Two Novels by Joel Lane

Influx Press have announced pre-orders for the welcome republication of two novels by Joel Lane:

From Blue to Black 

Birmingham, early 1990s. Triangle are a cult act on the post-punk scene, led by brilliant and troubled vocalist Karl – a man haunted by past violence and present danger, torn between fame and oblivion, men and women, music and silence. 

With a new introduction by Kerry Hadley-Pryce.

The Witnesses Are Gone

Moving into an old and decaying house, Martin Swann discovers a box of video cassettes in the garden shed. One of them is a bootleg copy of a morbid and disturbing film by obscure French director, Jean Rien. The discovery leads Martin on a search for the director’s other films . . . drawing him away from his home and his lover into a shadowy realm of secrets, rituals and creeping decay. 

With a new introduction by M. John Harrison. 

The novels share the qualities of his strongly-imagined short stories of urban decay, uncanny desolation and the poetic macabre. 

Joel Lane's writing is informed by his thoughtful understanding of the weird fiction tradition, as in the essays collected in This Spectacular Darkness. As Phil Baker noted in the Times Literary Supplement, 'Joel Lane . . . was an exceptionally astute and sympathetic critic of supernatural horror . . . For Lane, worthwhile supernatural horror is always about something more: a displacement and distillation that crystallizes human situations in a moment of of metaphorical truth'.

(Mark Valentine)