Black Clock # 10

Born out of the despair of the Great Depression, flourishing in the first radioactive blush of the nuclear age, noir is more than just a style, it's a sensibility. Black Clock 10 operates on the premise that Twenty-First Century noir is a mutated genre still bearing kinship with the original.In Black Clock 10, Robert Polito traces early signs of noir back to Eighteenth Century America in "It Would Be a Queer World If," and Dana Spiotta takes a look at one of the classic Fifties film noirs in "First is First, Second is Nobody." In Diana Wagman's "The Five Elements of Noir," some noir archetypes find the movie they're in has taken them over. The genre gets decidedly weird with Michael Ventura's cross-dressing private-eye in "One Marilyn Too Many," and becomes altogether supernatural in stories by Denise Hamilton and Francesca Lia Block. Amid work by major contemporary authors Scott Bradfield, Brian Evenson, Geoff Nicholson and others. Black Clock 10 also identifies 70 essential noir movies, novels, comics, poems, paintings, performances and pieces of music.