Where Furnaces Burn
Joel Lane
‘A poet of misfits, outsiders and the forsaken, his empathy for their suffering ever poignant.’
– Adam Nevill, author of The Ritual
‘Joel Lane understood and expertly exploited the connection between exterior and interior landscapes like no other.’
– Paul Tremblay, author of The Pallbearers Club
‘This essential collection has been out of print and impossible to find for years, but thanks to Influx Press’s ongoing reissue campaign, a new generation of fans of the Weird get to enjoy these wonderful and unforgettable stories.’
– The Fantasy Hive
WINNER OF THE 2013 WORLD FANTASY AWARD
Episodes from the casebook of a police officer in the West Midlands:
A young woman needs help in finding the buried pieces of her lover... so he can return to waking life.
Pale-faced thieves gather by a disused railway to watch a puppet theatre of love and violence.
Why do local youths keep starting fires in the ash woods around a disused mine in the Black Country?
A series of inexplicable deaths uncover a secret cult of machine worship.
When a migrant worker disappears, the key suspect is a boy driven mad by memories that are not his own.
Among the derelict factories and warehouses at the heart of the city, an archaic god seeks out his willing victims.
Blurring the occult detective story with urban noir fiction, Where Furnaces Burn offers a glimpse of the myths and terrors buried within the industrial landscape.
First published in 2012, Joel Lane’s World Fantasy Award-winning collection is a true modern classic of weird fiction that cemented his place as one of the most important and distinctive British writers of the weird.
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY R.M. FRANCIS
Praise for Where Furnaces Burn 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
‘The finest piece of noir fiction I’ve ever read.’
– Gnome Appreciation Society
‘I couldn't recommend this one enough’
– Arkham Digest
‘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: 9781914391095
Ebook ISBN: 9781914391101
Publication date: October 2023
Formats: Paperback / eBook