If the visual layout and content seem familiar, it’s because Remains is the welcome new venture from Andy Cox, the publisher and editor of Black Static, the superlative and much-missed magazine of contemporary horror fiction. It features a gorgeous cover and interior artwork from Richard Wagner, whose work also graced the pages of the former magazine, but the real test of Remains resides in the quality of its fiction.
There are seven stories, including ‘Cockatrice,’ a novella from Stephen Bacon, that starts out on familiar ground—an inquisitive child more taken with the monsters of his imagination than with the real ones much closer to home—before morphing into vengeful time travel tale with echoes of Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys. The shifting perspectives in a narrative that touches on infidelity, the power of the imagination, childhood sexual abuse, and the struggle to unsee the horrors one sees, are handled with great skill and compassion by Bacon.
Giselle Leeb’s story ‘Inclusions’ is a subtle and suggestive take on the haunted house theme. It maintains a certain distance from its human characters—the last of a group of writers gathered for a weekend workshop—allowing us to observe their interactions through the indifferent gaze of the house itself.
‘Her Little Ray of Sunshine’ is the story that most clearly evokes the tone of Black Static—no surprise considering it’s written by Neil Williamson, a regular contributor to the former magazine. It’s an unsettling and thought-provoking piece, reminiscent of much Slipstream fiction of the 1990s, with its quiet sense of outrage, even despair, at the extent of the psychological and physical harm men perpetrate on women, and even more so the lies and excuses we deploy to justify our weaknesses to ourselves.
Also recalling 12 Monkeys, but this time more explicitly, is Jolie Toomajan’s ‘A Heartwarming Tale of a Girl and Her Monkey.’ The tone here is elusive, even somewhat disjointed, such that protagonist Karyan’s motives in unleashing an apocalypse are never quite clear. Yet perhaps that sense of disconnection leads her to bond more closely with the monkey she liberates than with her human co-workers, which may be precisely the point.
The remaining stories range thematically from the delusion of overweening ambition (Rich Larson), to the peril of one’s life being exploited for fictional purposes (Anna Tambour). The final story, James Cooper’s ‘Nothing Special,’ offers a particularly bleak, noirish variation on the cynicism and self-loathing engendered by succumbing to the Hollywood dream.
Mike O’Driscoll is a writer living in Swansea. His work has appeared in Black Static, Interzone, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and numerous anthologies. His story ‘Sounds Like’ was adapted for a TV movie by Brad Anderson, as part of the Masters of Horror series. Mike blogs on different aspects of genre writing and film here.
