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I found the critical acclaim for this volume of stories to be fairly baffling. I had read a couple of Lane stories elsewhere that I enjoyed that led me to this first collection. But I remember feeling after about the fifth or sixth story that if I was going to read another description of a blasted city landscape replete with crumbling brick and strewn rubbish I was going to start screaming. It isn't just that many of these stories start and then stop with me wondering what was supposed to have h...
Joel Lane once again explores love, death, sex and despair in seventeen brillaint short stories focusing on bleak topics and urban settings, Lane constructs these stories with powerful word choice and distinctive characters.
Joel Lane’s first collection of short stories does not read like the work of a beginning writer. Either Lane wrote hundreds of unpublished stories before he wrote these or his gift simply sprang fully formed onto the page. This is also not an easy collection to categorize. To call it 'horror', 'weird', or 'urban fantasy' would be a misnomer, and would likely cause some potential readers to turn away. But you should not turn away, for these stories are worth your time. They are also not always bl...
I'm not sure why I can't merge my notes from the e-book into this.More notes here:https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
Joel Lane's first collection, first published in 1994 and out of print until this new edition from Influx Press. Like his first novel, the superb From Blue to Black, it seems preternaturally assured and feels like the work of a much more experienced writer. The hallmarks of his whole body of work are already in place: the cool, measured tone; Birmingham locations; political undertones; sense of loneliness; elements of the weird and supernatural accepted as ordinary by the characters. Indeed, the...
Few authors were ever able to incorporate the setting of their stories into the general atmosphere of the story to the degree Joel Lane was able to do so. The industrial wastelands, especially of the North of England, are the favorite location of Lane's dark tales. Profound loneliness is the primary characteristic exhibited by Lane's characters. They are hopeless, searching, and lost in depths of their own despair. If this sounds like a bleak collection of stories, it is. Yet Lane's writing is o...
Probably one of the most depressing books I have ever read. A batch of marginally supernatural stories set in a near future dystopian England. The stories are about brokenness: physical, mental, interior, exterior. England is a grey mass of broken factories, mines, tenements, streets and shops. The streets are full of Clockwork Orange type youth and skinheads and the police run wild. Both urban and rural landscapes are in ruins. Amidst the backdrop are individuals groping for meaning and contact...
After reading the phenomenal From Blue to Black, I was desperate to read more of Joel Lane, despite his usual genre (dark fantasy/fantasy horror) admittedly not being my thing at all- hence why Gaiman and Lovecraft have always left me cold. I like horror, but I like it more on the "realistic" side, I think. And yet, I really enjoyed my time in Lane's strange, dreamlike Birmingham. Even in this debut collection, his prose style remains consistent, and consistently good. I'm in love with the cold,...
2.5 stars
Uneven (and in some ways repetitive), but "Wave Scars," "An Angry Voice," and "The Foggy, Foggy Dew" are strong works of short fiction.
really great collection of short stories, so good at creating a sense of placeloved how empathetic and inescapably sad some of the stories are, you can feel the consequences of Thatcherism in the bones of this books and Lane's vision of Britain
I feel a bit bad about reviewing this book, my word knowledge just isn’t good enough to explain what this book does to the reader….but here goes my best attempt.Lane’s debut collection would have shown anybody who picked up this book just what a good writer he was, such a unique style that will turn your world upside down, make your insides hurt and leave you desperate for more understanding of what you just read. One thought kept popping up in my head during this reading, I kept thinking this i...
I've long been a fan of the late Joel Lane's fiction and have almost all of his books, however "The Earth Wire" (originally published in 1994) had eluded me until this new edition from Influx Press. Considering these stories were written over twenty-five years ago I was a little surprised that the quality matched his later input - indicative that Lane was a consistently strong writer through his published career. There are no signs of a fledgling here, but of someone already in full flight. Desp...
3.75 ⭐
Superb collection of stories - long out of print and hard to get hold of - by a writer who, although I didn't realise it, was someone whose work I had long admired and liked when I came across it in anthologies like Stephen Jones's 'Best Horror of...'. Having said that I would stress that the stories in this collection, and Mr. Lane's other writings while they can accurately be described as horror, or weird or fantasy, this should not lead anyone to pass them by as 'genre' - indeed I find some o...
An unsettling collection of weird stories set in the Midlands.
Probably about as good a short story collection as could have been expected at the time and it seems to hold up even better now, a quarter of a century on. Lane's writing is bound to alienate a lot of people. It's set in a perpetually unfashionable corner of England (Oldbury is rarely more than half an hour away on the bus), frequently revolves around gay characters and, even when there's no overt fantasy or dystopian element, there's a distinctly Lovecraftian atmosphere. All those who love this...
