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Celebrating the Uncanny Fiction of Joel Lane
Aug. 14th, 2025 04:00 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
reactor_feedCelebrating the Uncanny Fiction of Joel Lane
Published on August 14, 2025
Up until very recently, stumbling upon Joel Lane’s fiction in the United States wasn’t easy. Just one of his books, the posthumous collection The Anniversary of Never, was in print from a publisher with Stateside distribution: Dublin’s Swan River Press, also home to works by the likes of R. B. Russell and B. Catling. In the last year, London’s Influx Press—which has embarked on a series of reissues of Lane’s books—has found a U.S. distributor, which makes the bulk of Lane’s bibliography that much more likely to wind up on bookstore shelves and as staff picks. Which is good, because Lane’s work is utterly mesmerizing, even as it finds new ways to juxtapose the quotidian and the grimly miraculous.
In their introduction to the anthology Writing the Uncanny, editors Dan Coxon and Richard V. Hirst make a compelling case for why uncanny fiction matters more than ever:
“In its sense of disquiet and unease, the Uncanny may be the perfect genre for the modern era, reflecting the political uncertainty of our times—and the disordering of our everyday world that has accompanied the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.”
What does this have to do with Joel Lane? For one thing, Lane’s 1994 story “Albert Ross” is among the uncanny short stories recommended at the close of the anthology. And second, “disquiet and unease” are two qualities that Lane’s entire body of work possesses in abundance.
That story appears in Lane’s collection The Earth Wire, also published in 1994, and it’s a good introduction to Lane’s work. It’s about a man named Lochran, described by the title character as “a sort of faith healer.” Albert Ross sought Lochran out due to a particular condition: there are wings growing from his back, but they’re less a sign of being adjacent to the divine or possessing superhuman abilities as they are, well, messy. They cause Albert pain; they grow in odd ways. The relationship between the two men turns intimate, even as Lane also suggests a fundamental imbalance that can’t possibly hold.
In the midst of that, Lane adds sentences and paragraphs that root Ross’s singular affliction in an eminently familiar world. The second sentence of the story is this: “It was March, and the town was still half covered with snow; that only showed how many places there were where nobody walked.” This is both efficient and evocative scene-setting; it’s also notable that Lane establishes a very familiar, even mundane, setting before getting into the miraculous. Here’s an early passage that moves from a straightforward description into something much more specific:
“May Day had come and gone without much festivity. To the older generation it was Labour Day. But the young, even those who worked, didn’t want to know about an industrial past. Their celebration, if that was the word, discharged itself through alcohol and sex. There was nothing public about it. But then, rain was the enemy of openness.”
Note the way that the narration delineates the older generation from the younger without identifying with either. That’s appropriate; the characters in “Albert Ross,” as in much of Lane’s fiction, are outsiders: in both Ross’s night-shift hospital job and Lochran’s basement apartment, Lane suggests that these two men are avoiding the prevailing currents of society. (At one point, Lochran says to Ross, “What we both need is a new start.”) Lane writes alienation remarkably well, and even his more realistic work renders that sensation as palpably as his more overtly supernatural fiction. The protagonist of the 2003 novel The Blue Mask attempts to rebuild his life after an attack leaves his face permanently altered; 2000’s From Blue to Black told the story of a cult rock band, the growing fissures between its members, and the personal demons haunting them all. And Lane’s 2009 novella The Witnesses Are Gone falls into a subgenre that’s a personal favorite: the story of a “lost” film whose history reveals something stark and unsettling.
The Witnesses Are Gone also features scenes where a character witnesses something disquieting that may or may not be supernatural in origin—through whether or not it is makes it no less unsettling:
“I woke up before dawn; my mouth was dry, and I needed to piss. The bathroom was downstairs, at the back of the house. When I switched on the light, my first impression was of a shadow coming apart on the vinyl floor. There was a mass of woodlice there, two or three dozen, unusually small and dark. They got in through the skirting-board, but not usually in such numbers. I seized a broom and swiped at them, as if they were a dream that action could dissolve.”
That sense of a quotidian space transfigured, and of something unwanted breaking into a theoretically familiar space, exemplifies the dreamlike quality of some of Lane’s work.
Lane’s 2009 collection The Terrible Changes is, as of this writing, the latest of his books to be reissued by Influx Press. Unlike several of their reissues, which have added new introductions by the likes of Nina Allan and M. John Harrison, this one comes with the original introduction by Lane himself, in which he discusses his approach to writing. “I stopped caring about where I belonged and started to focus with some intensity on what I really wanted to say,” Lane wrote. In what is now a more bittersweet mode, he also stated that, when it comes to his own aesthetic, “[i]n twenty-five years, I’ve hardly made a start.”
In that introduction, Lane also calls The Terrible Changes “a retrospective of a quarter-century of writing.” Certainly it’s a fine introduction to Lane’s preferred themes and his aesthetics: the subtly unreal detailed in starkly realistic terms; lived-in narratives that abruptly detail into the impossible. Sometimes that takes the form of dream logic, as in the moment late in “After the Flood” where the protagonist understands the meaning of his own nocturnal vision just as a sort of nightmare logic suffuses his world, as a house’s basement transforms into a kind of purgatorial space fraught with knowledge and desire. “Face Down,” meanwhile, recounts the narrator’s interaction with a dead body floating in the canal that seems somehow separated from the laws of causality.
“The Sleepers” opens in the aftermath of a winter storm, which has left a peculiar aftereffect in the ice: a sense of the presence of “thousands of small faces: children with their eyes shut and their mouths just open, as if asleep.” It’s one of several stories here that features a truly indelible image, one that gains force and menace through implication rather than something more sudden.
The Terrible Changes also features some stylistic departures for Lane, notably the post-apocalyptic setting of “The Last Cry.” You might mistake this story for one of Lane’s tales of alienation and urban life right up until Lane details the tragic end to a relationship:
“He’d slept with Tony in this bed for ten years. Until the tumours had grown out of control. It happened to nearly everyone sooner or later. However many cures they developed, there were always more cancers. Radiation, implants, treated food, even the city air.”
Even here, though, Lane is still working with the same motifs that characterize his work elsewhere: a doomed relationship, a shifting body, a hostile society. These are stories that abound with moments of revelation and that also carry within them the potential for disaster. In his introduction, Lane writes that weird fiction’s power comes, in part, from its ability “to help us confront the darkness.” Lane didn’t take a familiar route to that place, but his work is no less powerful for it.[end-mark]
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