What Da Cover Says: 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.
What I Says: Lane has always been a master of desolation, selecting something mundane and finding its dark, decaying side but in The Lost district he manages to take things to the next level. Taking a genre as simple as an apocalypse which is already in a state of dis-repair, Lane manages to somehow take what is left and destroy it further, all colour seems to be drained and the world becomes like a painting where that small slice of life that the protagonist sees is all that is left and even that seems to be flaking away. Or a ghost story becomes a slow spiral into heroin addiction and finding true love leaves the main character drowning in a sea of dead fish.
Each of these stories has a dream-like quality to them, none so more than “Like Shattered Stone” where a sculptor carves in his sleep, there is a beauty to what is being pulled out of the stone but it makes the reader wonder just what is compelling the artist. There is more sex here than the previous books and there is a lot of death blended in with these scenes, “The Pain Barrier” was quite shocking and did remind me of the movie Audition, if you’ve seen that then you’ll appreciate just how twisted this story is.
There are a few stories here that feel almost autobiographic and these were the stand-out stories for me, “Beyond The River” is very different to anything else, a children’s author whose world has been shattered by her publisher being bought by a big firm who are only interested in profits, I don’t know if Lane ever experienced this but the writing was very bitter. And the most shocking story in the bunch “The Quiet Hours”, an author who is losing his memory, one of the saddest things I’ve ever read, it really did feel like Lane was writing about himself, there is a self-reflected tenderness here you don’t normally see in his writing and at the end I had to put the book down for a while, I felt like I had been put through the wringer.
Hopefully my review doesn’t put you off, this is one of the darkest books I’ve ever read but it is also one of the best, it feels like all of Lane’s previous works were training for this, so go grab all his books and start the training.
Many thanks to Hollie at Influx for this copy, you can grab yourself a copy from HERE:
Gnome Appreciation Society 