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This is my first foray into the world of the late Joel Lane, an author who seems to have influenced a number of contemporary horror writers. His world is a land of run down housing estates, ugly industrial units and factories, constructed of concrete, brick and tarmac. This bleak landscape is mostly found around the suburbs of Birmingham and the Black Country and is populated by a cast of characters who have apparently also been abandoned by society. The writing is bleak and depressing at times
Beautiful and brutal. This was my introduction to the writing of Joel Lane. Uniquely grim stuff. Looking forward to reading more.
(4.5 stars)Joel lane was--and through his work, still is--the unofficial critic and poet of the UK's urban decay. His stories represent the union of visionary imagination and social conscience, a coexistence of qualities which indicate his balanced engagement with collective life and inner experience."Keep the Night" gives a meta-performative turn to the rampant sex and violence of city life, by following a lost train-rider's accidental attendance of what seems to be an S&M meat puppet show. "Fe...
This collection – the last to be assembled before the author's death in 2013 – is harsher and more brutal than anything else I have read by Lane. I'd also say it is less thematically coherent, though the style remains very distinctive due to Lane's frequent use of motifs.Scar City was reissued this year by Influx Press, along with Lane's debut collection, The Earth Wire, from 1994. There's something uncanny about jumping from one to the other: the writing is familiar, the stories' concepts and c...
Originally published at Risingshadow.Joel Lane (1963-2013) was one of the best and most talented authors of horror fiction and weird fiction. It's sad that he died, because he wrote excellent and memorable stories that were praised by critics and readers alike. Nobody can deny how much his stories influenced and impressed those who read them, because they were exceptionally good. He will be missed.Scar City is an intriguing glimpse into Joel Lane's short fiction. All of stories in this collectio...
I had a lot of reservations with Where Furnaces Burn, and was a little wary about this collection. But many of the stories are vintage Joel Lane. In "Those Who Remember", Lane keeps us guessing about the nature of the narrator's mysterious rendezvous. Small dark details add to the increasingly ominous picture. The final ritual and implications are unexpected, cryptic, and powerful. I would type in the final paragraph as yet another example of Lane's distinctive prose, but you should really read
Grim, bleak, poignant - a really powerful collection of stories, mostly about people trying to escape to somewhere else, and succeeding, only to find things even worse there than they were where they started off from. Lane's prose is a flensing knife - it'll strip you of your skin.
Oh, the bleakness...
Scar City is a collection of dark urban fantasy short stories which are intense and often quite depressing and weird. The stories are revolved around troubled people and difficult circumstances. I really enjoyed his writing style as he fragilely covered each subject matter. These are difficult stories with the charaters trying to make sense of and cope with their daily lives. My favourites were - The Greif of Seagulls, Those Who Remember, The Willow Pattern, Echoland and Making Babies. I highly
This collection of stories contains some of the bleakest writing I've ever read, there is a reoccurring theme of wastelands which is used in some very inventive ways. From lands on the brink of death to an aging vampire everything is starting to decay and when writing about something mundane Lane manages to create a haunting quality that leaves you with chills. Lane gives nothing away in his tales, you can guess how it is going to end but I can guarantee you'll be wrong there is no way you can m...
I'm gradually nearing the end of having read everything Joel Lane wrote and that's a sobering thought. Whilst his stories are bleak, fractured dissections of characters inhabiting equally bleak and fractured worlds, there is also an indisputable charm in a Lane story: an admiration of how less is more, of the sly sense of humour which undercuts some of the tragedy, with an appreciation of the horror Lane depicts which is rendered from broken society and inner demons rather than any outwardly - s...
Contents:009 - Publisher’s Note and Bibliographic Data013 - Foreword by Alexander Zelenyj: Echoes from the Place We Met017 = "Those Who Remember"027 - "In This Blue Shade"035 - "A Far Away City"047 - "The Willow Pattern"057 - "Echoland"067 - "This Night Last Woman"075 - "Birds of Prey"085 - "The Last Gallery"093 - "Making Babies"101 - "Keep the Night"109 - "My Voice Is Dead"121 - "A Hairline Cut"125 - "The Long Shift"135 - "Internal Colonies"143 - "Among the Leaves"151 - "The Grief of Seagulls"1...
This, perhaps coupled with the previous work, is an almost unbearable coda of the whole book. It is typical in that it contains many brilliant darkly poetic phrases that might stay with you more powerfully and longer than you’d might otherwise wish. It also contains the odd rare simile that doesn’t quite work like: “The breath trailed from my mouth like an apology for ectoplasm.” It has it own trademark reference to scars, too, here on the protagonist’s inside arm, as, even, there was a “scarred...
