Joel Lane

I'd be seriously remiss in my blogging duties here if I didn't urge everyone to order a copy of Joel Lane's excellent collection, The Lost District. Laird Barron recommended Lane to me a year or so ago, and at some point I ordered The Lost District. Over the past few days, I've finally been reading it, and it is extraordinary. In his evocation of urban unease, Lane is clearly the heir to writers like M. John Harrison and Ramsey Campbell. His prose style shows that he's studied both Harrison and Campbell: it shows the former's eye for detail, the latter's skill at slipping into the surreal. Time and again, the stories show a concern with subterranean environments, real and metaphorical; there's also a concern with what I want to call the role of the victim, the dynamics of which I haven't quite worked out yet but that isn't something I've encountered in supernatural fiction before. There is a depth to Lane's fiction, a feeling of mystery and immanence, that reminds me of my first encounter with Peter Straub's fiction at the local library. The thirteen year old me knew that there was a lot more going on in books like Ghost Story and especially Shadowland than I was getting, and this drove me to check them out again and again, each new read yielding just a bit more. Lane's book is like that; it has been a good long while since I've read a book that has felt so full, so solid. From what I understand, The Lost District didn't do particularly well sales-wise, which is maybe not so much a surprise as it should be. It's the steak au poivre to the Big Mac of so much contemporary horror fiction. Savor it.