Joel Lane

In midwinter, an aspiring politician finds himself suddenly deprived of human contact. Newcomers to a town are strangely reminiscent of people lost in a recent flood. Demonstrators on a peace march see the faces of sleeping children in the snow. A failed musician meets his own ancestors getting off a midnight train. The Terrible Changes is a journey through the shadow-realm between reality and dream, between clarity and madness, between the living and the dead. In Joel Lane's fiction, the weird is a symbolic language expressing the chilling beauty, sadness and mystery of real life, combining the supernatural with themes of human loss, passion, solitude and despair, in the tradition of Robert Aickman, John Ramsey Campbell, and M. John Harrison. From ‘The Brand’ (1983) to ‘Alouette’ (2008), these stories span a quarter-century of writing: urban horror tales, elegiac ghost stories, erotic reveries and psychological fugues. Long unavailable, The Terrible Changes is now back in print for a new audience, adding to Joel Lane’s legacy as a true master of the weird.

'Nothing ever changes. We just tell ourselves it does.' Set in a post-industrial landscape of the present, the near future, and the imagined, Joel Lane's seminal collection The Lost District explores human encounters with the unknown: sexual discovery, drug-inspired visions, the lonely paths of madness, and the shadow realms on the other side of death. A neighbourhood fades into corrupt echoes of itself; a porn actor's scars reveal the forces controlling his life; a musician is haunted by the madness of a deceased singer; and a man literally follows his ex-lover to the end of the world. Ranging from grim urban horror to strange erotic fantasies to bitter allegories of loss and exploitation, the stories in The Lost District link the hidden places in the urban and small-town landscapes to the secret spaces inside all of us. First published in the USA in 2006, and long out-of-print, The Lost District has never been published in the UK until now, further enforcing Joel Lane's reputation as one of the most significant and distinctive British writers of the weird.

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY JOSEPH O’NEILL Neil is a student at Birmingham University, living a typical life of gigs, clubs, politics, sex. One night, after a row with his lover, Neil follows a stranger onto a canal towpath. The stranger turns on him and attacks, viciously carving up Neil’s face and leaving him mutilated beyond recognition. Neil’s recovery is a journey through surgical reconstruction and sexual alienation. His attempt to track down his attacker becoming a search for his own hidden, destructive self; a search that leads him to question values he had always taken for granted. First published in 2003 and long out-of-print, The Blue Mask is a hardcore emotional trip exploring the trauma of change and the nature of violence and of love.

WINNER OF THE 2013 WORLD FANTASY AWARD Episodes from the casebook of a police officer in the West Midlands: A young woman needs help in finding the buried pieces of her lover... so he can return to waking life. Pale-faced thieves gather by a disused railway to watch a puppet theatre of love and violence. Why do local youths keep starting fires in the ash woods around a disused mine in the Black Country? A series of inexplicable deaths uncover a secret cult of machine worship. When a migrant worker disappears, the key suspect is a boy driven mad by memories that are not his own. Among the derelict factories and warehouses at the heart of the city, an archaic god seeks out his willing victims. Blurring the occult detective story with urban noir fiction, Where Furnaces Burn offers a glimpse of the myths and terrors buried within the industrial landscape. First published in 2012, Joel Lane’s World Fantasy Award-winning collection is a true modern classic of weird fiction that cemented his place as one of the most important and distinctive British writers of the weird.

The Witnesses Are Gone is a first-hand account of a journey into the darkest parts of the underworld - a look behind the screen on which our collective nightmares play.

Birmingham, early 1990s. Triangle are a cult act on the post-punk scene, led by brilliant and troubled vocalist Karl - a man haunted by past violence and present danger, torn between fame and oblivion, men and women, music and silence. Triangle's bass player, David, is struggling to make sense of Karl's reality as the band start to make waves in the music scene and Karl starts to come apart in a blur of sex and drinking. First published in 2000, Joel Lane's debut novel From Blue to Black is a story of passion, blood and alcohol, broken strings and broken lives - a piercing voyage through our musical and political past that cuts to the bone.

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY NINA ALLAN Joel Lane (1963-2013) was one of the UK's foremost writers of dark, unsettling fiction, a frank explorer of sexuality and the transgressive aspects of human nature. With a tight focus on the post-industrial Black Country and his home city of Birmingham, he created a distinct form of British urban weird fiction. His debut collection, The Earth Wire was first published in 1994 by Egerton Press and is reissued in paperback by Influx Press for the first time in over twenty-five years. Love and death. Sex and despair. The Earth Wire is a thrilling, disturbing examination of the means and the cost of survival.

Joel Lane (1963-2013) was one of the UK’s foremost writers of dark, unsettling fiction, a frank explorer of sexuality and the transgressive aspects of human nature. With a tight focus on the post-industrial Black Country and his home city of Birmingham, he created a distinct form of British urban weird fiction. ? Scar City is one of the final collections put together before his death in 2013 – with his home city of Birmingham as their nucleus, these are intense, haunting and often painful stories from a master of the short form. WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY NICHOLAS ROYLE

Few cities have undergone such a radical transformation over the last few decades as Birmingham. Culturally and architecturally, it has been in a state of perpetual flux and regeneration, with new communities moving in, then out, and iconic post-war landmarks making way for brighter-coloured, 21st century flourishes. Much like the city itself, the characters in the stories gathered here are often living through moments of profound change, closing in on a personal or societal turning point, that carries as much threat as it does promise. Set against key moments of history – from Malcolm X’s visit to Smethwick in 1965, to the Handsworth riots two decades later, from the demise of the city’s manufacturing in the 70s and 80s, to the on-going tensions between communities in recent years – these stories celebrate the cultural dynamism that makes this complex, often divided ‘second city’ far more than just the sum of its parts.

Joel Lane, renowned as a writer of compelling strange stories, novels in the noir tradition, and acute poetry, was also a thoughtful and perceptive essayist on the fantasy and horror fields. For the journal Wormwood he wrote a series of pieces discussing the leading figures in twentieth-century dark literature, including H. P. Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti, Fritz Leiber and Robert Aickman. They are characterised by his profound insight, high critical standards and his keen allegiance to this fiction. Joel always intended to collect these essays in a book to be entitled This Spectacular Darkness, a quotation from the poet Edwin Morgan, whose work he admired. This cannot be that book: but it brings together all the essays he was able to write in the series. Joel writes in his essay, 'This Spectacular Darkness', '. . . it was essential to ask new questions about human nature and our place in the world. Horror fiction was . . . an attempt to generate new myths-or a new kind of imagination-that could deal with . . . new realities.' And few have understood and explored these new myths and realities with the deep understanding that he goes on to demonstrate. Also collected here are essays Joel wrote for other publications, including studies of Ramsey Campbell, Robert Bloch and Nyarlathotep. The volume is completed by appreciations of Joel's essays, poetry, short stories and novels.

'The Autumn Myth' attempts a reality check on the myths and dreams that permeate our world. It attacks the culture of political and corporate mendacity in modern Britain, then goes on to consider the more ambiguous myths that sustain our personal lives. The poems explore the human experience of time, the lessons of grief and the evocative power of music. They look beyond a bitter society governed by lies towards a more creative use of imagination. The title poem suggests that global warming has eradicated autumn - and Lane's third collection celebrates an October of the heart, a revolutionary glow.

'The Autumn Myth' attempts a reality check on the myths and dreams that permeate our world. It attacks the culture of political and corporate mendacity in modern Britain, then goes on to consider the more ambiguous myths that sustain our personal lives. The poems explore the human experience of time, the lessons of grief and the evocative power of music. They look beyond a bitter society governed by lies towards a more creative use of imagination. The title poem suggests that global warming has eradicated autumn - and Lane's third collection celebrates an October of the heart, a revolutionary glow.

Trouble in the Heartland, Joel Lane's second poetry collection, inhabits the same West Midlands landscape as his first collection, The Edge of the Screen (Arc, 1999) - a landscape of urban decay, violence, loneliness, abuse, addiction and chaos. Chaos is a particularly prominent theme in this book; in the first section, the chaos is around us, in the second, inside us, while the third and final section attempts to draw the outer and inner worlds together in order to make sense of the whole. For all its unrelenting subject matter, this is a surprisingly optimistic book - carefully observed, sensitive and grimly witty - and one that will confirm Joel Lane's considerable talents as a poet.

Osta kirja Midnight Blue Joel Lane (ISBN 9798895152843) osoitteesta Adlibris.com/fi. Ilmainen toimitus yli 29,00 €. Adlibriksen valikoimissa on miljoonia kirjoja, löydä seuraava lukuelämyksesi jo tänään! Aina edulliset hinnat, ilmainen toimitus yli 29,00 € tilauksiin yksityisasiakkaille ja nopea toimitus.