The Blue Mask
Joel Lane

'Joel Lane's writing has the quality of dark glass shattered.' 
– Joseph O'Neill, author of Netherland 

'A novel of considerable power, its gritty drama of damage and disillusion well served by a hard-edged and often vigorously compelling prose style… an undeniably dark novel, yet its explorations move us towards a clearer view of the unsettling world we inhabit.’
– Guardian

Neil is a student at Birmingham University, living a typical life of gigs, clubs, politics, sex. 

One night, after a row with his lover, Neil follows a stranger onto a canal towpath. The stranger turns on him and attacks, viciously carving up Neil’s face and leaving him mutilated beyond recognition. 

Neil’s recovery is a journey through surgical reconstruction and sexual alienation. His attempt to track down his attacker becoming a search for his own hidden, destructive self; a search that leads him to question values he had always taken for granted. 

First published in 2003 and long out-of-print, The Blue Mask is a hardcore emotional trip exploring the trauma of change and the nature of violence and of love. 

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY JOSEPH O’NEILL

Praise for The Blue Mask and Joel Lane

‘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.

'A master of urban noir whose stories also have a brittle poetry and a deep humanity. We may find ourselves among wastelands of disused factories, derelict houses and shuttered shops, but we also encounter there an uncanny beauty.'
– Wormwoodiana

‘Stories as urgent and uncomfortable and ultimately transcendent as they were when they were written.’
– Nina Allan, on The Earth Wire

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: 9781914391057

Ebook ISBN: 9781914391064

Publication date: October 2023

Formats: Paperback / eBook