The Witnesses Are Gone

by Joel Lane, M. John Harrison (Introduction)

Moving into an old and decaying house, Martin Swann discovers a box of video cassettes in the garden shed. One of them is a bootleg copy of a morbid and disturbing film by obscure French director, Jean Rien.

The discovery leads Martin on a search for the director’s other films, and for a way to understand Rien’s filmography, drawing him away from his home and his lover into a shadowy realm of secrets, rituals and creeping decay. An encounter with a crazed film journalist in Gravesend leads to drug-fuelled visions in Paris – and finally to the Mexican desert where a grim revelation awaits.

The Witnesses Are Gone is a first-hand account of a journey into the darkest parts of the underworld – a look behind the screen on which our collective nightmares play.

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Thriller, Short Stories, Mystery, Novella, Weird Fiction

102 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Joel Lane was a British novelist, short story writer, poet, critic and anthology editor. He received the World Fantasy Award in 2013 and the British Fantasy Award twice.

Born in Exeter, he was the nephew of tenor saxophonist Ronnie Scott. At the time of his death, Lane was living in south Birmingham, where he worked in health industry-related publishing. His location frequently provided settings for his fiction.

Reviews

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

So utterly strange.

Martin buys an old, decaying house where in the shed he finds a box with four video cassettes. One isn't much of anything, two are pornographic, but the fourth one is a black and white French film. In it are four young adults that are locked in a house while slowly losing their minds caused by an entity in a locked room of that house. Martin becomes obsessed with the film and the director of it, Jean Rien.

The problem is that every lead he receives goes no where. Anything online causes his computer to crash. Any article he can find deteriorates in his hands. It's as if the film and director don't won't to be found. If they're even real at all.

"He believes that all of Rien's films are hints of an entity, power, a god perhaps. Something mysterious and terrible, glimpsed only in distorted shadows. Negatives. Views of a black earth. And whatever it is, it doesn't want to be seen."

A slim little novel at right around 80 pages. I was looking to kick off spooky season and thought this would be a great place to start. While I found this eerie I never really felt spooked or scared. Now had this book been the written version of the film Martin saw, oh boy, that would have had me peeking between my fingers.

I'm happy to have read this just for it's strange ambiguity. The truth is, I'm not really sure what happened at the end, but I'm also not sure the authors intent was to ever provide tangible answers. It's a book to ponder and think over. 3.5 stars!

Thank to Overdrive for the loan.

[Karl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joel Lane is no longer with us. He passed away November 2013 and it’s our great loss. In 2008 Mr. Lane was a Shirley Jackson Award novella finalist for “The Witnesses Are Gone”.

In the introduction to the book Conrad Williams tells us “This is as honest and as brutal a work of fiction as you are ever likely to read”, and I have to agree with that statement. The horror and dread is so subtly layered into the narrative that the reader becomes totally immersed in this cleaver narrative, when one stops to take a breath, we find no air available to fill our lungs and we don't know where the surface is any longer.

The story concerns Martin Swann and his search for an obscure French film maker and his obscure movies. Impending doom sets in from the first few chapters as we learn of Martin’s contemporary life. Rot and slime slowly creep into Martin’s life through accidental discoveries. As he pursues his quest to find more information about the film maker and his bizarre films Martin becomes totally obsessed with the search. Any references he finds to his search warn of impending doom.

Martin’s own life becomes such an obsession he enters a drug induced un-reality that rivals the nightmare world he is seeking.

This is some great and masterful writing and is recommended to those who read Arthur Machen. Machen on heroine.

This hardcover copy of "The Witnesses are Gone" is signed by Joel Lane and is one of 500 copies.

Artwork for the cover is by Vincent Chong.

Introduction by Conrad Williams.

[Jack Tripper · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought I’d had my fill of creepy/cursed film tales, but this one always called to me. Plus, I’d been meaning to read more of the late Joel Lane, whose Where Furnaces Burn contained a few of the best examples of urban decayed weird fiction this side of 70s/80s Ramsey Campbell. Where Campbell’s city of choice is Liverpool, Lane’s is Birmingham. England that is, not Alabama.

This novella, however, takes us all over the map, from Birmingham to Paris, Scotland to Mexico. All in our narrator Martin’s quest to track down the lost films of an elusive, mysterious director of short surreal “horror” movies. Not only are the movies and director elusive, but any memories of having watched them are soon forgotten by the few who’ve seen them. All that can be recalled is their profundity and dream-like disturbing nature. Which makes it doubly difficult for Martin to find any info at all, and some experts on obscure cinema believe the director and his films don’t even exist, and that anyone who’s claimed to see them is a liar. But Martin has seen one of them, on an unlabeled VHS tape, and it changed the course of his life, even if the details of the movie are all a bit hazy now.

I really dug the gritty realism of the story, the griminess and bleak inner city atmosphere, as it made it all the more immediate and unsettling when Martin’s reality is…altered. It’s a tale of obsession and paranoia (and their effect on relationships), with the impeding invasion of Iraq by US forces post 9/11 as a backdrop, and the protests that went along with it. The juxtaposition of reality-grounding early 2000s current events and slowly manifesting unreality was expertly done, as was the overwhelming sense of foreboding.

About the only negative I can point to would be the many extremely unlikely coincidences that Martin encounters on his journey. I won’t go into details, but these incidents stretched credulity more so than the uncanny strangeness did. I suppose it could all be explained away as inevitable or fate, or “something pulling the strings,” but either way it was slightly distracting. That’s minor in comparison to the regret I feel at not getting into Lane’s work much sooner. Though I suppose that’s a good thing considering all that I have to look forward to.

[Hux · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting one. Many things that I liked but quite a few things that I didn't. 

The story concerns Martin Swann, a middle-aged man who, for some reason, doesn't quite seem to grasp that he's a middle-aged man. He has recently bought a new house in Birmingham and in the shed he finds some video tapes and watches them. It appears to be a film by obscure French film maker named Jean Rien and the contents are disturbing yet intriguing. Martin begins to obsess over them a little, seeking out information about the reclusive film maker, the meaning of these films. He meets an expert who advises him that Rien doesn't really exist, he is a myth, a fiction, and the films Martin saw were probably just fakes made by others who have elaborated upon the myth. But then Martin hears about the possibility of seeing some of Rien's films in Paris so goes with the intention of learning more; but instead he is dragged away from what turns out to be a porn cinema by a man claiming he can find him the real films. What Martin actually finds is heroin. After this, he goes to Scotland with his girlfriend to investigate rumours about a place where Rien filmed, then, after tragedy, he goes to Mexico in search of the film maker and meets another fan of his work, a woman named Eleanor. His search never seems to come to an end, only takes him deeper into madness.

So... I really enjoyed this. I thought it was very effectively eerie. There is an oddness to it, an uncomfortable disquiet, which trembles all through the piece with a slight nausea. It does a good job of keeping Martin perpetually on edge, disturbed, anxious. He sinks deeper into the mystery of the films and the film maker but never really discovers anything more than further confusion and, increasingly, a greater degree of darkness and personal horror. The book reminded me a little of House and Leaves but more so Paradise Rot (in the way that it brought the mundane and the supernatural together plus a strong use of the concept of decay). The climax in Mexico with Eleanor is nightmarish. 

The downside: the book, and specifically Martin (but more accurately Lane himself it seems) espouse a tedious amount of 6th form politics. Sure, it's set just before the Iraq war but there's so much bedwettery here, performative left-wingism, and right-on opinions; he references leaflet campaigns against cartoon fascism and war and offers endless (albeit forgiveable) mentions of all the groovy, university educated tastes he has in book, films, and music. It's just so tiresome. Especially for a man plumped up by the banality of middle-age. He lays it on a little too thick. Then we have the use of heroin. I suspect this may have more to do with the narrative than its random appearances suggests (chasing death amid a desire for greater meaning).

The notion of death being relentlessly present and hovering around us at all times with his companion, nothingness, hidden (we think, or hope) in the occasional piece of art is an unpleasant but profound thought.

Very good but flawed

[Adrienne L · Rating 4 out of 5]

As anyone who's lived long enough will tell you, the human mind can only take so much reality before it shuts down. Ghosts are a form of censorship. We block out the night with ghosts, because the darkness is worse.

In the shed behind his new home, Martin Swann discovers an obscure and unsettling film left behind in a box of random, unlabeled VHS tapes. The film is by mysterious French director Jean Rien (because of course), and Martin soon becomes obsessed with tracing the director and his other films, which seem to have a sinister cult following, while some people claim both films and director are a hoax. This set-up called to mind another book I read recently, Night Film by Marisha Pessl in which the MC pursues an obsession with a mysterious horror director.

Very quickly, Martin goes from seeing the film to seemingly living in a Jean Rien film, and I was often as disoriented as he was. He also spends much of his time under the influence of alcohol and drugs.

There are a series of odd interactions between Martin and other characters who act and speak in riddles. At one point, someone asks him, "Do you think people are suppressing the films? Have you met these unseen censors? Hung with seraphim whose mothballs crinkled in the rusted score?" What? So I freely admit that I'm still not sure what it all means, but there were some effectively unsettling scenes, and since this was a very short novella, I was willing to just ride along with the nightmarish imagery and the often beautiful writing. I wasn't crazy about the end though.

[Oliver Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a hard book to review. It’s beautifully written, thoughtful and very creepy. Narratively, it’s deceptively sprawling for such a short work, covering the ground of a much larger book. It goes everywhere and nowhere, which might be a problem if the other elements of the books weren’t so well done.
The story is simple and very similar to Theodore Roszak’s much longer ‘Flicker’. The lead character watches an obscure, unsettling film and then spends the rest of the book trying to find out more about its director. ‘All the Witnesses Are Gone’ is much more unsettling. There’s something in Lane’s writing that really gets under your skin and I suspect it’s a book that will linger with me longer than I’d like it to.

[Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read The Witnesses Are Gone just over a year ago. I loved it, but found it curiously (and fittingly) difficult to review. I didn't get much further than just writing the sentence: 'I am ecstatic with the wonderful discovery of Joel Lane's work.' Having recently read and adored Lane's debut From Blue to Black, I thought this might be a good time to revisit it.

It has one of those opening paragraphs. The kind I can't resist. This is so perfect to me:

Maybe if I hadn't bought the house, I wouldn't have found the videos and none of this would have happened. Judith would still be alive, and I'd have lost nothing except some memories I could live without. But I'm not convinced. I think it would just have found another way of happening. Even before it all started, I felt like I was living backwards. The future seemed more real than the past.

This is a darkly dreamlike novel, a story that embodies its own sense of unreality. The narrator is Martin Swann, who has recently bought a house in Tyseley, a mostly industrial district of Birmingham. While clearing out the previous owner's possessions, he finds a few VHS cassettes. Among them is a copy of a French art film titled L'éclipse des sens – the work of a director with the dubious moniker Jean Rien. Though it's poor quality and mostly indecipherable, the tape fascinates Martin: 'I felt like it was trying to tell me something I needed to understand.'

Martin becomes preoccupied, then obsessed, with learning more about Rien. Yet the filmmaker is curiously elusive. Magazines containing articles about him disintegrate; website links lead to error pages; stills from his films cause Martin's computer to crash. Martin forgets the plot of L'éclipse des sens and eventually finds he can't even recall the film's title. Still, he's compelled to chase shadows. His odyssey becomes increasingly hallucinatory.

Meanwhile, the rest of Martin's life seems to be built on shifting sands. He wants his girlfriend, Judith, to move in with him – this is, in part, why he bought the house – but she will only stay intermittently because 'the house didn't appeal to her'. While in another context this would seem infuriatingly vague, such vagueness suits the general illusory mood of this story. There's an uncertain quality to Martin's relationship with Judith; there's an uncertainty, a weightlessness, an ambiguity that pervades the whole text. One of the journalists Martin tracks down delivers perhaps the most memorable – and emblematic – lines in the book when he says:

Maybe I'm not really a person. I don't mean I'm something else. I just don't belong to the day or to the night. I'm always stuck in the doorway. Watching the traffic go back and forth.

I found The Witnesses Are Gone perfect not just because the plot and prose are brilliant, but because it might have been written to order especially for me: the themes, the atmosphere, the unspecific weirdness of the horror element, even the micro-stories of faulty relationships, self-doubt and political activism that creep into the background. Like From Blue to Black, it is equally satisfying at the micro level, with gemlike sentences and striking fragments glittering on just about every page ('the sky was the blue of a Romero zombie', 'their blank faces scarred by rain').

I look forward to eagerly gathering up every Joel Lane book I can track down and reading the lot of them VERY SLOWLY over a period of years, because I really want to savour every word.

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[katarina · Rating 1 out of 5]

if this book had a point im glad i missed it

[Esther · Rating 1 out of 5]

What artsy indie movie did I just read?

The synopsis reeled me in, but the book did not deliver for me. This book is neither character-, nor plot-driven. It's mood-driven, and in this case, that was not enough for me.
I get what this book was trying to do, but the synopsis is just a bit too misleading for me. It poses as a horror sci-fi book, but it is an indie novel about a guy spiralling off into drug-fueled paranoia.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

I probably wouldn't consider this top-tier Joel Lane. Very enjoyable though, especially if (like me) you have a soft spot for these lost film quests.

As usual, I enjoyed the cultural references peppered throughout. I had to burst out laughing:

Do you remember reading Lovecraft or Machen for the first time and believing, just for a moment, that what you were reading was not fiction? That some documents of another reality had fallen into your hands? ... And now the same stories appear in corrected editions, with long introductions and scholarly footnotes by S.T. Joshi, the suspension of disbelief is impossible.

Note: I read the recently reissued edition on Influx, with a John Harrison intro instead of Conrad Williams. I would not start with the intro; for some reason Harrison felt that it was interesting for us to read a summary of the novella first, with a few arguable spoilers.

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joel's latest - he brought it along to the group, looks great.

It is excellent. I'm completely biased of course, but Joel has pulled out another creepy, wonderful read full of great images- I like them anyway (eg 'The sea was a grey scroll endlessly being wiped clean and re-written.' or 'Crows flapping overhead like scraps of burnt plastic').
A man, Swann, finds videotapes in the shed of his new (old and rundown) house, and discovers fragments of films from a French director Jean Rien (yes Joel likes his puns and bad jokes: at French customs Swann says he has 'rien' to declare, and Rien becomes Juan Nada in Mexico). He tries to track down other films by him but they prove elusive. In doing so he encounters strange men and women, loses his girlfriend, and comes close to some mysterious force, a nihilism that blights all who try to find or worked with Rien.

As usual politics are there - on the surface - eg. Swann discusses Bush: 'like the school bully whose father is the local police chief.. he's shaking your hand but when the teacher's back is turned.. [he'll:].. make you kneel before him. Look at the eyes always. Bush has the eyes of a man who likes to hurt.' When he jumps into a freight train carriage he finds refugees who turn away from him.

The mystery hits harder I think because Lane roots everything in a gritty realism, the stations and pubs of the English midlands, or the bleak coast of Scotland in winter; and uses real events - the Iraq war and the big London protest against it, for instance. Against this backdrop the weird stuff that happens is very powerful.

Superbly done - he draws you down into this shabby, destructive, drug infested and corrupt world by degrees, and you become totally immersed.

I've docked one star because he uses the same scene in a gay Paris sex club in his novel The Blue Mask. Tsk, tsk.

update: Joel has put me right about this scene - it's different. So I'm making it 5 stars now..

another update: Joel told us at the group last week that the book won a Shirley Jackson Novella award (runner up) - he passed round a stone engraved with this information (readers of Jackson's The Lottery will know why a stone..).
http://www.shirleyjacksonawards.org/s...

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve lost count of the number of things in my life — dates, films, meals, work appointments — I’ve missed because of delayed or cancelled trains. If I’d been an alcoholic or a junkie, I don’t think I could have bigger holes in my diary. Being a passenger teaches you that life is random and nothing can be counted on.

The Witnesses are Gone is the story of Martin Swan, a man who finds strange VHS tapes in the shed of his new house. The tale is permeated with a new millennium disaffection, as Lane situates the story with references to the War on Terror and the geopolitical narratives of the day that justified it.

The backdrop of growing unease and disenfranchisement segues naturally into Martin watching the strange tape and spiraling as he tries to make sense of it. He treats the mystery of the filmmaker Jean Rien as a Rosetta Stone, as if unlocking the mysteries of a nebulous auteur can act as a master key to more personal mysteries that plague him.

The strength of this novella is its weakness, too — its defiance of easy classification and conventional storytelling leaves the reader as adrift as Martin is as he watched that first tape.

The oppressive tone, especially at the latter half, often didn’t work for me; I found myself laughing at one or two points. The abruptness of Martin’s long-term girlfriends death by train and then this heroin hazed journey in South America with a woman who may or may not be real might have been an intentional choice, but that didn’t make it any less silly to read at times.

Still, The Witnesses are Gone succeeds in a way a lot of stories don’t and made a lasting impression on me.

[Cameron Aegle · Rating 1 out of 5]

I took another recommendation from tik tok and it disappointed me yet again, surprise surprise.

Simple and pointless.
This is a frustrating goose chase that leads nowhere, I know all endings can’t be happy and cathartic but this just felt like a long and drawn out overcomplicated adventure that had no meaning. I read it because it was recommended as a short read to get you out of a rut and honestly, it does make me want to read something else to wash out the taste this book leaves.

[Deb Prins · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not what I was expecting and not in a good way

[Justin Steele · Rating 5 out of 5]

Last month I posted a review of Ramsey Campbell's novel The Grin of the Dark. I liked it, but felt that it would have been more effective if it was trimmed to be shorter. Otherwise, the book was an example of a "man researches lost art (in this case films) and ends up going down a rabbit hole of darkness" story . Readers of horror will have seen variations on this theme done before, and Campbell used silent film clowns and a world that is perceived to be increasingly hostile to create a book that serves as a great example of this type of story. So far, Theodore Roszak's Flicker seemed to be the only novel that could be called an exemplar of this type of story. It wasn't until a few days ago, when I picked up The Witnesses Are Gone, a novella by Joel Lane, that I can say I found a work that can stand up there with Flicker.

Joel Lane knows what he's about. Narrator Martin Swann finds a grainy, disturbing VHS in the shed of his new home. This surreal, black and white film was made by the mysterious French director Jean Rien, who becomes a bit of an obsession of Martin's.

The rabbit hole Martin finds himself heading down is dark indeed, and a feeling of despair permeates the novel from start to finish. Lane succeeds at hinting at the terrible without being overt and spoon feeding his readers. This novella manages to be both intelligent, with nods to certain films and literature along with commentary on the United States war with Iraq, and terrifying. The length was perfect, and Lane did not let the story get away from him, but instead managed to keep a tight narrative.

Readers of dark literature would do very well to snag this one, and join Martin Swaan in a trip down his sepia-tinted rabbit hole. I couldn't recommend this one enough.

Originally appeared on my blog, The Arkham Digest.

[Zuky the BookBum · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolute fever-dream. This one is so slippery I can already feel the memory of it dissolving away. It’s a story that wants to be reread and reread and reread. Incredible, beautiful prose. I will absolutely be adding Joel Lane’s back catalog of work to my tbr after this.

[Ellie Grace · Rating 1 out of 5]

i have no idea what i just read

[Caitlin Woodall · Rating 1 out of 5]

Too artsy for me to understand what the fuck was happening

[Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Movies these days just aren’t as important as they used to be. What happened to the auteur directors who don’t even release their movies in theaters and only screen them in the back rooms of shady bars, or break into your house and sneak it onto your VHS shelf and it sends you down a rabbit hole of epic conspiracies? RIP to the good old days

[Stephen Theaker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Martin Swann finds a videotape of an old French film in his new house. He doesn't really enjoy it - it's depressing, miserable and repetitive - but he can't stop thinking about it. When he tries to discover more about the director, Jean Rien, he finds only dead ends. He makes the mistake of persisting.

Before saying how wonderful this book was, it's worth saying first that instead of spending hours searching for old magazines, Martin might have had more luck in his quest if he'd begun by looking Jean Rien up on the IMDB...

We can guess what would have happened if he had, of course: he'd have got a page loading error, or at best a page of tantalising titles whose links did not work. But it would have been worth mentioning it: you can't help feeling that Martin is ignoring the obvious way to find the answers he needs.

Anyway, now that's off my chest: this is a brilliant book. It combines perfectly certain English, American and Japanese traditions of horror, as exemplified by M.R. James, Lovecraft and Hideo Nakata. But this isn't a Frankenstein monster of influences sewn together; somehow Lane makes it seem as if they were all part of the same tradition in the first place.

It shares with Lovecraft a moral outrage at the horror: these events are not just horrible or frightening, they are wrong; they should not happen; the world should not allow it. With Nakata it shares an interest in the paradox of film; that it seems more real and substantial than our reality. With James (I think, at least - I confess I've only seen the BBC adaptations) it shares the idea that there are things in the world best ignored for the sake of your own happiness.

It's grounded in everyday detail (Martin watches DVDs of Angel with his girlfriend), which makes the strange things that happen even more anomalous. Most of the time Martin's life is normal, mundane. When the supernatural (if that's what it is) intrudes, the reader is knocked off the rails all over again. While the tone is unsettling throughout, two or three sequences are utterly terrifying.

Perhaps the book's biggest achievement is that you're left wanting to see the films described, despite the inevitable consequences for your sanity... This was a superb book, one that I read in a single sitting; I refused to let myself sleep until I'd reached the end. And, of course, once I'd reached the end, I couldn't sleep.

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's plenty of weird fiction and horror novels about obscure or lost films, Gemma Files' Experimental Film, Ramsey Campbell wrote two: The Grin of the Dark and Ancient Images, and those are just the obvious ones that come to mind. This is more of a novella.

Here we have a protagonist who's trying to track down the work of an obscure French director whose films and even the memories of them have a tendency to fade or disappear. It's one of those delightfully weird and unsettling stories where the narrator starts to doubt his own memory as everyone around him assures him, "Oh, that never happened." "Oh, it's better to just leave that be and forget about it." But of course, he is obsessed and must see it through.

Lane evokes the "Bush Years" many times with asides about the Iraq War and anti-war protests. The lies and deceit and the general feeling of helplessness and "beaten-downness" of the era. That was a throwback to times I haven't thought about for years, back before Bush became a rehabilitated #Resistance hero. Maybe Trump should take up painting and give Michelle some candy and the moderate Dems will kiss his ass as well. .......ahem...back to the review...

The one place this book faltered for me was the ending. I was hoping for a bit more explanation, for things to be wrapped up and explained more. This ended like a lot of Joel Lane's excellent short stories, but for something of this length it felt a bit too sudden, almost a deus ex machina. That said, similarly to Lane's best short stories this does leave you with a grim, haunted feeling, and leaves you wondering too. There's several memorably creepy scenes and Lane's prose is as darkly beautiful and desolate as ever.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Martin Swann has amassed little of what would be considered conventional material significance over forty years and therefore is perhaps inevitably drawn towards the seemingly nihilistic movies of director Jean Rien. I say seemingly, because these are movies which go way beyond the usual 'cult' status, being so obscure that they are almost impossible to trace, with the suggestion that Rien's ouvre is somehow limiting and/or deleting itself; frustrating attempts to obtain copies and only appearing on the fringes of reality as blurred stills or in snatches of incomplete reviews. Becoming obssessed with locating these movies, Swann is attempting to find meaning - wishing to fictionalise his experiences, make them a linear concept, drawing coincidences where there are probably none, and seeking to afford himself the status of a character in a story over which he really has no control. Similar to religion - which is also a construct by which mankind believes he has worth - Swann feels compelled to find himself using Rien as a crutch. Ultimately, he fails, because there is nothing there. Not simply nothing substantive: just nothing. And in doing so events disintegrate around him, blur the boundaries of film and reality, until he loses everything (sometimes willingly), with the final realisation that our perception of all life - like film - only has a worth if we give it one.


This is a finely written and intense novella and comes highly recommended.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Becoming a fan feels the same as falling in love.
It feels excessive. It’s too much.
After reading The Earth Wire I was as fascinated by the author photo as the words in the book.

The Witnesses Are Gone is a book that might be about fandom, the dangers and joys of fandom. I can’t decide where Joel Lane stands on this. On the one hand I think he’s a giant fan-boy himself (He writes with the love and commitment of the total fan). On the other hand, I think he wants to commit terrible violence to the fan. Or maybe this is a book about the distorting violence the fan does to an art work.
Certainly it’s a book about the transformative nature of art. Ha ha ha!
Lane’s narrator, Martin Swan is not just unreliable, he’s dangerous. Why is he telling us this story? In his world art is as serious as a contagious pathogen. You only have to see a movie once for it to destroy your life. What will happen to you if you listen to his creepy and entirely unconvincing story? It’ll bring you down, that’s for sure. And it’ll give you a dark thrill that might feel like the start of an unhealthy addiction.

[Ellice · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eek, I’m so sorry but I have to say I did not understand this one. The blurb made this seem like the most griping premise ever, a man (Martin) who becomes consumed with hunting down a French director responsible for a haunting, mind-altering movie that he discovered in an old and decaying house. His drug-fuelled search leads him all over the world, searching for some evidence of the fact that this director existed and wasn’t just a figment of his imagination as he’s led to believe. It’s only 84 pages long so it’s a “read in an hour” sort of situation, but I’m just a bit ??? like why. The description of the story sounded a lot more intriguing and exciting than the actual story, as some parts I just sort of thought, hmm surely that wouldn’t actually really happen though? I didn’t hate the way it was written, so I’m still going to try more of Joel Lane’s books but I think perhaps this one may not be my favourite. 2/5 stars ⭐️⭐️

[IvyInThePages · Rating 1 out of 5]

Rating: 1.14 leaves out of 5
-Characters: 1/5
-Cover: 2/5
-Story: 1/5
-Writing: 3/5
Genre: Horror, Mystery, Thriller
-Horror: 0/5
-Mystery: 1/5
-Thriller: 0/5
Type: Ebook
Worth?: No

Hated|Disliked|Meh|It Was Okay|Liked|Really Liked|Loved

One thing I hate is when book's synopsis says one thing and you get a whole other. This is a dumpster fire. I thought we were going to get horror on VHS. What I got was a man trying to be poetic in a Wendy's. Please just don't.

[Bea · Rating 1 out of 5]

I expected a weird mystery, but not this. Didn't expect all the graphic drug depictions and mentions of r*pe and prostitution either, a trigger warning might have been nice. Appreciate the Lorca mention tho.

[Milt Theo · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterpiece of dread and subtlety.

[Christian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pessimist philosophy by way of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Sort of. In my opinion.

I’ve had the idea a few times to write a mystery that parallels the impenetrable mystery of life, always concluding that it could not both genuinely parallel life and be wholly satisfying as a story. Joel Lane has beat me to it, and though, not-so-surprisingly, it did fail to truly satisfy, it did finish with a (non-)conclusion invoking The Myth of Sisyphus that I mostly agree with. Sort of.

[Luna · Rating 2 out of 5]

what an odd book.

honestly, I struggled with my rating because a part of me disliked this book while the other part enjoyed the lost film hunt, nods to multiple pieces of art/film and political commentary. I also feel like I missed some bigger message that was being portrayed through heroin and decay but who knows.

maybe jean rien was the friends we made along the way.

can’t really say I recommend this, but if you like vague psychological horrors this is for you!

[clumsyplankton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty enjoyable read