The Lost District
Joel Lane

‘Joel Lane’s imagination is bleak. But it is also the imagination of a poet... These stories are a kind of political gothic; but they’re also a look at the contemporary soul, depicted as a collision between Jacob’s Ladder and the 24-hour news channel: this renders them so genuinely horrific you want to look away. Too late. You’re hooked.’
– M. John Harrison, author of Wish I Was Here

‘As a critic of the macabre, in closeness of reading and clarity of insight, Joel Lane is unsurpassed. As a fiction writer he’s just as intelligent and keen-eyed. His prose is spare and sharp, his vision is bracingly bleak. He’s one of the absolute treasures of our field.’
– Ramsey Campbell

‘Nothing ever changes. We just tell ourselves it does.’

Set in a post-industrial landscape of the present, the near future, and the imagined, Joel Lane’s seminal collection The Lost District explores human encounters with the unknown: sexual discovery, drug-inspired visions, the lonely paths of madness, and the shadow realms on the other side of death.

A neighbourhood fades into corrupt echoes of itself; a porn actor’s scars reveal the forces controlling his life; a musician is haunted by the madness of a deceased singer; and a man literally follows his ex-lover to the end of the world.

Ranging from grim urban horror to strange erotic fantasies to bitter allegories of loss and exploitation, the stories in The Lost District link the hidden places in the urban and small-town landscapes to the secret spaces inside all of us.

First published in the USA in 2006, and long out-of-print, The Lost District has never been published in the UK until now, further enforcing Joel Lane’s reputation as one of the most significant and distinctive British writers of the weird.

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY CONRAD WILLIAMS

Praise for The Lost District and Joel Lane

‘Joel Lane draws us into an alarming world where the simple realities of his characters’ lives are liable to give way, at the turn of a page, to strange miracles and surreal horrors described in a language of almost visionary intensity.’
– Jonathan Coe, author of The Rotters’ Club

‘Joel Lane is a master at creating moods of disturbing and disorientating strangeness set against backgrounds of urban decay.’
– Karl Edward Wagner, author of In a Lonely Place

‘Joel Lane has quietly and prolifically built up a body of work that has brilliantly chronicled lives led in the wastelands of the UK, as well as charting some of the awful territories that exist within all of us. His prose is honest, unflinching and horribly gorgeous. In my opinion, he is a writer without equal.’
– Conrad Williams, author of London Revenant

‘Joel Lane’s writing is rich, beautiful and painfully perceptive, and he is without doubt one of the finest fantasists writing today.’
– Tim Lebbon, author of The Silence

‘Joel Lane’s writing has the quality of dark glass shattered and reconstituted.’
– Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland

‘Joel Lane is engaged in the task of pinning back the wings of darkness. In this he is protected by the amulets of resolute, precise writing and an unflinching moral eye. The effect is one of remarkable deliverance. This is a stunning collection from one of the very finest short story writers working today.’
– Graham Joyce, author of The Limits of Enchantment

‘If you haven’t read Joel Lane, you have no idea how beautiful dark fiction can be.’
– Michael Marshall Smith, author of Blood of Angels

‘The reader of a Lane story can never escape the feeling of being located squarely in banal reality. It’s this that makes any intrusion of the supernatural so shockingly effective – because the picture he creates is so palpable, and because we recognise some version of these lonely streets from our real lives.’
– Sublime Horror

‘A poet of misfits, outsiders and the forsaken, his empathy for their suffering ever poignant. A cartographer of Birmingham and the Black Country as necropolis and weird edgeland. A chronicler of subcultures and the urban esoteric. An intelligent radical and one of the best British post-war writers of horror and the weird. I would go to considerable lengths to acquire his books when he was alive, but, at last, his new and future readership won't have to. Joel Lane will endure for as long as there is interest in visionary writers of quality.’
– Adam Nevill, Author of The Ritual.

‘Lane has blended the dark, decaying industrial Birmingham… to paint… an intriguing, if not a little foreboding, place. Dark stuff indeed.’
– The Barcelona Review

About the Author

Joel Lane was the author of two novels, From Blue to Black and The Blue Mask; several short story collections, The Earth Wire, The Lost District, The Terrible Changes, Do Not Pass Go, Where Furnaces Burn, The Anniversary of Never and Scar City; a novella, The Witnesses Are Gone; and four volumes of poetry, The Edge of the Screen, Trouble in the Heartland, The Autumn Myth and Instinct. He edited three anthologies of short stories, Birmingham Noir (with Steve Bishop), Beneath the Ground and Never Again (with Allyson Bird). He won an Eric Gregory Award, two British Fantasy Awards and a World Fantasy Award. Born in Exeter in 1963, he lived most of his life in Birmingham, where he died in 2013.

Paperback ISBN: 9781910312186

Ebook ISBN: 9781910312193

Publication date: May 2024

Formats: Paperback / eBook