Where Furnaces Burn (2012) by Joel Lane

Where Furnaces Burn (2012) by Joel Lane, containing the following stories:

A Cup of Blood (2004), A Mouth to Feed by (2008), Beth's Law (2009),  Black Country (2010),  Blind Circles (2004),  Blue Smoke (2012),  Dreams of Children (2012),  Even the Pawn (2012),  Facing the Wall (2004), Incry (2011), Morning's Echo (2010), My Stone Desire (2007),  Point of Departure (2012), Quarantine (2012), Slow Burn (2012), Stiff as Toys (1998), Still Water (2007),The Hostess (2010), The Last Witness (2010), The Receivers (2002), The Sunken City (2012), The Victim Card (2004), Waiting for the Thaw (2012), Wake Up in Moloch (2012), Winter Journey (2008), and Without a Mind (2012).  

Winner of the 2013 World Fantasy Award for best collection, Where Furnaces Burn is a story cycle from the late and much lamented Joel Lane, England's horror-poet of the industrial, rusting North where much of this book is set. Where Furnaces Burn follows the police career of its first-person narrator in and around the Manchester area.

Lane tended to avoid long short stories, preferring to write short, dense works that nonetheless generally worked as stories and not as fragments of vignettes. That's true here -- though the stories form a larger pattern, they also for the most part stand on their own.

Here we deal again and again with horrors rising out of industrial decay, poverty, and modern alienation (and the protagonist may be the most alienated of them all). Lane's prose is superbly suited to his interests -- poetic at points, grim, and pragmatically matter-of-fact even in the most poetic moments.

These are supernatural stories, mind you, not simply hardboiled excursions into Northern English crime. Ancient horrors adapt to the modern world; new horrors are born. Lane's spiritual forebears include American Fritz Leiber, whose 1940 short story "Smoke Ghost" invented a new way of evoking the horrors of the industrialized world. They also include Ramsey Campbell and his groundbreaking 'kitchen-sink' horror that began in the late 1960's. 

It's all disturbing, sad, and often strangely moving. But Lane also conjures up some fearsome horrors, whether newly minted or ancient and adapting to the Brave New Decaying World. It's brilliant stuff, and a fitting coda to a great writing career. Highly recommended.

The Lost District and Other Stories by Joel Lane (2006)

The Lost District and Other Stories by Joel Lane (2006): containing the following stories: The Lost District  (2001); The Pain Barrier (1994); The Bootleg Heart (2000); Scratch (1996); Coming of Age   (2003); Mine (2006); Prison Ships  (1998); Like Shattered Stone (1994);  Among the Dead (2005); The Window (2001); The Quiet Hours (2006); Exposure (2001); The Outside World (1995); The Country of Glass (1998); The Night That Wins (2005); Against My Ruins (2004); The Only Game (2006); Contract Bridge (1996); Beyond the River (2004); The Plans They Made (1997); The Drowned (2002); Reservoir (2006);  An Unknown Past (2002); and You Could Have It All (2006).

The late Joel Lane, gone too soon at the age of 50 in 2013, was one of a handful of horror's finest modern short-story writers. Many of his stories were set in and around Birmingham, England. These stories presented a bleak, nightmarish, and very human universe of the lost and disconnected, generally trying to reconnect to something through sex, drugs, or alcohol.

And Lane really could be a short-story writer with the accent firmly on 'short' -- The Lost District and Other Stories brings together 26 stories in less than 200 pages. That's a lot of stories. Gratifyingly, none of the stories are hyper-short 'Flash Fiction,' and none of them are fragments or unfinished-feeling vignettes. They are actually stories, though often with equivocal endings.

Lane often deals with body horror, though generally in a subdued manner. When he does move into the graphically grotesque, as in "Coming of Age," the results are extremely disturbing given his general reticence when it comes to graphic violence. Otherwise, the horror and the weird intrude on the world in more muted ways, often leading to a final stinger of sentence.

In some cases, as in the title story, horror itself remains almost hidden. "The Lost District" could just be a standard-issue remembrance of things past. But if so, why the disquieting background of decaying Birmingham? And why the feeling that the civic 'renewal' that 'loses' that old district is some sort of malign, organic urban process and not simply a case of bureaucratic planning? 

There's more than a hint of Ramsey Campbell in Lane's focus on urban and suburban English horrors, but there's also a more inchoate, almost miasmic sense of decay that recalls early J.G. Ballard in its emphasis on unexplained, gestating decay. Striking stories of disquiet, beautifully and sparsely told. Highly recommended.

Lovecraft Unbound: 20 Stories (2008): edited by Ellen Datlow.

Lovecraft Unbound: 20 Stories (2008): edited by Ellen Datlow.


I think this anthology, which consists of 16 new stories and 4 reprints, is the award-winning, veteran editor Datlow's finest anthology. It's not all killer, but there is no filler. Many of the stories that first appeared in this anthology have already been anthologized several more times since Lovecraft Unbound appeared in 2008. Highly recommended overall.

• "The Crevasse" by Nathan Ballingrud and Dale Bailey: Antarctic setting recalls HPL's At the Mountains of Madness, but this effective and low-key (in a supernatural sense) story also riffs on "Who Goes There?," the basis for The Thing movies.
• "The Office of Doom" by Richard Bowes: Never order the Necronomicon on an Inter-Library Loan. Just don't.
• "Sincerely, Petrified" by Anna Tambour: Elliptical tale of fictional myths attached to... The Petrified Forest? Yes. Unusual and very enjoyable.
• "The Din of Celestial Birds" (1997) by Brian Evenson: Interesting but a bit too murky for my tastes.
• "The Tenderness of Jackals" by Amanda Downum: Writers really get entranced by the idea of making HPL's ghouls into a fully realized society. Not a bad story, but crippled by those tricky ghouls, who have frustrated many a writer.
• "Sight Unseen" by Joel Lane: Moody, low-key riff on HPL's "The Shadow Out of Time."
• "Cold Water Survival" by Holly Phillips: Very science fictiony and of-the-moment as Global Warming releases monsters. Nebulous, Swiss-Army-Knife monsters when it comes to their skill-sets, which are too vast and ill-defined to allow me to suspend disbelief beyond page 3.
• "Come Lurk with Me and Be My Love" by William Browning Spencer: Another entry in Spencer's often serio-comic explorations of Lovecraftian themes and variations as seen in the terrific novels Resume with Monsters and Irrational Fears.
• "Houses Under the Sea" (2006) by Caitlin R. Kiernan: A solid mix of first-person narration and pseudo-documentary collage dissipates with the big reveal, which is amazingly underwhelming.
• "Machines of Concrete Light and Dark" by Michael Cisco: Creepy bit of philosophical horror; slight but solid.
• "Leng" by Marc Laidlaw: Skirts the very edge of parody in its visit to Lovecraft's famous, infamous Plateau of Leng, which is not a place you want to visit. Hold the mushrooms.
• "In the Black Mill" (1997) by Michael Chabon: Chabon's story hammers on obvious parody during its first half, which is rife with winky, coy,  obvious shout-outs to various Lovecraftian names and places (a woman named Brown-Jenkin? Really?). The spell of HPL seems to overcome Chabon in the second half, as the story suddenly plays everything straight -- but the parody undoes any ability to take the story seriously while also being obvious and awfully thudding in its humour.
• "One Day, Soon" by Lavie Tidhar: Oblique, mysterious bit of cosmic horror involving a forbidden book.
• "Commencement" (2001) by Joyce Carol Oates: Deceptively light-hearted narration darkens throughout in a story that feels an awful lot like Oates doing a riff on Thomas Ligotti, who does this particular sort of thing better.
• "Vernon, Driving" by Simon Kurt Unsworth: Relationship horror with a sorrowful cosmic twist.
• "The Recruiter" by Michael Shea: Light black comedy with serious undertones ties in to several other Shea stories involving Lovecraftian beings.
• "Marya Nox" by Gemma Files: Files nails the documentary aspect of Lovecraftian horror while offering an interesting geopolitical setting for a tale of a buried church that should have remained buried.
• "Mongoose" by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette: Unusual space opera plays with Lovecraftian names while being tonally and thematically so far from HPL that the story (one of a series) could probably do without its space-traevling Arkhamites and reconfigured Hounds of Tindalos (now complete with Linnaean taxonomy -- Pseudocanis tindalosi).
• "Catch Hell" by Laird Barron: Oddly, one of Barron's least cosmic, least Lovecraftian stories. Good for Barron would be great for almost anyone else.
• "That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable" by Nick Mamatas: Low-key, purposefully mundane slice-of-life from the days after the Great Old Ones rose to destroy humanity and reclaim Earth. 

Best New Horror; Not-so-good Old Horror

Best New Horror 25 (2013/Published 2014): edited by Stephen Jones, containing the following fiction: "Who Dares Wins," Kim Newman; "Click-Clack the Rattlebag," Neil Gaiman; "Dead End," Nicholas Royle; "Isaac's Room," Daniel Mills; "The Burning Circus," Angela Slatter; "Holes for Faces," Ramsey Campbell; "By Night He Could Not See," Joel Lane; . "Come Into My Parlour," Reggie Oliver; "The Middle Park," Michael Chislett; "Into the Water," Simon Kurt Unsworth; "The Burned House," Lynda Rucker; "What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Z------," Lavie Tidhar; "Fishfly Season," Halli Villegas; "Doll Re Mi," Tanith Lee; "A Night's Work," Clive Barker; "The Sixteenth Step," Robert Shearman; "Stemming the Tide," Simon Strantzas; "The Gist," Michael Marshall Smith; "Guinea Pig Girl," Thana Niveau; "Miss Baltimore Crabs," Kim Newman; and Whitstable by Stephen Volk.

Another year, another solid Best New Horror anthology from editor Stephen Jones. The 25th such annual anthology, as it turns out. Besides the stories, the lengthy sections devoted to works that came out in 2013 are excellent, as is the sad-making Necrology of deaths of people connected in some way to the horror genre.

The anthology is book-ended on the fiction side of things by two standalone sections from Kim Newman's Anno Dracula series. They're enjoyable and deeply metafictional and possess horrifying elements, though they're not particularly horrifying. Neil Gaiman's short-short story, "Click-Clack the Rattlebag," apparently wows when read aloud by the author. On the page, it's the slightest of slight jaunts.

My favourite stories herein include "Holes for Faces" by Ramsey Campbell, a mournful look at the inner life of an endlessly put-upon child; "The Gist" by Michael Marshall Smith, a sad look at a wasted life; and "Isaac's Room" by Daniel Mills, an effective tale of an Internet-augmented haunting that gains a lot of effectiveness from its low-key, under-stated nature. 

Joel Lane's "By Night He Could Not See" is a poetic and ultimately twisty tale of revenge from beyond the grave, while "Come Into My Parlour" by Reggie Oliver deals with a child's much-disliked aunt in another of Oliver's excellent riffs on the classic English ghost story epitomized by the stories of M.R. James.

Stephen Volk's short novel Whitstable also stands out. It's far and away the longest tale in the anthology. It's also one of the two or three best, and well worth the length. Volk takes the germ of a concept from Fright Night, among other works, in this story of a boy who comes to Peter Cushing for help because the boy's soon-to-be-stepfather is a vampire. 

The story goes off in a completely different direction that what one might expect from this beginning. It's a deeply researched look at Peter Cushing's life, set in the months after his beloved wife died of emphysema in the early 1970's. It makes Cushing a sympathetic character, but it also extends some level of pity to the monster he chooses to pursue. It's really lovely writing.

All in all, a solid year for Best New Horror. Highly recommended.

The Hell of Mirrors (1965): edited by Peter Haining, containing the following stories: The Werewolf (1839) by Frederick Marryat (excerpt: chapter 39 of The Phantom Ship)); Ligeia (1838) by Edgar Allan Poe; The Black Cat (1843) by Edgar Allan Poe; Young Goodman Brown (1835) by Nathaniel Hawthorne; Schalken the Painter (1835) by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu; The Damned Thing (1893) by Ambrose Bierce; The Middle Toe of the Right Foot (1890) by Ambrose Bierce; The Squaw (1893) by Bram Stoker; Who Knows? (1890) by Guy de Maupassant; The Drowned Man (1888) by Guy de Maupassant; The Caterpillar (1929) by Edogawa Rampo; The Hell of Mirrors (1926) by Edogawa Rampo; The Knocking in the Castle (1964) by Henry Slesar; The Fanatic (1964) by Arthur Porges.

Extraordinarily odd anthology is really only noteworthy as being prolific anthologist Peter Haining's first editorial work. And he would put together many volumes superior to this one. But we've all got to start somewhere.

Why is it odd? More than half the book consists of out-of-copyright stories, many of them classics. But The Hell of Mirrors doubles up on entries by several authors. Then we jump from the 1890's to two weird tales in translation from Japanese fantasist Edogawa Rampo. The we jump another 35 years to two solid but undistinguished stories from the same science-fiction magazine, both released the year before this anthology came out. It looks like a job of selection that must have taken about an afternoon, with no apparatus other than a brief introduction to explain to us who the writers are and why these particular stories are important.

If you came across this for a couple of bucks in a used bookstore somewhere and hadn't been exposed to the stories by Poe, Bierce, and Le Fanu, then I suppose it would be worth the purchase. But for the most part, the best stories are much-anthologized and the lesser stories by Slesar and Porges, while mildly enjoyable, can easily be skipped. Not recommended.