Too dark and grim for me these days, couldn’t finish it...

I finished Joel Lane's Where Furnaces Burn a few days ago. It took me a while as I wanted to savour it. Joel's stories work best when you can finish them and then give them the consideration they expect and deserve, so it was a stop/start kind of read.What set this apart from his previous collections however was the central premise of a Birmingham police officer's career investigating strange cases. It gives the stories a narrative drive that most short fiction collections don't have, and it's w...

One of the finest collections of urban weird tales you could wish for. The bleak horror of David Peace's Yorkshire is leavened with political insight and a chilly compassion in a series of vignettes which show again and again the atavistic nastiness beneath the surface of 'civilised' society. There are intelligent and original twists on old myths (notably the werewolf), but more importantly, the mixture of policing and strangeness never jars - this is a long way from 'Kolchak's Monster of the We...

This has the familiar Joel Lane touches: the clean, matter-of-fact prose; the post-industrial depression of the Midlands; plucky characters trying to get by in challenging circumstances; the promise and often unsatisfactory outcomes of sexual encounters; violent events that may have some supernatural agency. At first I wasn't sure about the narrator shared by the stories, and their brief lengths (some early pieces are just 3-4 pages). But there are some terrifically unsettling ideas here, and th...

Well I've found a new favorite weird fiction author. This is so good I'm amazed this author wasn't bigger on my radar. I think Lane's work ranks with the best of my favorite weird authors like Simon Strantzas, Brian Evenson, Cody Goodfellow, Livia Llewellyn and others. It's very unfortunate Lane died almost three years ago now, a very talented writer, and by the tributes that I've read, a great man and friend.These are some of the most emotionally impactful weird stories I've ever read. In this

Reading this was a bittersweet pleasure.I knew Joel for many years. During this time I read his poetry, his two published novels - and the manuscript of a third novel that never found a home. I particularly admire the bleak controlled beauty of his poems: there is much of the same lyrical bleakness in the short fictions which are collected here.There is a melancholy pleasure in recognising the landscape of my home city and its surroundings within these stories. At a time when Birmingham desperat...

A bit of a lost gem of British weird fiction, despite having won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection back in 2013. It's hard to get hold of a copy now, but if you can, you're in for a treat. Joel Lane is widely respected among the weird fiction/horror community, and it's easy to see why. These stories are tight, strange, and hugely unsettling, as well as painting a surprisingly coherent picture of Birmingham and its surrounds as a modern Gothic landscape, haunted by lost souls and otherw...

Update: Joel has died in his sleep aged 50. I'm shattered by his death, shocked. He was a great writer and his work should be better known.. The stories in Joel's latest collection are linked, being from the casebook of a police officer from the West Midlands. But I have read some of them (he's in the writer's group I attend) and they are not as straightforward as that summary suggests. No, they are as weird and unsettling as ever. Looking forward to reading the lot.....last night at the group J...

This was my first experience of Joel Lane and I am left speechless. "Where Furnaces Burn" follows a Police Officer through the tumultuous years of his life and the supernatural cases that have changed him, culminating in his exodus and reincarnation. Incredible writing that captures the sick heart of the Black Country and insidious effects it has on its people.

4½ stars

Originally published at Risingshadow.This review is based on a PDF ARC.Joel Lane's Where Furnaces Burn caught my attention a couple of months ago when I was looking for new and interesting dark fantasy and horror short story collections to read. A friend of mine most warmly recommended this collection to me, because he knew that I'm a big fan of well written dark fantasy and horror fiction, so I decided to read and review it. I'm glad that I had a chance to review this collection, because it tur...

Dragnet by way of the urban apocalypse.Or maybe, if you want a more recent reference, True Detective with the characters plagued by supernatural elements.And, oh by the way, this collection won the World Fantasy award in 2013.This is a short story collection, but it has the heft of a novel, because each story represents a different case explored by a police officer over his 24 years in the service, told in chronological order. These are gritty tales set in the region around Birmingham, England.

Moldy dreamland. If Alice goes down the rabbit hole, the policeman in these stories goes down a rotting tunnel slick with silt and mold and populated with body parts wrapped in newspaper or stuffed with rat poison. Quiet and chilly and mesmerizing. Reads almost like a novel with chapters scattered in time.

I was immediately hooked by the blurb on the back of this collection – ‘Blending the occult detective story with urban noir fiction, Where Furnaces Burn offers a glimpse of the myths and terrors buried within the industrial landscape’.These short stories are a dark and downbeat blend of weird fiction and urban-landscape writing, from a police perspective (for, I suspect, the reason that police have both access to, and a certain detachment from, society’s horrors), tackling the West Midlands as i...

This was hard work. For a start (which matters to me more than it must do to some) the physical book itself was amateur - too-tight margins and bright white paper - but also this didn't feel like a collection of short stories so much as an assemblage of repetitive potential scenes for several novels, almost all of which involves violence and gruesome bloodshed, which got a bit much after a while, hence the age it's take to get through it.Disappointing.

I've always enjoyed Joel's stories and had the privilege of meeting and publishing him on a number of occasions (a story in this collection, "Incry", was published in the British Fantasy Society magazine, New Horizons, when I was editor), so it was no surprise to me that this was a powerful read. The stories in here are particularly excellent, however, as unlike his other collections they feature a single protagonist - a cop - and this thematic thread consolidates the read, adding a greater, cum...

A great great book. RIP Joel Lane.The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long to post here.Above is its conclusion.

On November 26, the weird fiction community had a shock when writer Joel Lane passed away in his sleep. I never had the chance to know him on a personal level, but his work was powerful, every story of his left an impression on me. A few days before his passing I picked up Where Furnaces Burn, which won the World Fantasy Award for best collection only a few weeks earlier.Where Furnaces Burn consists of twenty-six short stories, some new for the collection and others having been published previou...

Supernatural detective stories with shades of Ligotti and Barker; this deserved the World Fantasy Award. Lane deserves to have a much larger readership (and in time no doubt will, film rights anyone?), and this might be the best 'horror' book I've read in a few years. If you liked True Detective and don't mind truly mysterious, metaphoric, and weird denouements, then you might love this as much as I did.

WHERE FURNACES BURN is one of the best single-author collections of horror fiction I've read. Even though I've read most of these stories before in other collections and magazines (I often buy the latter because Joel Lane has a story in them), they're compiled here with a unique chronology and continuity so I enjoyed them even more second time around. Some of the most original horror I've come across, blended with police investigations and urban tragedy (all set in my home town), and so well-wri...