The Big Click
July 2014 (Issue 15)
The Big Click is an electronic magazine of crime fiction. We publish bimonthly online and for various e-reader formats. Our mission is to find the best of new crime fiction in a variety of modes—we are especially interested in noir, confessional, weird and “literary” fiction that depict and interrogate crime and social trespass.
The Staff
Publisher and Editor-in-Chief: Jeremiah Tolbert
Associate Editor: Seth Cadin
Associate Editor: Molly Tanzer
Editorial Consultant: Nick Mamatas
© 2014 The Big Click.
Cover artwork by Marcin Jagiellicz.
Ebook design by Clockpunk Studios.
www.thebigclickmag.com
July Editorial
by The Editors
There’s an argument to be made that horror is a mode rather than a genre. What we typically think of as the conventions of horror can subtly sneak inside fantasy, crime, scifi, and even literary fiction. Bizarro, a literary movement that incorporates elements of absurdism, spectacle, and the surreal, operates similarly. While some Bizarro fiction seems to nestle firmly (and happily) within an established tradition, such as the works of Carlton Mellick III and Jeff Burk, other writers, like Alan Clark and Sam Pink, draw on Bizarro’s tropes while remaining distinct. Bizarro, in those cases, is the seasoning—not the meal itself.
That may be why, similarly to horror, Bizarro plays well with others. A soupçon of Bizarro enhances many literary dishes, crime fiction among them. Crime fiction deals with, well, crimes… but one has only to watch the news—read any history book—meet another human, really, to realize that human motivations, which sit at the heart of crime fiction, are not always clear cut. We don’t always make sense, or follow established patterns.
Some authors of crime fiction steer clear of the unexplained, preferring the gritty realism of “if this, then that” narratives. Other authors dive right in to the weird and the inexplicable. Both approaches have their merits, and in this, The Big Click’s special Bizarro edition, we celebrate both, showcasing the flexibility and breadth of what Bizarro can achieve when paired with crime fiction.
Take Cameron Pierce’s “Drop the World,” about the emotional struggles of a young boxer and Olympic hopeful. If that sounds neither Bizarro nor criminal, well, you’d be right. And wrong. Very wrong. As for Stephen Graham Jones’ “How to Know You’re A Killer,” in spite of the title, the story asks more questions than it answers. Can lists be stories? Can stories be manifestoes? Can manifestoes be a short, solid, exciting read? With all this confusion in the air, it’s a good thing J David Osborne is here in this issue with his essay “On Not-Knowing,” though it doesn’t really have anything to do with the above questions. (You won’t find any answers in our reviews of the hottest, latest Bizarro crime fiction titles out there, either, but you should check them out anyways.)
It wouldn’t be an editorial without a reminder that it’s extremely possible for you to support us by buying an issue or a subscription to The Big Click. So… yeah.
On Not-Knowing
by J David Osborne
One night after a lot of whiskey and beer, a friend of mine suggested that we head down to Main and rob someone. We had no money but what we’d just spent on the booze, and we knew that when we woke up we’d be hungry. Deep down we both knew that we didn’t have it in us, but we still hyped each other up, shouting back and forth about how those rich fucks didn’t earn what they had (and you know, that for some reason we deserved it). The friend grabbed some pantyhose from his room and we each pulled a pair over our heads and posed in the mirror. We took knives from the kitchen and shoved them in our jacket pockets with the makeshift masks and headed out into the cold. Now that I think on it, I wonder why he had so much pantyhose.
Most of the night was spent sitting in a pizza place, eyeing the popped-collar stumble drunks, seething at their stupid faces and our own impotence. We couldn’t do it, we both knew it, but we still nodded at certain people, targets I guess, and pretended that this was the guy, this guy was getting his shit took. We sat there up until they closed. We walked home and slept. When I woke up the next morning I just bawled, furious at my situation and completely hating myself for even considering hurting someone, or taking what didn’t belong to me. “I have morals,” I told myself, “I’m a good person, what the fuck is wrong with me?”
I despised myself for a long time after that. A solid week of wondering did I even deserve to be here. Once I got past it, though, I decided that it was good that I put myself through that. Now I knew that part of myself. Not having money will make you a little crazy.
Crime fiction, at its best, can give you that same level of introspection, but without any of the self-loathing. By chronicling the lives of thieves and murderers and drug dealers, a good crime fiction author can dig into what it is that drives people to do bad things. We’re not all heroes. Some of us are cowards, and some of us are too cowardly to even function as proper cowards. But exploring that in an honest way is absolutely vital to building up a sense of empathy that we can then carry into the real world. When we get to the bottom of what makes us bad, we’re able to find out something about what it means to be human.
On the flip side, however, there’s a lot of honesty in the not-knowing. I am eternally grateful that I don’t know what it’s like to take someone’s money, or worse, hurt them physically. That not-knowing, that’s what I think attracts me to Bizarro fiction, and why I think that injecting a little bit of this weird genre into crime fiction can be massively healthy for the latter.
Bizarro officially became a “thing” in 2005, though it had been around for many years before that. Bizarro fiction is absurdist, surrealist, just plain weird. There are books about people falling in love with houses and men who survive the nuclear apocalypse by wearing a suit of cockroaches. It’s a genre fascinated and turned on and frightened of the strange shit we deal with on a daily basis. In its weirdness, I feel a lot of comfort and solidarity. There are things out there that I just don’t understand, and Bizarro books, to me, are that not-knowing made fun.
There is a lot of crime fiction that tells the story of characters who descend into evil. Breaking Bad is a great example, taking five seasons, over sixty hours, to tell that story. For most audiences, the story of a good person, or even a regular person turning evil, it takes time for that change to be convincing. Otherwise it seems like it comes out of left field.
Sometimes, in real life that shit does come out of left field, though. My pathetic little episode wasn’t preceded by a steady buildup. I got drunk, and thought it was a good idea. Thought it was something that I was owed. The problem is that when we try to document this in crime fiction, it comes off a little half-baked. It feels like the plot is being rushed. It feels under-thought.
And that is where the not-knowing comes in.
Bizarro can be a great addition to crime fiction, and I’m seeing the combination more and more often. It’s an artful, impressionistic representation of the bewilderment most of us feel when confronted with these acts. I’m not saying that those of us who haven’t committed crimes aren’t talented enough to write about it, but it feels more real to me when you get right up to that point in the fiction and then you say, “This is fantasy, this is my impression of the act, because I really have no fucking idea what’s going through their heads.” Using Lynchian imagery, you can make a fine analogy, you can capture the adrenaline and excitement and fear and sadness of an act, without having to document it and risk coming off sounding like an outsider.
By utilizing the weird, you’ve made yourself an in
sider, because you’ve changed the paradigm to one that’s universal.
In terms of film, what I’m trying to describe could be found in almost all of the films of David Lynch. Far from being “meaningless” surrealism, most of the imagery found in the context of Lynch’s films seem to be gorgeous approximations of how he’d imagine the characters feel, going through what they’re going through. The Not-Knowing isn’t cutting from a sex scene to show flowers blooming and waves crashing against the rocks, it’s the “Welcome to Canada” scene in Twin Peaks, which uses strobes and loud music and strange-looking people to instill a fear, a dread that can only come from not quite understanding how people can do what Laura Palmer does. You have to be in love with something, on some level, to get too close to it, but you can (kind of counter-intuitively, I think) give a better idea of these things feel by keeping a bit of distance. By being a bit weirded out.
Back to books. Take, for example, Kris Saknussemm’s Bizarro crime masterwork Private Midnight. Detective Ritter is, for the most part, your stereotypical noir protagonist, one with plenty of demons and skeletons in the closet. He meets a mysterious woman and soon he’s obsessed with her. Again, typical noir trope. However, what begins to happen to him defies genre convention: Ritter begins losing weight, his skin becomes smoother, his hair softer. I might be delving into spoiler territory here, though I would encourage you to read this book, as it’s in the execution that the novel really excels. Anyhow, he is essentially becoming a woman. The key factor to look at, here, is that this is not a dream. In the world of the novel, he is actually transforming. Whether acting as a metaphor for shedding the old self or becoming who one really is or even as a male beginning to understand the female, this is one of the great examples of not-knowing in fiction. What Saknussemm does so brilliantly here is, rather than try to explain Ritter’s change of mind or heart through a tedious description of his feelings or thoughts, instead shows a physical, monumental change in the character himself. And he keeps it as “real,” in the sense that it’s really happening. The act of transformation becomes one of acknowledging that a change is indeed taking place, and admitting that the author has no idea what that change might actually be like. This metaphorical change is alien, and is represented as alien through this visual.
And in case I’m not up my own ass enough here, I’ll use an example from my first novel, By the Time We Leave Here, We’ll Be Friends. A character attacks another one, who is pissing at the time. They begin to fight for their lives, and the pissing guy just keeps pissing. It’s completely absurd (and at the time I thought it was pretty funny). What I was trying to do was represent the energy, the craziness, the dirty feeling of mixing fluids whilst fighting for your life, without resorting to typical descriptions of sweat and pain.
In my own experience, there is only so far that I’m willing to go when it comes to criminal enterprise (read: not very far). In order to tell crime stories, then, there are times when I sit back and admit to myself that I have no idea how a character would act in a certain situation. So what I try to do, and what I’ve seen a lot of great weird crime writers do, is pull back into fantasy just when it gets to the point of not-knowing, to go from crystal clear picture quality to a muddy Impressionist painting just at the moment where their understanding ends. It feels more real to me, more honest. In my own experience, there’s a lot of truth in not-knowing. Bizarro helps to represent that not-knowing in the most interesting way possible.
© 2014 J David Osborne.
About J David Osborne
J David Osborne is the author of Our Blood In Its Blind Circuit, Low Down Death Right Easy, and the Wonderland Award-winning By the Time We Leave Here, We’ll Be Friends. He runs the indie crime fiction press Broken River Books. He lives in Portland, OR with his wife and dog. He doesn’t miss Oklahoma yet.
Capsule Reviews
by The Editors
Long Lost Dog of It (Broken River) by Michael Kazepis is a slow burn. It’s a short novel, focused on Athens in 2011, when the whole nation seemed prime to explode under the pressure of austerity and its own lengthy history. There are killers, and casual violence—a stray dog runs off with an ear freshly torn off the head of a racist, a sex show that seemingly ends with a disemboweling—and a fair amount of aimless wandering. But every scene, and every character, gets a long quiet moment too.
The plot is almost besides the point, and at any rate doesn’t become clear until the book is half over. If there’s an antecedent in noir literature, it’s David Goodis and his dreamy portrayals of losers and the low life, where the hardboiled stuff is punctuation, not purpose. It doesn’t matter how jaded anyone is, or how tough. Whether it’s a lesbian with a heart of stone, or a stone-cold murderer who learned to butcher from his father, and how to kill in Serbia, the world destroys everyone in the end. And in the end, Kazepis tells us, “Put your faith in your—”
It doesn’t get more noir than that. —NM
***
The Door That Faced West (Lazy Fascist) by Alan M. Clark is an unflinching fictional account of the Harpe Brothers’ murderous trek throughout the U.S. South and Midwest regions in the late 18th century. Renegades from the start, Micajah and Wiley Harpe were Tories that ran with Indians fighting against colonial upstarts. After the Revolutionary War, they kept their keep by river-pirating and highway-robbing. Anyone with loot was charmed into joining the brothers’ camp only to be gutted, stuffed with rocks, and sunk to the bottom of a nearby river.
This included women and children, with the exception of the Harpe’s own women: two sisters, Suesanna and Bett Wood, and Bett’s friend Sally “Sadie” Rice. The brothers shared the women, and during their year of being on the run, all became pregnant with a Harpe bairn. To wit, this existence was an unhappy one, and once the women were able to escape the Harpes and return to society, they settled into ordinary domestic lives.
The women pose a prominent question in the Harpes’ history: what circumstances made them choose an existence as harrowing and horrific as life with the Harpes? It is this last notion of circumstances and decision-making that inspired Clark to write The Door That Faced West through Sadie Rice’s eyes. He does so with all the grit and gore you would expect of a true crime western, while eschewing the sentimentalism often associated with female-centric historical romance. This makes for a brutal account, but then again, everyone has brutal beginning in this tale. Sadie comes from an abusive home—a preacher father who perhaps killed her mother—and all she seeks is escape from that life. Not much but refuge and safety motivates her to stay with the Harpes, even after she realizes what blood-thirsty psychopaths they are. To survive, Sadie must stay practical, and the practicalities of lower-class runaway women in the late-eighteenth century weren’t concerned with marrying rich, the latest frocks, or gaining a proper education and some sort of social equality with men. It was safety and support—survival. While at first getting to know Sadie and the unsavory world she comes from can be difficult, once you realize that the sparsity of the narrative is its veracity, it becomes a well-written, fast-paced, unique take on a darker side of American history. —SJC
***
Emily Collins is struggling with ennui and the transition from going from a twentysomething with a cool musician boyfriend to a thirtysomething with an awful musician boyfriend when she gets a letter informing her that she’s inherited a previously-unknown aunt’s house in Oklahoma. As Emily has just found out her awful musician boyfriend is cheating on her, she decides she needs a change. Emily leaves her job and friends and life, deciding to make a fresh start of it by moving into the house, though she knows nothing about the town, due to her deceased mother’s unwillingness to discuss her past. (Said mother has returned in dreams, partially prompting Emily’s decision.)
Once in Oklahoma, Emily learns her aunt didn’t just die. She was brutally murdered, and there has been a series of similarly inexplicable murders and disappearances rocking the community. With the help of a hot tarot card-reading boy fro
m an “occult shop” a few miles outside of town, Emily decides to get to the bottom of these mysteries, which means getting to the bottom of the titular Echo Lake. The big question is if the townspeople want an outsider like Emily getting to the bottom of either…
Can the past ever truly be buried? Can some stains ever be completely scrubbed away? These are the questions that dominate the bulk of Echo Lake. While similar inquiries have been explored by many novelists before Trent, her command of pacing and plotting make familiar territory feel fresh in parts of Echo Lake. In particular, the middle section is tensely-paced, well-plotted, and fascinating. Unfortunately, too many digressions bog down the third act, making the conclusion less satisfying than it might have been. In spite of this, those who enjoy their crime fiction spiced with a dash of literary flair and a sprinkling of the supernatural will find much to enjoy. –MT
© 2014 The Editors.
About The Editors
Jeremiah Tolbert is a web designer, writer, and photographer living in Tonganoxie, Kansas.
Nick Mamatas is a writer and editor living in Berkeley, California.
Seth Cadin is an East Bay artist and editor who also sometimes trades stories for money.
Molly Tanzer writes and edits in Boulder, Colorado.
Drop the World
by Cameron Pierce
It’s the top of round three in a four round fight. You’ve never been knocked out before, but when a vicious uppercut connects with your chin, you wonder if you’re about to find out how it feels. Your mind fights for control of your body. Your knees wobble.
Ten minutes ago, you saw Olympic gold. You saw yourself standing triumphant over the broken body of Vicki McCauley. Now the fight isn’t even halfway to the finish and you’re seeing stars. How could you gas so early? Your cardio routine is insane. How can you get hit like this? You’ve fought Vicki before. You know firsthand she only has one deadly punch. How can you fail to hit her? You’ve studied her fights so much in recent weeks, her body is practically a celluloid extension of your own. Physically, you’re the superior. You’re faster, stronger, and pack more muscle. Mentally, though, Vicki is a beast. You realize your strength means shit against a cerebral fighter like Vicki, one so remarkable in her plan of attack. Every punch feels scripted, like she’s a goddamn playwright. Or a ventriloquist. She moves, you move, and she puts you right where she wants you. That’s how good she is. At the end of round two, you’re positive you can’t lose another round or the fight’s hers. Houston tells you to get inside and keep your jab in her face. It won’t earn you many points on the score card, but it’ll teach her to respect your space. Then you can set to work chiseling away at her. You nod, gasping for water. The bell to begin round three dings and suddenly you have a taste for blood. You feel stronger now than you did before the fight. You do what you always do when the cards are down. You let your pain be a fortress.
The Big Click: July 2014 (Issue 15) Page 1
