The ominous ordinary: horror writers finding scares in the everyday

Some of the very best work in this genre comes from writers who embed their terrors into strikingly everyday settings

Long-lived short fiction magazines are a rarity today. And ones that have had a real impact on the wider landscape of storytelling are even rarer. So issue 50 of Black Static marks a important milestone for editor Andy Cox and TTA Press, who are responsible for two of the world’s most significant outlets for short fiction.

Reality, even comfortable suburban reality, is transitory and fleeting

We’re on the bus, up from Manchester through Salford to Bolton, on our way to go camping in Kearsley. We piled on at Victoria Station – we’d all been in the square between it and Chetham’s music school. It’s where all the kids like us’ll go – the moshers, the punks, the greasers and the goths.

All the ones like me and Biff.

Related: Horror fiction from Charles Dickens to Charlie Higson – books podcast

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