Where Furnaces Burn

Joel Lane
Influx Press

Episodes from the casebook of a police officer in the West Midlands.
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.
First published in 2012, Joel Lane’s World Fantasy Award-winning collection is a true modern classic of weird fiction that cemented his place as one of the most important and distinctive British writers of the weird.

I read my first Joel Lane book - 'The Earth Wire and Other Stories' - in 2022 and have picked up a couple of these nice new Influx Press editions since but this is the first I've had the opportunity to get stuck into and being a occult detective collection it was always going to be somewhere near the top of the tbr pile.

The 26 stories here follow the trials and travails of a copper in what's known as 'The Black Country' - the post-industrial, urban sprawl around the city of Wolverhampton in the West Midlands - as he navigates an unfortunate affinity for cases of a distinctinctly weird and supernatural nature.

Lane was a fabulously gifted writer and the stories here are wonderfully strange.  As you progress through the 26 tales you can feel the strain our hero is under pulling at the threads of his life and sanity.  He's dragged deeper and deeper into, sometimes literal, underworlds, navigating cases of abduction, of dismemberment, of loss, of neglect, of ghosts and of gods.

The only problem I had is that these stories - many of which appeared in various journals and anthologies - are very short and follow a distinct pattern so when read together they do start to feel a little samey but spread out and peppered in amongst other writers / stories they made for a great read.

..........................................................................................

If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

Affiliate links are provided for your convenience and to help mitigate running costs.

The Earth Wire and Other Stories

Joel Lane
Influx Press

Joel Lane (1963–2013) was one of the UK's foremost writers of dark, unsettling fiction, a frank explorer of sexuality and the transgressive aspects of human nature. With a tight focus on the post-industrial Black Country and his home city of Birmingham, he created a distinct form of British urban weird fiction.
His debut collection, The Earth Wire was first published in 1994 by Egerton Press and is reissued in paperback by Influx Press for the first time in over twenty-five years.
Love and death. Sex and despair. The Earth Wire is a thrilling, disturbing examination of the means and the cost of survival.

Unfortunately I never got to read Lane's stories when he was alive but I know he was held in high regard by a number of folks I know and admire so when I heard that some of his work was being reprinted by Influx Press I grabbed two of the collections that intrigued me the most.  

This first collection was originally published in 1994 a time most assuredly reflected in the pessimism at the heart of many of the stories.  These are stories formed out of the stifling confines of - at that point - 15 years of Tory government. When to be poor or to be different was to be less and when for many people - myself included - to be anything other was to be as impossible as it was unthinkable.  Lane's characters exist in the dark and claustrophobic confines of a post Thatcher Britain that has fallen even further into dismal fascistic hell than it thankfully did. Confronting Lane's characters isn't the mask of gurning buffoonary we are currently subjected to but the shaven headed, booted thuggery we came to know in the 70s and 80s returned.  

These stories though aren't solely social and political fiction this is weird fiction of the highest order.  Taking his cues from the likes of Robert Aickman and M. John Harrison Lane's characters exist in worlds of confusion, delusion, transformation and hallucination.  His stories are succinct and beautifully strange often dropping us into a broken reality tantalisingly familiar yet deliriously other.

..........................................................................................

If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

Affiliate links are provided for your convenience and to help mitigate running costs.