Where Furnaces Burn
World Fantasy Award 2013.
About the cover art: Wednesbury by Night in the 19th Century. The artist is unknown. Courtesy of Ironbridge Gorge Museum.
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 lead the police to 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.
“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.” – Conrad Williams
Contents:
- My Stone Desire
- Still Water
- Morning's Echo
- The Hostess
- Blue Smoke
- Beth's Law
- A Cup of Blood
- Even the Pawn
- A Mouth to Feed
- Quarantine
- Black Country
- Without a Mind
- The Sunken City
- Incry
- The Last Witness
- Dreams of Children
- Waiting for the Thaw
- Stiff as Toys
- The Victim Card
- Winter Journey
- Slow Burn
- The Receivers
- Wake Up in Moloch
- Point of Departure
- Blind Circles
- Facing the Wall
Joel Lane
Joel Lane (1963–2013) was a British novelist, short story writer, poet, critic and anthology editor. He received the British Fantasy Award twice.
Born in Exeter, he was the nephew of tenor saxophonist Ronnie Scott. At the time of his death, Lane lived in south Birmingham, where he worked in health publishing. The latter city frequently provided settings for his fiction.
Although the majority of Lane's short stories can be categorised as horror or dark fantasy, his novels are more overtly mainstream. From Blue to Black (2000) is a portrait of a disturbed rock musician, whilst The Blue Mask (2003) follows the aftermath of a brutal and disfiguring attack.
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