Sheer brilliance. Not an easy or comfortable read, but worth the effort for the pared-down prose, atmospheric descriptions, hauntingly-portrayed characters, and oddly monochrome colour scheme, which is broken by sudden bursts of orange and red in a way that mirrors the shocking events of the plot.

sharply written and slyly funny: 'their haircuts alone were enough to get them signed to Creation.'

How to sum up the experience of reading From Blue to Black? Joel Lane's writing leaves me speechless. By the time I got to the end of the book, I had dog-eared so many pages that one corner was almost twice as thick as the rest.In the early 1990s, a Birmingham indie band called Triangle begin to achieve modest success. Their singer, Karl, is talented but troubled – and if that's a cliche, it's a cliche every character in the book is uncomfortably aware of. The story is narrated by David, the ban...

Hooked on Joel Lane's writing after picking up his collection Where Furnaces Burn at Fantasycon in Scarborough, I went and tracked down a second-hand copy of his debut novel From Blue to Black, the story of a cult Birmingham post-punk band around the time of the Tory reelection of 1992. Though not falling into the weird fiction category Joel Lane is known best for, stylistically this is very similar to Where Furnaces Burn in its hard-edged but beautiful descriptions of Britain’s post-industrial

Joel Lane is a writer wholly new to me, and there's nothing more exciting about encountering an author for the first time and thinking "my God, who are you and where have you been my whole life?"The best way I can describe the prose of From Blue to Black is cold. Cold and colorless, which does not necessarily sound like a compliment, I know, but it matches both the setting and the music of the band (perhaps the only band book I've ever read where the prose matches the style of the music) and jus...

The title of this book is wonderfully appropriate, both in its suggestion of the book’s noir genre and in its reflection of the incredible monochromatic atmosphere Joel Lane conjures up.Because there is almost no colour in his narrative. Everything described is either black, white or in endless shades of gray, with only the occasional explosion of vivid colour (a pink sunset, a blaze of orange fire) to break the monotony. But this isn’t a criticism, since the device captures the mood of the nove...

Oh wow. Not often does a book take me utterly surprised.I wasn't expecting much from this music fanboy novel (I'm not well versed in music fandom in general, which left me a bit lost before I Wikipediaed and Youtubed the songs mentioned, after which things began to shape together) - but WOW, I was so surprised that what I was actually reading about was the story of a LGBT rock band inspired by Morrisey or something.It's not like they warn you that the characters come out of the closet randomly a...

Just like the Midlands this is a brutal place to find yourself. A story of youth, of love and of finding your way. I found myself smiling at his way with words, aching for my teenage years, craving live music and those not-so-fleeting connections with friends and lovers and.

This book stunned me the first time I read it.In fact I can't think of a novel that has affected me in quite the same way. It literally lived with me for weeks afterwards.Joel Lane's words are precise, skilfully deployed and devastating.The novel has a strong sense of place, weaving the collapse of relationships, cities, communities and characters minds together. The effect is almost dreamlike but also unnerving. This is a tale of the industrial heartland. A tale of love, loss, powerlessness, po...

Very well - if ever so slightly over-earnestly - written (but that’s only if I am being harsh). Affecting, evocative and bleakly romantic.

Umm, this is why you don't date someone you work with.Seriously: I tend to be severely disappointed with novels by authors whose short stories I admire. I'm a huge fan of a lot of Lane's short fiction, so I've consciously avoided his first novel for awhile. The writing is typical Lane, a little too dense with detail for my usual taste, but always thoughtful, largely cliche free, and engaging. (Maybe it helps that I've spent time in depressing '90s Birmingham; have you been to Erdington? New Stre...

Rating: 3.5 starsI'm not even sure how to get into this book. It took me forever to read. And I mean forever. Normally, it bugs me if I leave a book half read for too long but this one just didn't call me back. At all.The writing style just bored me to death. Even when something major was happening I could just feel the need to yawn and 'rest my eyes'. And this languid feel was made worse by the fact I normally read before bed so the way it was written made it really hard for me to stay awake. U...

I didn’t get on with this novel when I first read it. I’m not sure why. It may have been because I didn’t want to read about people who had a creative outlet for their nihilism. Whatever the reason, revisiting it now, I can see why Joel Lane’s work is so loved (the novel has just been re-issued, 20 years after its first publication.) First, that outlet. From Blue to Black has as its central characters two members of a post-punk band, and it’s their immersion in music that ameliorates an otherwis...

"Nobody really belongs anywhere. I don't think we go where we belong when we die. It's more like...like the airwaves, messages drifting around. That's what left of us, messages."The latest release from Influx Press is a reprint of the 2000 Joel Lane novel From Blue to Black. Taking place in Birmingham in the early 1990s, Triangle is a cult post-punk band led by singer-guitarist Karl who is haunted be ghosts and dangers. When David joins the band to play bass, it begins a passionate and torrid af...

appreciate the bassist representation but nobody talks about music the way anyone in this does

I feel like I fell asleep listening to Bauhaus and this was a dark fantasy my mind created for me 🖤

A couple of years ago I went through a phase of buying books with 'Blue' in the title, whether or not I'd heard of them. 90% of the time, the books were excellent, introducing me to authors I subsequently pursued (John Lawton top of the list, and Simone Bucholz a later example).This I might not have come across were it not for Tess Makovesky's recommendation, and certainly not found so much to enjoy had it not been for Nick Davies ensuring I kept in touch with 1990's music, as well as visited Bi...

DNF at ~70%. Had this been a memoir of a band I was fond of (or even vaguely familiar with) it might’ve held my interest. Had this had a plot any more detailed than ‘rock band drink, argue, fuck, play music, get introspective and argue some more’, it might have held my interest. As it was, all the characters I didn’t develop any interest in, all the verisimilitude felt like padding for the repetition, and reading about sex and drugs and rock and roll is much less fun than I recall living it was

Any contemporary fiction fans that also have a thing for the late 80s-early 90s Brit music scene should get a hold of this book. In the end I felt as if the band Triangle had actually existed and I had actually heard their songs and been to their gigs. Describing music through words is no easy task but Joel Lave pulls it off wonderfully, combining it with a dark fiction twist in a post-industrial Midlands setting. Pairings like that can easily go wrong, but in this case, the result is hauntingly...

From Blue to Black tells of the rise of Triangle, a fictional power trio, making dark, dissonant rock music in 1990's Birmingham. It is also a love story of sorts. Karl, the group's haunted, alcoholic, bisexual lead singer/guitarist, and David, their new bass player become lovers the night they meet. Their doomed affair, and Karl's descent into addiction and mental illness, plays out against (and is expertly mirrored by) the bleak industrial landscape of Northern England. First time novelist Lan...