then we beat them with a stick until they are demented and psychotically dangerous. Then we starve them for a few days, sharpen their teeth, and set them loose in a room full of people.”

BLACK A u s t r a l i a n D a r k C u l t u r e M a g a z i n e

A prime example of local talent finding fortune overseas, Angelspit have taken their stompy boots on the road. “We did twelve East Coast USA gigs and 24 gigs in Europe. It rocked! A highlight was playing in an 1100-year-old castle in Poland with Frontline Assembly, Mortis, and about 5,000 insane European Goths. Lowlight was packing up after a gig at 2am in -20 degrees in upstate New York … I’m not kidding; it was minus 20!”

Angelspit’s second full-length album, Blood Death Ivory, has just been unleashed on the world, both in regular pressing and special Bloodpack (with bonus goodies). Influences are outside the box. “… from R’n’B, metal, punk, 80s synth pop, and European techno, Blood Death Ivory is an experiment in ‘Ballistic Electro Punk’. It’s about getting away from the formula of goth and industrial and getting back to the raw idea of punk music done with synthesizers. There are big guitars in the album, and we’ve tried to make the synth match their fatness.”

Talie Helene is a freelance music journalist, a musician, a staff writer for Zero Tolerance Magazine, and news editor for the AHWA.

W in

C ool

S tuff !

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Books: Hal Spacejock series

To celebrate the release of Hal Spacejock 4: No Free Lunch, Simon Haynes is giving away the first novel in his comical sci-fi series online at www.spacejock.com.au

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Win a set of Simon Haynes’ Hal Spacejock novels.

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Light Yagami is a brilliant university student who resents the crime and corruption in the world. His life undergoes a drastic change when he discovers a mysterious notebook, known as the “Death Note”, lying on the ground. The Death Note’s instructions claim that, if a hu-

46

DVDS: Batman Gotham Knight Superman Doomsday

BLACK A u s t r a l i a n D a r k C u l t u r e M a g a z i n e

DVDS: death note 1 & 2 Death Note Anime Series 1 man’s name is written within it, that person will die. Light is initially skeptical of the Death Note’s authenticity, believing it is just a prank.

However, after experimenting with it and killing two criminals, Light is forced to admit that the Death Note is real.

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Not far outside the Yorkshire town of Skipton, a group of frieds stumble across a ruined cathedral and a journey into myth and legend begins.

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Win a copy of Nathan Burrage’s mystical thriller Fivefold!

To enter: Go to www.blackmag.com.au and fill in the form under the Prize Pool link.

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47

Books

Robert Hood

Photo credit: Cat Sparks

Aussie horror’s Wicked Godfather

R

obert Hood is one of the enduring legends of Australian horror fiction. He started his writing career in the crime genre, and has since become an established horror and science fiction writer. Along the way, he has edited several anthologies, cowritten a children’s series (Creepers), a young adult series (Shades), several short story collections, and the novel Backstreets. He is also an award-winning critic with a tender place in his dark heart for daikaiju (giant monsters like Godzilla), ghosts, and zombies.

BLACK: You have written some pretty dark and unsettling short stories (including one that caused a magazine to be banned in Queensland!). Why horror?

Robert Hood: I am drawn to the iconography of horror—and by that I mean the monsters and dark supernatural side of the genre, so that even my crime writing has a suggestion of the dark fantastic lurking behind it. Why? Lots of reasons could be put forward: flexibility, the fact that it allows you to push boundaries, to question the nature of things. But also the imagery of horror offers very powerful metaphors with which to explore mortality, change, 48

the uncertain and often threatening nature of the world. Fear of the dark and the unknown is a primal, universal emotion and one that we haven’t lost despite electric lights and the understanding and control that is given to us by scientific and technological advancement. At its best, horror is the literature of the Outsider, a threat to complacency. If it seems ‘sick’, it is because it can be threatening and unsettling, and can make us question what normality is and what we would do if we lost it (which of course does happen periodically).

Horror is a much more thoughtful and encompassing genre than the naysayers allow.

BLACK A u s t r a l i a n D a r k C u l t u r e M a g a z i n e

BLACK: What has been your most unusual encounter with a fan?

RH: A kid at a large school event once asked if I’d sign one of my books (I was there as co-author of the Creepers children’s horror series). I said “Sure!” and he handed me a book by Christopher Pike [a bestselling US author of, among other things, a large number of kid’s books that take the same comic-horror approach as my series]. I said, “I’m not Christopher Pike. This isn’t one of my books.”

He considered this then shrugged and said, “That doesn’t matter. You can sign it anyway!”

I guess authors are interchangeable.

OK. You can let characters explode and make heads fly, crawl around in the digestive tract of giant maggots, let the zombies loose to do their worst, whatever, as long as you are enjoying the process.

Adult writing (and older YA) has to be more self-conscious and tied to reality (albeit a fantastical reality); and of course any amount of emotional nakedness is allowable. It’s where the real business takes place. Adult fiction is what I come home to after the holiday.

BLACK: Your debut novel Backstreets was a frank and personal exploration of grief and a very powerful story. Will you write a book in a similar vein again?

RH: That was a hard one, emotionally. I was very disciplined though; I went into the darkest places, but I made sure, for all that it came from personal experience, that it wasn’t an autobiography. The young adult setting helped there, keeping me in the mind of a 17 year old, not a 50 year old. That’s where its power comes from; dark emotional truth, but distanced so that readers are forced to both experience the truth of the emotion and yet evaluate it.

Backstreets is a good example of the slippery nature of YA as a category. To me, it was a novel with a young protagonist —which was the best way of telling the story I wanted to tell.

But would I do something similar again? I try for emotional truth all the time, but the circumstances are generally less personal. I’m in all my stories in one way or another, emotionally. But the emotion behind that book was very deep and very dark, arising from a particularly horrendous circumstance. I don’t want to have to go through anything like that again for my art!

BLACK: Having written adult fiction, young adult fiction (Shades), and children’s fiction (Creepers), how do you convey horror differently to the three groups of readers?

RH: Young adult fiction blends into adult in my mind – YA is a category I find rather artificial, though there is an exploratory innocence in the best of them that makes writing them pleasurable – a sort of “what does it all mean?” quality that can get bogged down in metaphysics in adult literature.

Children’s books are quite different, however.

There’s a lot of freedom writing for younger children as they don’t have the inhibitions of adults, and are not overly worried by unexplained weirdness. They accept it for what it is and revel in it—especially if it’s gross. It’s a kind of exploration of taboos at a very innocent level. Of course, the confrontational nature of horror has to be toned down for kids.

They’re generally not ready for naked reality at its worst. It has to be couched in ‘fun’ terms. The Creepers books got fairly gross and full-on, but they were funny, so that made it

the publisher concerned had a genuine will for it to do so and were astute in what they published.

BLACK: Giant monsters and the undead—what fuelled your passion for these critters?

RH: God[zilla] only knows! The sheer visual impact of both of them must have something to do with it. I have talked often and at length about the many virtues and thematic strengths of both subgenres—but when it comes down to it, I simply love them both, no matter how much sub-standard work appears within their respective orbits. I can take bad stuff—and sometimes enjoy it—for the sheer pleasure of the good stuff when it arrives. Recent films like the Korean monster film The Host and the US Cloverfield justify any number of substandard direct-to-video giant snake movies (hey, don’t get me wrong! I like low-budget giant snake movies, too). For me, as well, the sheer imaginative excess of the giant monster films—their utter flaunting of physical laws and physiological credibility—is a great attraction. With zombies it’s probably the power and versatility of the central metaphors and how this reflects on contemporary society and our attitudes to mortality. Or maybe the blood and guts …

BLACK: What are you working on now?

RH: I’m finishing a supernatural horror novel called Dead Matter. At the same time, I’m working up a proposal for a YA gothic supernatural romance. A short story collection with the title Creeping in Reptile Flesh is overdue because the title story keeps getting longer (15,000 words and counting). I’m also writing a non-fiction book on giant monster films – and I’d love to do another on ghosts.

BLACK: You were heavily involved in advising Lothian Books on their ‘Dark Suspense’ line of horror novels (published in 2006). Tell us more!

RH: When Lothian decided they wanted to start a horror “line”, they were honest enough to recognise that their knowledge of the genre was limited – which is why senior editor Teresa Pitt contacted me. I was happy with the books that were eventually chosen, even though I could only influence the decision to a degree—and those books seem to me to have done reasonably well, even though a string of company takeovers and changed agendas killed the idea of the ‘Dark Suspense’ line as an ongoing thing.

Four decent Australian horror books that represented different aspects of the genre were given their chance in the world – and they have served to raise the profile of horror in Australian publishing, albeit slightly. Where they have been properly promoted, they’ve done well, I’ve been told. But the timing was wrong. I think a similar novel line to this would have every chance of succeeding, as long as 49

Monsters, ghosts, and zombies, oh my!

A

s an award-winning horror critic, Rob knows his critters.

Here are his recommended favourites if you ever feel up to a good scare.

Daikaiju: 1. King Kong (1933): the SFX technology may be dated, but the magic the film weaves has never faded – and it influenced everything that followed. Not daikaiju, which, strictly speaking, is Japanese—but it can’t be avoided as the giant monster classic.

2. Gojira (1954): the Japanese version of what became known in the US re-edit as ‘Godzilla, King of the Monsters’. Anyone who thinks this is cheap rubbish, artistically or technically, needs serious re-education. A thematically powerful world classic with a potent central metaphor that still lingers in today’s zeitgeist.

3. Gamera 3 (1999; dir. Shusuke Kaneko): the third part of Kaneko’s dramatic “re-think” of the child-centric Gamera films of the 1970s is simply stunning on all levels. Its street-level approach to monster destruction and intelligent handling of the genre elevates it even above most of the Godzilla films.

Moments of Dying

Zombie: 1. Romero’s living dead series: Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985), and Land of the Dead (2005). The first of these not only created the zombie apocalypse subgenre, but each of them defined their respective eras perfectly and powerfully. Romero is the master.

2. I Walked with a Zombie (1943; dir. Jacques Tourneur): a different type of zombie film entirely, but poetic, beautiful and grim in its quietly devastating artistic intelligence.

3. Re-Animator (1985; dir. Stuart Gordon): there is a long tradition of comedic zombie films, and Re-Animator is perhaps the most outrageous and certainly one of the best. These hilarious gorefests, often scarily intense in their own right, seem to deal with death by mocking the very idea of physical immortality. What they do to fleshand-blood is simply wrong … and very right.

Ghost: 1. The Haunting (1963, dir. Robert Wise): beautiful script, beautiful photography, excellent acting; ambiguous, creepy and rarely bettered.

A superb piece of cinema.

2. Kaïro [aka Pulse] (2001, dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa): though its quiet, unnerving ability to erode the audience’s sense of artistic distance is not appreciated by many – especially those unable to get past their addiction for the in-your-face action of the typical Hollywood blockbuster – Kaïro remains the scariness film I’ve ever seen.

3. Ring [aka Ringu] (1998, dir. Hideo Nakata): its power to frighten isn’t diminished by the fact that it has been endlessly copied. Almost singlehandedly, Ring resurrected both the ghost film and the horror film. I saw it early, unexpectedly, at a time when I was starting to think that the art of the horror film had died. It changed my mind. n

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Robert Hood

Fiction

First Moment of Dying O

utside, the world was waiting.

Inside, the silence was as cold as guilt.

A woman’s corpse lay on one of several occupied gurneys, in preparation for the pathologist’s scalpel. An off-white sheet partially covered her; she was in her mid-twenties and plain in death, despite the nakedness of her upper torso. Whatever desire she’d inspired in life had become irrelevant now. Dull abrasions, dried blood, and unhealed wounds decorated parts of her forehead, left cheek, and shoulder. Her throat had been cut. Her right breast bore dark blotches—the imprint of cruel fingers.

Resurrection began.

“No!” she growled, jerking back from him and stepping away.

The corpse settled, its nascent life draining out onto the gurney and dissipating into stale air.

She stared at the dead man’s face, searching her faded memory. Then her curiosity twisted into a snarl. She heard echoes of his threats, felt his loveless touch once again and recoiled from his blows. He had forced himself on her with brutal indifference to her pain.

Stupid bitch, he’d growled, dragging his blade against her throat. The sound of wailing sirens filled the night.

In that moment, a word was insinuated into the silence: it was the susurration of a foot on dirt, the creak of a branch touched by wind, the sigh of a dying breath.

So intent was she upon remembering every detail of the police siege that had ended in his death, she didn’t notice the door behind her swing open.

Now.

Light burst into the room, filling it like a recollection of gunfire.

Simultaneously a harsh metallic clatter jerked her from her reverie.

She turned; a young morgue attendant stood in the open doorway, shock plastering his face. A metal tray and various implements lay about his feet. Shaking, he stared at the naked woman with the open throat and abused body. She stared back amid the sterile whiteness of the morgue.

The woman’s dead hand twitched as the airborne vibrations of the word entered through her fingertips. Quickening spread up her arm and into her chest, slowly and painfully; it ground through atrophied muscle with a will more inexorable than decay. Finally, her chest heaved, straining with the effort of life.

The woman’s eyes opened. For a few seconds, they looked into darkness beyond the ceiling; then they flicked sideways, left and right, searching. Her bloodless lips faltered with queries she couldn’t express.

As she pushed herself upright, the soiled sheet slipped away. Sitting on the edge of the gurney, she stared at blood-splatter that had formed suggestive glyphs across her thigh. Her hand touched them tenderly.

“Jesus?” Echoing from deep within her, the word was low and strangled. Her fingers followed the blood and the lines cut into her skin as though they carried an answer written in Braille.

She pulled her hand away and looked around, searching the room’s dim ambiance. Then she stood. On an adjacent gurney lay another corpse, more covered in its morgue cloth than she had been; only its feet were visible, masculine and distorted by misuse, a tag tied to its big toe. She dragged the cloth away.

The man was as naked as her but less defiled. Death had erased all signs of age from his features, leaving him an ugly, grey golem. The woman frowned as though in recognition.

“Jesus?” she whispered.

Amid the hair on his chest, two bloody bullet holes scarred the waxen skin around his left nipple. Her hand hovered over them, so close the whisper of her trembling fingers flattened the surrounding hair.

The body shifted. One hand twitched.

“They told me …” His voice quivered. “They told me you were dead.”

The woman moved toward him, one arm stretched in front of her, as though pleading. Her lips quivered. He couldn’t make out what she was saying—the awkward bend of her jaw seemed far from natural.

“Please …” the morgue attendant whined. “What … do you want?”

Her pale hand reached for his throat, but still he couldn’t move. Her eyes, starkly bright against the corpse-like pallor of her face, filled him with dread; they drained whatever hope he had of backing away and fleeing her presence. When she spoke again, her ruined throat distorted the words, making them meaningless. Whimpering, the morgue attendant cowered from her. The woman’s fingers brushed against his cheek. In that instant, the attendant’s eyes shrivelled into his skull, and the skin of his neck and face began to bleed. Blood dribbled down his withering body, and as it struck the floor, turned to ash. “Jesus?” the woman asked once more. The attendant’s desiccated corpse collapsed to the floor.

With an air of unfathomable sadness, the woman stepped over his remains.

“Jesus?” she moaned as she stumbled down the plain grey corridor.

Outside, the world was waiting.

51

Fiction

Second Moment of Dying N

ow.

Wearily, Laz Burne looked up from his coffee, responding to the word without much enthusiasm. But the waitress was way over the opposite side of the café, serving a middle-aged woman whose limp red hair gave her an irresistible air of resignation. No one else was nearby.

Beyond the grime-spotted window next to him, humanity moved rapidly and with imprecise purpose along the street, some on foot, others snuggly safe within their vehicles. Burne had no purpose at all, and right now, felt grateful for the relief that such meaninglessness gave him. As he watched, a group of aggressive youths ambled past, so close that Burne could have reached out and grabbed their dangling “fucker” tokens – the latest fashion – but for the barrier formed by the glass. One of the youths turned and snarled at him, as though catching a trace of his thoughts.

“Those sex gangs scare me,” said a woman’s voice next to him. The waitress. She’d moved fast and quietly.

“They’re—” Burne had been going to say they were harmless; but he knew they weren’t. Even as the words died in his throat, he saw one of the youths grab at an old woman nervously edging past them; he pulled her to him and licked her wrinkled cheek with his tattooed, spike-pierced tongue. She protested feebly, blood oozing from tiny grazes left behind on her skin. Laughing, the youth pushed her aside. Her legs couldn’t steady her; she stumbled off the curb and was carried out of Burne’s field-of-vision by the engine grill of a speeding van.

“Oh, my god,” croaked the waitress, leaning over his table to get a better view. But there was nothing to see. An incongruous surge in the crowd dissipated as quickly as it had bloomed. “Was she hurt?”

Burne said nothing. The waitress looked into his eyes, perhaps wanting him to give her some reassurance. When she didn’t get any, she turned to go out the door herself. Burne grabbed her arm.

“Don’t,” he said.

She stopped. “But the old woman?”

“You can’t help. It doesn’t matter.”

The waitress frowned. Horns blared from deep in the street and came to them carrying the echoes of a scream.

“It’s getting worse,” she said.

Burne turned his head away, eyes searching up and down the street.

“Worse?”

“The frenzy,” she said. “The fear.”

Across the street a man and a woman, lovers perhaps, argued. Though it was impossible for Burne to hear them, they both gesticulated wildly—like actors in a silent film—shouting, trading insults. It might have been a mundane scene, but the context of the street and the old woman’s death lent it a violence that was powerfully ominous. Burne was not surprised when the woman pulled a gun from her handbag and blew a hole in the man’s head. His blood splattered the passing

52

BLACK A u s t r a l i a n D a r k C u l t u r e M a g a z i n e

crowd, which barely reacted except to give them a wider berth for a moment. The body fell out of sight behind the pedestrian rush, and the woman fled.

The waitress hadn’t noticed this grim vignette.

“You waiting for someone?” she asked.

“I don’t think so.”

She grunted. “Refill?”

Burne thanked her, and she poured coffee into his half-full cup.

As she moved off, Burne’s gaze returned to the street, lazily and without intent. So much to see—and nothing. Movement became an internalised blur, chaos without significance. He let his mind empty.

But something eased into his consciousness—something low and barely visible, a condensation of shadow. It emerged from the darkness of an off-street alleyway, hesitating, waiting for a break in the frenzy of pounding feet. A cat: mottled and brown-grey. Its tail flicked back and forth, ears tensed, cautiously listening. Burne watched as it insinuated itself into a gap in the pedestrian traffic, then stopped, waiting. A middle-aged woman in a black, knee-length coat bent to pat the animal; it pulled back. She frowned, stood and continued on her way. Others swore, though it ignored them. Someone kicked at it, but the animal darted aside easily.

Burne watched with calm indifference.

At the curbside, the cat stopped, unnerved by the confusing patterns of the cars and vans. It stared ahead, waiting. Surely it wouldn’t venture out into that death-trap of grinding wheels? Burne felt a wisp of anxiety ghost its way into his chest.

Finally, unable to endure the confusion any longer and unable to find meaning in the bustle of the traffic, the cat gave way to impatience and darted onto the road. But it had miscalculated; a car bore down on it. Burne cried out, thrusting forward his hand so that palm and fingers pressed against the glass. His eyes burned scarlet. A vibration of the air churned through the barrier and engulfed the cat.

Horns blared as the car struck something unseen, veering off toward traffic in the next lane. Squealing brakes, the sharp cry of a crumbling chassis. After a moment of chaos, the traffic settled. Violent recriminations began.

Burne sensed the presence of the waitress. He pulled his hand off the glass, picked up his coffee mug and sipped. Outside, the cat, safe on the pavement again, seemed to sense where its salvation had come from; for a moment, it stared up at Burne through broken reflections on the café window. Its eyes flared like sapphires catching light.

Burne held its gaze for a moment, then the animal darted away.

The waitress was still looming over Burne, hand gripping the refill jug; he felt accusation in her gaze.

NOW

“Why that?” she asked.

“I like cats,” he said, holding out his empty cup.

H

Third Moment of Dying

is hand hit the side of her head like a slab of uncooked meat. Felicity absorbed the impact and let herself fall back against the wall. It was nothing new.

clean open appearance, beautiful some said, and it brought her regulars back time and again. All he wanted was to scare her into compliance so that the main attraction, her body, would be no more compromised than it already had been.

fied, and for a moment, looked familiar—but only vaguely, the way all men looked familiar to her. Yet there was a character to his face that so hard-etched itself into her mind that she knew she would never be able to remember him except with vivid immediacy.

“You been taking your meds?”

He snarled. “Ya’ll see the Doc. ‘N lose the tadpole.”

“Who are you?” Felicity asked. Despite his solid presence, he gave the impression of being a phantom.

She slid to the floor, nodding.

Horse glared down at her as though at a pile of dogshit he’d just stepped in.

“As if getting knocked-up ain’t bad ‘nough,” he added. “Not getting it flushed straight away earns ya a bruise or two, I reckon.”

“But Horse –” “Just another fuckin’ meat-sack, bitch, another mouth for the world to feed. You looked around out there lately? Why’d ya wanna toss another fuckin’ loser into that hellhole?”

He kicked her in the back, sending a sharp pain through her kidneys. Tears welled into her eyes, but she turned aside, refusing to show him just how miserable she felt. The grimy texture of his office floorboards rubbed against her cheek.

Felicity didn’t know. She didn’t know anything. It wasn’t a world for kids, but her baby whispered inside her, and it wanted to live – she could hear it now, like the pounding of her heart.

“Whose is it?” he growled.

“Can’t let me?” He laughed and this time the blade scored the skin at the base of her ear.

Then he ripped away her tanktop and pulled at her jeans. The knife was almost warm as it lay on the gentle swell of her belly. “You don’t get no choice, darl. If it comes to it, I’ll take it out m’self. Doc’d do a cleaner job, all round, though. Whatcha reckon?”

“Don’t know, Horse, honest. Could’ve been anyone.”

He kicked her again, this time with less vigour. “Get it outa there and into the goddam sewers. Go see the Doc.” Felicity shook her head.

“What? You arguing with me?” He knelt, grabbed her short red hair and yanked it.

His gaunt, smooth-skinned face loomed close, eyes dark and nasty.

“Can’t explain, Horse.” Her voice seemed weak and ineffectual and that made her defiance grow. “I’ve got to keep it.”

Horse slammed the base of his palm against her temple so her skull smacked down hard.

“We don’t have no whore-brats here. ‘S in your fuckin’ contract, Fel-honey.”

“I can’t let it die.”

“How many you had scrapped out already?

What’s one more?”

She turned to look at him, hoping her eyes expressed determination rather than fear.

“This one’s different. I can hear it whispering to me.”

“Whisperin’?”

She stared into the dark brown pits of his eyes but sensed his arm move and heard the scrape of his blade leaving its sheath.

Countless girls had been cut with that knife; countless men had bled their lives into darkness from its bite. Horse’s breath, foul with burger grease, throbbed in the depths of her nostrils. A sharp metallic chill traced across her cheek. But the knife didn’t cut.

Horse didn’t want to kill her, not yet, and nor did he want her face scarred. It had a

“I can’t let you take it.”

Her baby wasn’t whispering to her now; it was screaming. The sound of it was so loud she was surprised Horse couldn’t hear it. Its cries sped out into the room, beyond the walls, echoing in every corner of the hellhole the world had become. Her baby was calling for its father.

“See?” whispered Horse, his lips wetting her ear. “Ya flesh opens up as easy as a whore’s legs.”

Felicity felt blood trickling down the side of her belly and moaned for him to stop.

Yet through the watery smear her vision had become, beyond the ratty nest of the man’s hair, she could see a different opening—a hollow in the shadows filling the room.

Something dark coalesced from it. Something shaped like a man.

“Now can we get rid of the fuckin’ baggage without mo’ fuss?” Horse said, straightening up.

The shape moved toward them with a jerky suddenness. Horse interpreted Felicity’s startled gasp as compliance and laughed.

Something snapped, like a branch giving way under the sudden pressure of a wind gust.

Horse’s face twisted into a grotesque grin; as he slid out of Felicity’s field of vision, he almost looked happy to be dead.

He pointed toward her bared stomach. Selfconscious, Felicity covered herself with the rags of her tanktop. “Are you the father?” she asked.

He grunted. Perhaps he couldn’t speak. For a moment, Felicity’s attention plucked at Horse’s body on the periphery of her vision, but she forced her knowledge of it aside.

“Gynogenesis,” the stranger said, shocking her as much for the unfamiliarity of the word as for the fact that he had spoken at all.

She tried to stand but dizziness forced her to sit with her back against the wall.

“Virgin conception,” the man continued.

Felicity almost laughed. “Virgin? Not me? I’m just a whore.”

“The conception is virginal.” He stepped closer. Felicity saw how handsome he was and felt more certain than ever that they had never met. Yet she knew him, as though he was part of her subconscious mind, dragged now into the light. “Conception energised by the presence of sperm, but the egg selffertilised. No genetic material provided by the father. Only the inspiration.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t need to.” He crouched and reached toward her belly. His fingers remained several centimetres from her flesh, yet she felt his touch regardless.

“As your baby grows, I will fade.” The man stood again, backed away. Darkness swirled to engulf him. “He will fight in the coming war.”

“War?” “Surely you feel it drawing near?” He paused as though listening for the sound of battle.

“All around us, humanity takes sides. Angels and demons are born. I am one.”

He moved away from her.

“Which are you?” she asked.

But he was gone, and Felicity’s baby remained silent.

The form of the man standing over her solidi53

Fiction

J

Fourth Moment of Dying

ohnno Caig knew the prisoner was awake. Middle of the night and all, nightlight down low and security camera suffering a glitch that made the dim figure look like a twitching 3D watermark hunched on the bunk—but Caig knew the man was awake. Caig could feel his gaze through several steelplated walls and from 200-metres distant, along a bare, empty corridor. Even locked away, the prisoner’s gaze chilled him to the bone.

Caig was thirty-three and had worked this shift for a week, yet he felt he’d known the prisoner all his life. Forbidden to enter the cell or even to approach within the outer airlock, Caig watched the gaunt, powerful figure constantly, fascinated by who he might be, why he was kept locked away here in this high-security isolation tank, its walls covered in strange glyphs. The man did very little; whether sitting, standing, or prone on the stark, unpadded bunk, there was no sign that he ever did anything much. He had no books.

No TV. No writing implements. Nothing. He pissed and shat in the exposed latrine, but Caig hadn’t seen him drink or eat. Perhaps these things happened outside Caig’s shift, but if so he surely would have seen some evidence of it. Caig couldn’t even work out how they’d get food in to him. The man was completely sealed off. All the prisoner did was stare into space.

Stare at Caig.

“Quit it, for fuck’s sake!” Caig muttered, staring back at the man’s image on his monitor.

It didn’t surprise Caig that there was a high turnover of staff at this facility, but it had taken him awhile to realise why. When the authorities had offered him a transfer from Murdoch Penitentiary, he’d been more than happy to oblige. Murdoch, like most prisons, had become dangerous, prone to outbreaks of uncontrollable staff and inmate violence.

Conditions had deteriorated to the point where Caig considered pissing the job off altogether. But where could he find alternative employment? To outsiders, prison guards were as sought after, these days, as ex-cons.

So when the Minister for Correctional Services herself, the Right Hon. Joy Navaret, had come to see him, it hadn’t taken much persuasion to get his agreement to relocate.

Like everyone else, he knew nothing about the Manala facility, but was flattered when she told him that his personality and psychological profile indicated he was perfect for the cushy job. He would be monitoring the behaviour of one lone prisoner.

“Only the one?” he’d queried. “In the whole place?”

54

She’d nodded. “Your shift will be 10 pm to dawn. You’ll be on double your current wages with a two-weeks on, one-week off schedule.”

“Do I write reports?”

“Not necessary. If there’s trouble—which there never has been—you inform Internal Security, onsite. They’ll deal with it.”

“What about a cafeteria?”

“Food and drink will be supplied to your specifications, as part of the package. Plus a car and generous superannuation bonuses.”

It sounded too good to be true.

“Who is this prisoner?” Caig had asked.

The Hon. Joy Navaret had studied him in silence. Finally she’d said, “That is not your concern.”

Wasn’t until he’d taken the job that he’d heard the rumours of constant staff turnover. Most had left the Service altogether, he was told.

He’d decided it didn’t matter.

Now he wasn’t so sure.

That the prisoner was creepy was undoubtedly true, and the truth of it became more and more intolerable as the hours dragged by.

After three days, Caig had started to worry he wouldn’t be able to last out the probationary period. But he’d gritted his teeth and stuck with it. One day at a time, he told himself constantly.

His head jerked, causing the room to shudder.

God, had he fallen asleep?

He checked the monitor. The image had improved somewhat and revealed that the prisoner was no longer on the bunk. He stood now, staring at the wall. Unmoving.

“Fuck,” Caig muttered.

He reached for a slice of cold pizza. Bit into it. The glutinous solidity of the three-cheese topping sickened him. Odd. He’d always liked cold pizza.

Maybe I should ask for a microwave oven, he thought.

As he tossed the slice aside, he paused and drew his hand closer. There was something different about it. It looked strong and wiry, with a skin texture and patterns of wrinkles that seemed alien. For a moment he thought it might have been someone else’s hand. Yet it was connected to his arm, his shoulder.

What the fuck? He shook his head, but the sensation lingered.

“I feel strange,” he said out loud.

He held up his left hand and put the two side-by-side. Sure, they were a matching pair, but now both seemed foreign.

BLACK A u s t r a l i a n D a r k C u l t u r e M a g a z i n e

A sensation of being watched, sharper even than the one he’d been feeling for days, made him glance at the monitor. The prisoner was staring directly up at the camera now, at him—or so it appeared. Caig had a clean view of the prisoner’s eyes—and they looked as though they were focused beyond the wall of the prison. Focused on Caig. But that was impossible; it wasn’t a two-way monitor. Caig leaned in close.

“Who are you?” he whispered.

I have many names.

Shocked, Caig stumbled away from the monitor as though afraid the prisoner would reach through the screen and grab him.

“What the fuck?”

I have many names.

“You can hear me?”

The prisoner nodded, a wry smile bending his lips on the left side more than the right.

The connection has been made.

Yo u a r e a l l y o u w e r e s u p p o s e d to be.

There had to be an explanation for this. Caig couldn’t imagine what it was, but the idea that an explanation was inevitable distracted him from his fear.

“What d’ya mean, supposed to be?” he growled.

The right spiritual constitution.

The right weakness of will.

“I don’t—” Understand? Of course not. But i t d o e s n ’ t m a t t e r. T h e p r o c e s s h a s b e e n i n i t i a t e d a n d c a n ’t b e stopped.

Caig felt his legs weakening under him. Every muscle ached, distancing him from his own body. It was as though he was becoming someone else.

Yo u a r e b e c o m i n g m e “You? What is this?”

Escape, my friend. Over and over again, I escape.

“We’re changing places?” Caig felt panic grip him. “I’ll be stuck in there?”

I’ll still be here. I will always be here in this room. But I will a l s o b e o u t t h e r e . I n y o u . Yo u will be … nowhere.

Caig was so far gone now he couldn’t even register panic. The room blanched into whiteness.

“Who the hell are you?” he managed in his last second of independent awareness.

“I am Legion,” the prisoner said.

N

Last Moment of Dying ow.

It was always now, they said—always a moment in time that should be lived to the full. But most often, in Ratman’s experience, what the world handed you in any given moment was grief—and what was so special about that?

Crawling to the bottom of the broken stairs that led up from the pit where he’d taken refuge, he stared toward street level. Only shadows there now. The world had gone quiet. He wondered what it meant.

Sometimes, he reflected, the now offered a gift that looked like salvation. Was this salvation?

He’d always hoped that was what each moment’s new offering would prove to be. It never did. The world’s first gift to him had been birth, but his mother had abandoned him early, and after being handed around from one child abuser to another, he’d ended up on the streets. There, malnutrition and disease had made him blind. Having sight for those few early years had ensured that memory of it would remain to torment him throughout the next three decades of his life.

Yet now, unexpectedly, the world had given him his sight back.

He’d been huddled in an alcove when it happened, withdrawing from harsh screams and other sounds of violence. Deeply afraid, he’d breathed in the rising stink of blood, heard the final wheeze of a torn throat’s last breath; it had come from nearby, too near for Ratman’s liking. All around him, he’d sensed the presence of vast and unnatural terrors. Cries of anguish called to him from every direction. He was afraid, even afraid to ask passers-by what was going on. Words had felt like they might too easily betray him; passers-by might prove to be tormentors.

He could handle ignorance so long as others remained ignorant of him.

But something had stepped out of the chaos; Ratman had felt its presence like a chill breeze on his skin. Breath drifted over his ear, and he pulled away.

“Don’t be afraid,” a man whispered.

“Who are you?” Ratman had held his hands out in a blocking motion.

“I have a gift for you,” the man answered.

Ratman felt his hands taken. The pressure of the man’s fingers conveyed reassurance, not threat.

“I can help you see.”

“See?” “And you will bear witness.”

“To what?”

The man released Ratman’s hands, spoke a few words that Ratman didn’t recognize as English and placed his palms over Ratman’s eyes. Almost instantly Ratman’s head filled with pain.

He’d screamed. Vast waves of sickly light became agony in his skull and the air filled with grotesque faces. He clenched his eyes shut and crawled away from the one who’d healed him, retreating down broken stairs into a cold and shadowy basement. There he hid, eyes shielded by the rough cloth of his coat. He’d waited, screaming like the rest, until the pain faded. Even then he hadn’t moved. Not until the screams from outside faded as well.

Now Ratman had found some courage—either that or a desperation that arose from uncertainty. He’d studied his own emaciated hands, his filthy pants, the rotten wood of the stairs, a wall dripping with run-off from the street. Studied them until their meaning had leached away. Above, the door he’d come through was closed, though he didn’t recall closing it himself. A sliver of red-umber light leaked through a gap above the lintel.

Slowly, he made his way to the top and pressed one ear against the door’s cracking wood. All he could hear was the frantic rush of his own blood.

Opening the door proved difficult. It was almost as though it had not been opened in years. The hinges squealed in protest. He held his breath.

Red light filtered through the widening gap, but nothing more physical attacked him. He opened the door still wider and looked out, squinting to protect his newly healed eyes from the glare.

But there was no glare. Daylight was dim and hazy, as though the sun had lost heart. The whole world looked aged and eroded.

Ratman eased himself onto the city street.

Above both these unmoving armies, hung torn and broken figures—men, women, children—suspended from the building facades by the exposed sinews of their own limbs. They were alive, barely alive, all of them—Ratman could see the languid despair in their faces, could smell the stench of their terror, hear the slow rending of their flesh. He turned his eyes away, but there was nowhere he could look that wasn’t stained with horror.

“What is this?” he whispered.

No one answered. The two lines of motionless phantoms looked as though they might thrust forward into violence at any moment—but each moment brought further inaction. It was only after ten minutes or so of staring that Ratman realised that all of them, those close enough for him to see at any rate, were sightless, their eyes—red, yellow, or black with despair—hardened marbles that light could not penetrate.

And as he continued to stare, wanting to retreat but unable to move his muscles, Ratman noticed minute signs of age and deterioration appearing on the creatures. On extended arms, pale faces, chests carved open so that inner complexities were exposed to the dull light that remained in the world, there appeared sudden rips and patches of crumbling skin and flesh that fell away like weathered sandstone.

They were dying. Killing each other with their hatred, their indifference, their fear.

The humans on the walls, as blind as the monsters, twitched in agony, dying slowly as well. Everything was dying.

Ratman couldn’t move, couldn’t clamp his eyelids shut, couldn’t escape.

“I don’t want to see,” he cried.

But all he could do was watch.

Watch.

And wait for the end.

n

It was only then, as he stood by the gutter, staring down the long stretch of the main thoroughfare, that the dimness clarified and he could make out rows of figures. For a moment he’d thought the city empty. But there were people in it. Lots of people. Or what had once been people. He didn’t like to think about what had happened to them or what they might have become.

On the left-hand side of the street, crouching like crumbling gargoyles in the shadows, were thousands of distorted creatures. Their claws and humanoid faces were smeared with blood, their bodies weather-beaten, eyes red with hatred. On the opposite side were yet more barely-human monsters; these were pale, gaunt, and emotionless, the light in their eyes jaundiced and indifferent. A vast mass of them stretched into the distance.

55

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