Background

Joel Lane was born in 1963 in Exeter, Devon, United Kingdom.

Education

Joel Lane attended George Dixon Academy in Birmingham, United Kingdom. He earned a Natural Sciences degree and a Philosophy of Science Masters at the University of Cambridge.

Career

Although he has worked as a journalist and is a published poet, Joel Lane is best known in the horror and gothic community for his series of short stories set in the modern industrial town of Birmingham, England. Lane’s stories have appeared most often in small-circulation periodicals, but his work has also appeared in Year’s Best Horror and Best New Horror. “He writes about poverty and illness, deals in detail with the gay subculture, rails against political injustice, shows derelict factories and disused canals, sets many of his scenes after dark,” explained St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers contributor Chris Morgan, “all in attractive prose full of metaphor and simile.” “I’m fascinated by the power of supernatural imagery as metaphor,” Lane noted in the St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers, “and its ability to evoke a dreamlike state of awareness where the boundary between internal and external reality is blurred.”

Lane’s stories tend to focus on modem societal problems viewed in a horrific manner. Most of them deliver a message about the state of modern society and the fears that modem life focuses on the parts of the society that fail to conform. In “Thicker than Water,” for instance, Lane traces the story of a young journalist investigating the deaths of a group of homeless people “supposedly being moved around the country, rehoused by the government,” explains Morgan. The victims appear to have been killed by a group of militants, but when the journalist presses his investigation, he is himself killed - at which point he posthumously joins the victims.

Other Lane stories examine the problems that plague everyday life. In “The Foggy, Foggy Dew,” Morgan states, “he portrays a group of manual workers cleaning up a disused and very dusty factory. The dust follows at least one of the young workers home, clogging up his house and his life.” Although the dust is on one level almost a horrific creature with a will of its own, on another level it is a symbol for tuberculosis (as it was in the song from which the title is taken); as Morgan concluded, “in a wider sense the dust is a metaphor for apathy and silence.” In “And Some Are Missing,” Lane examines the plight of “the helpless - victims of mugging or drunkenness - being set upon by some kind of vampire. All the scenes occur by night; the relationships here are gay,” declared Morgan. “But the text makes it reasonably clear that no supernatural figure is at work; this is a projection ... of the cold and exploitative nature of society itself.” “ ‘Real Drowners’ ... is concerned with alcoholism and surviving traumatic experiences,” the St. James Guide contributor reported, while “Playing Dead” is a story about a one-night stand that turns into a constant replay of one woman’s suicide attempt. Even when he reaches outside the environment of post-industrial Birmingham, Lane continues his examination of the human psyche. “Wave Scars,” reported Morgan, takes place in “the Welsh port of Fishguard, [and is] a tale of recurring personal ghosts.”

Achievements

• Lane was best known for his dark short fiction, including “My Stone Desire” (2007), winner of a British Fantasy Award. His collections were highly regarded: The Earth Wire & Other Stories (1994) won a British Fantasy Award, The Lost District and Other Stories (2006) was a British Fantasy and International Horror Guild Award nominee, The Terrible Changes (2009) was a British Fantasy Award finalist, and Where Furnaces Burn just won the 2013 World Fantasy Award. He is also the author of two mainstream novels and edited anthologies.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Trouble in the Heartland

    (Trouble in the Heartland, Joel Lane's second poetry colle...)

    2004
  • The Lost District

    (A collection of fantastic and horrific stories that deal ...)

    2006
  • This Spectacular Darkness

    (Joel Lane, renowned as a writer of compelling strange sto...)

  • Where Furnaces Burn

    (Blurring the occult detective story with urban noir ficti...)

  • The Blue Mask

    (The Blue Mask is a hardcore emotional trip that explores ...)

    2003
  • Scar City

    (A new collection from one of the most powerful voices in ...)

    2015
  • From Blue to Black by Joel Lane 201

Politics

Joel came from a family steeped in the traditions of struggle and the labor movement: his grandfather was a socialist who, as a member of the Communist Party, was expelled from the United States in the 1920s.

Joel himself didn't become politically active until relatively late in his life, joining the Labour Party for a brief period in the 1990s but eventually finding his political home in the Socialist Party. Joel joined the Socialist Party along with his mother Ella in 2009 and immediately became one of the familiar faces at Birmingham branch meetings and on stalls.

Lane contributed to its newspaper, the Socialist, and its journal, Socialism Today.

During branch discussions, Joel made meticulous notes and always made insightful contributions. He was a gifted writer, and whenever he was asked to introduce a discussion would provide thought-provoking and well-researched material.

After meetings he would often apologize for not volunteering to do more activity, we needed to remind him that he was, in fact, one of the stalwarts of the branch and was one of our most solid and consistent activists.

Two areas in which Joel had a particular interest were the government's attacks on the National Health Service and literature.

He was strongly opposed to the politics advocated by Tony Blair and New Labour.

Views

Quotations: "And it happens all the time. Boats go down, cars crash, houses burn; and damaged people spill out onto the road. The only way to go on is to realize that it is always the same. You have to hold onto the few who mean enough to you to bring out the healer. And sometimes the healer is very hard to find."

Membership

Joel Lane attended the Birmingham Science Fiction Group. He was a member of Sophie Lancaster Foundation, PEN.

• Birmingham Science Fiction Group , United Kingdom

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  Sophie Lancaster Foundation , United Kingdom

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  PEN , United Kingdom

Personality

Though Lane received the World Fantasy Award, twice won the British Fantasy Award, and was lauded by critics, his writing never reached a mainstream readership, never broke free of the “genre ghetto,” and he certainly never received any significant financial returns for his lifelong literary output. A gay man, an outspoken socialist, a literary critic, a champion of his peers, a soft-spoken and bookish type, Joel Lane infused his fiction with all the trauma, desire, horror, epiphany, and occasional ecstasy of someone living on the fringe, observing quietly all the stories of those around him who would die with their lives and all their attendant mysteries and transcendences unknown to the world.

Joel was a deeply principled, thoughtful and gentle person. He cared greatly about many issues of social justice, equality, and politics, and had the sort of intelligent overview of current affairs that made him a fascinating person to converse and debate with.

An attentive and careful author, he knew just how far to let the editors go with their pruning shears, and exactly when his writer's instinct knew something just had to stay as it was.

Lane once said "I'm very much a city person, and found the small-town environment too limiting. The intensity of it helped me to develop a stronger work ethic, and I learned a lot about the power of ideas and the value of intellectual clarity. That set me up for quite rapid development as a writer once I'd returned to Birmingham."

Physical Characteristics: Joel never enjoyed the most robust of health; he’d had Type 1 diabetes since his teens, and following his father’s death in 2004 - a sudden event that occurred in horrible, tragic circumstances and which brought back many painful and traumatic memories from his childhood - he struggled with both depression and sleep apnoea.

Quotes from others about the person

• Mark Samuels once called him “the conscience of horror.”

Interests

• music, reading, writing

• Politicians

  Pablo Neruda

• Writers

  Arthur Machen, Ray Bradbury, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Aickman, John Metcalfe, Fritz Leiber, M. John Harrison, Ramsey Campbell, Graham Joyce, Cornell Woolrich, Horace McCoy, David Goodis, John Franklin Bardin, Jim Thompson, Robert Bloch, Derek Raymond, James Ellroy

• Music & Bands

  Nick Cave, Lou Reed, Richard Thompson, Bruce Springsteen, Joy Division

Connections

Joel Lane was a homosexual and had no children.

Mother:

Ella Lane

Brother:

Tom Lane

Friend:

Peter Coleborn

Acquaintance:

Mark Samuels

colleague:

Allyson Bird

Friend:

Simon Bestwick

References

• Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vol. 194
  2010