6 books by Joel Lane
Requirements: Epub reader, 2.45 Mb
Overview: Long considered one of the UK’s premier wordsmiths of dark fantasy and horror, Joel Lane died unexpectedly just a few weeks after the book you now hold won the coveted World Fantasy Award for Best Collection, thereby putting a tragic and brutal end to a career that looked set to blossom. He was 50 years old. Joel was the author of three other collections of supernatural horror stories (The Earth Wire, The Lost District and The Terrible Changes) plus a weird novella (The Witnesses Are Gone–also from PS), three collections of poems (The Edge of the Screen, Trouble in the Heartland and The Autumn Myth), a booklet of crime stories (Do Not Pass Go), a chapbook (Black Country) and a pamphlet of erotic poems (Instinct). He also edited an anthology of subterranean horror tales (Beneath the Ground) and co-edited an anthology of urban crime and suspense stories (Birmingham Noir, with Steve Bishop) and an anthology of weird and speculative fiction stories against racism and fascism (Never Again, with Allyson Bird). Projects considered forthcoming in the autumn of 2013 included a book of essays on classic weird fiction authors (This Spectacular Darkness), a collection of metaphysical ghost stories (The Anniversary of Never) and a crime novel about bootleg alcohol (Black Label). Whether any or part of these will now appear is not currently known.
Genre: Fantasy, Horror, Short Stories
Scar City
A new collection from one of the most powerful voices in slipstream and horror writing is a significant event. This collection of twenty two stories was one of the last that Joel Lane put together before his death in 2013. Frequently taking the form of dark urban fantasy, with his home city of Birmingham as their nucleus, these are intense and often painful stories that linger in the mind for a long time.
These stories are populated by troubled people living troubled lives in troubled places. A pervasive melancholia overhangs the tales, and seeps its way into their fabric (in tandem with the copious amounts of alcohol imbibed by their complicated characters trying to make sense of and otherwise cope with their circumstances). These tales, then, wear their scars plainly, and it’s this fragile, fractured quality which imbues them with their beauty. They are difficult stories, but then they have to be, considering their subject matter.
The Anniversary of Never
Joel Lane’s award-winning stories have been widely praised, notably by other masters of weird fiction such as M. John Harrison, Graham Joyce, and Ramsey Campbell. His tales also regularly appeared in the “best of” annual anthologies of Ellen Datlow, Karl Edward Wagner, and Stephen Jones. With this posthumous collection, Lane continues his unflinching exploration of the human condition.
“The Anniversary of Never is a group of tales concerned with the theme of the afterlife,” observed Lane, “and the idea that we may enter the afterlife before death, or find parts of it in our world.” These stories of love and death will burrow deep into the reader’s mind and impregnate it with a vision often as bleak as the night is black.
The Lost District
A collection of fantastic and horrific stories that deal thematically address the core relationships of ones life, be they parental, first loves, best friends, or lovers (of both the hetero and homosexual variety). The decaying industrial backdrop of England’s midlands provides a working class context that is both uniquely English, but universally accessible.
The Terrible Changes
In midwinter, an aspiring politician finds himself suddenly deprived of human contact. A group of newcomers to a town are strangely reminiscent of people lost in a recent flood. In a world where grief is forbidden, a young man builds a mound to commemorate his lover. An obsessive reader of Poe enters the world of his idol’s stories. 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.
Joel Lane’s short stories combine the supernatural with themes of human loss, passion, solitude and despair. The complexity of the urban landscape provides a background to stories in which nothing can be relied upon. Ghosts and visions are an inevitable part of a reality where facts are uncertain, loyalties are divided, and the unknown is always close at hand. In Lane’s fiction, the weird is a symbolic language that expresses the chilling beauty, sadness and mystery of real life.
The Witnesses Are Gone
The Witnesses Are Gone is a first-hand account of a journey into the underworld in all the wrong places. Martin Swann, its narrator, moves into an old house and finds a box of videocassettes in the garden shed. One of them has a bootleg copy of a morbid and disturbing film by a little-known French director, Jean Rien.
Where Furnaces Burn
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 lead the police to 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.
Download Instructions:
http://gestyy.com/wXOfr7
http://gestyy.com/wXOftw
