The Terrible Changes
Joel Lane

‘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

‘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.

In midwinter, an aspiring politician finds himself suddenly deprived of human contact.

Newcomers to a town are strangely reminiscent of people lost in a recent flood.

Demonstrators on a peace march see the faces of sleeping children in the snow.

A failed musician meets his own ancestors getting off a midnight train.

The Terrible Changes is a journey through the shadow-realm between reality and dream, between clarity and madness, between the living and the dead. In Joel Lane's fiction, the weird is a symbolic language expressing the chilling beauty, sadness and mystery of real life, combining the supernatural with themes of human loss, passion, solitude and despair, in the tradition of Robert Aickman, John Ramsey Campbell, and M. John Harrison. 

From ‘The Brand’ (1983) to ‘Alouette’ (2008), these stories span a quarter-century of writing: urban horror tales, elegiac ghost stories, erotic reveries and psychological fugues. Long unavailable, The Terrible Changes is now back in print for a new audience, adding to Joel Lane’s legacy as a true master of the weird.

Praise for 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

‘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: 9781914391118

Ebook ISBN: 9781914391125

Publication date: February 2025

Formats: Paperback / eBook