Midnight Blue
Joel Lane
‘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.
‘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
Vincent Black, Scottish-Brummie sound engineer and aspiring folk singer, is turning fifty. A Communist, former train engineer, and a heroin addict who took his name from the Richard Thompson song ‘Vincent Black Lightning 1952’, he is obsessed with mystical dreams about dead singers such as Nico, Sandy Denny, and Janis Joplin.
After the drug-related deaths of a number of Vincent’s friends leave him confused and frightened, he tries to deal with his sense of loss by playing music, and by escaping into a romantic affair with a younger woman who is just his type: artistic, spiritual and possessed of a sense of humour. Then, she disappears under mysterious circumstances.
And when a lover from his student days begins stalking him, Vincent is panic-stricken – because that person is supposed to be dead…
Midnight Blue is Joel Lane’s third and final novel, never published until now, completing the informal trilogy that began with From Blue to Black and continued in The Blue Mask.
Fueled by a passion for music–especially the protest songs and traditional ballads of British folk–and the fullest expression of Lane’s allegiance to socialism and how left-wing politics intersect with creativity, Midnight Blue is the coda to a remarkable career of a writer now beginning to gain the critical praise he deserved.
Praise for 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
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: 9781914391071
Ebook ISBN: 9781914391088
Publication date: May 2025
Formats: Paperback / eBook