The Earth Wire and Other Stories

by Joel Lane

Love and Death. Sex and Despair. In this critically acclaimed collection of seventeen short stories, Joel Lane examines the means and the cost of survival.

Genres: Short Stories, Horror, Fiction, Fantasy, Weird Fiction, Short Story Collection, Literary Horror

208 pages, Paperback

First published September 29, 1994

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

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joel Lane’s first collection of short stories does not read like the work of a beginning writer. Either Lane wrote hundreds of unpublished stories before he wrote these or his gift simply sprang fully formed onto the page. This is also not an easy collection to categorize. To call it 'horror', 'weird', or 'urban fantasy' would be a misnomer, and would likely cause some potential readers to turn away. But you should not turn away, for these stories are worth your time. They are also not always blatantly fantastic or horrific in nature. Most project, at least on the surface, a grimy urban realism based in the English West Midlands—nearly always suffused with a dark, melancholic tone. This atmosphere pervades all of the stories, thus connecting them through a common sensorial experience generated through their reading. In the less obviously unreal examples, below this layer of grime lurks a slight tinge or element of strangeness. Accompanying this is often a current of social consciousness that I find rare in literature of the weird. Lane’s style is self-assured, quietly capable. Even in the descriptions of the frequent messiness permeating his characters' lives there is clarity and precision. The subtlety of his writing has a lulling effect, and once transfixed by it a reader may miss important keys buried offhandedly in the text.

Lane displays a stylistic kinship with Robert Aickman, yet often taking that writer's type of trademark ambiguous strangeness to an even higher plateau. I was also reminded of Christopher Priest's authorial voice, yet Lane is more oriented toward human relationships than Priest, and more successfully probes at their nuances. I found more emotion in Lane's fiction than in Priest's, though it is still somewhat muted by his style. In many cases I’m turned off by writers of weird or supernatural fiction attempting to equally blend domestic situations with the weird/supernatural elements of a story, as I rarely find the relationship-oriented details to rise above the level of the banal or cliché. The result is mere filler padding the narrative. But the way Lane writes these flawed characters seeking love and acceptance works for me. Maybe it’s the fact that there is never a neat and happy ending, or that it’s all presented so matter-of-factly yet still touched with pathos (as in lines like 'The opposite of love is indifference'). Though not exclusively so, I have found this kind of restrained emotionality to be common in British writers, and it’s usually a welcome relief to encounter.

Now, on to the stories (starred are particular favorites, but I enjoyed all of them at least to a certain degree)...

Common Land: Probably the most overt 'dark fantasy' story in the collection. A young woman rekindles a romance with her ex, who has fallen in with a few others like him who create crystalline ice figures by breathing out frozen threads from inside their bodies. A very dark (and cold) tale set in a derelict section of a post-industrial city.

Albert Ross: A young man with a burgeoning affliction meets with a healer, who helps him work through his transition. A painful story of aging and certain gulfs that cannot be traversed.

*The Clearing: A haunting, vaguely dystopian story where residents of a city in the midst of redevelopment are plagued by a terminal cancer. Once infected they are forcibly taken to hospital, where it’s rumored they are exterminated. Lane deftly maintains a palpable sense of fear and desperation amid a striking urban setting.

*The Night Won’t Go: Devastating.

He had to think, not let his thoughts just happen. Drink helped. Sex helped. But they didn’t touch whatever it was displaced you from your own life, took away your sense of direction, so that you had nothing left for dealing with the future except a handful of reflexes that could belong to anyone.

Thicker Than Water: A reporter obsessed with unexplained murders at a vagrant settlement seeks answers he likely won’t be pleased to find.

Branded: A slight piece about two lost teens—one more troubled than the other.

Wave Scars: Two men—briefly lovers—return to the one’s hometown and share an unusual experience. Very much a tone piece, deeply melancholic in nature.

The Death of the Witness: An alienated young woman has disaffected sex and then after a night of no sleep sees or hallucinates a tragedy.

An Angry Voice: A boy, his brother, and their father leave their barricaded city for a day of shooting in the hills. The narrative grows increasingly tragic and dreamlike.

Other Than the Fair: A tale of two fairs. A 14-year-old girl attends a fair with her older sister and her sister’s boyfriend. While on the Ferris wheel they glimpse through the adjacent woods what looks like another fair nearby. Of course they decide to check out the other fair, which grows increasingly menacing as they walk through it. A rather ambiguous tale, with an ending that just kind of trails off. Probably warrants a reread.

And Some Are Missing: A troubled man coping with a recent break-up begins to see vampire-like creatures he calls 'antipeople'.

*The Foggy, Foggy Dew: A cold, hollow story with a strong vein of cosmic horror running through it. A man runs into an old friend while working a temp job. After getting a pint together they go home to the man’s friend’s house where his mom is working at a loom. His friend then begins playing the piano in a highly unusual manner. (Note: this is the earliest story included in the collection, first published eight years before in 1986 as a chapbook by Mark Valentine.)

*Waiting for a Train: A man takes a surreal train journey...or does he? Pitch black in its themes and imagery, this story really messed with my head.

The Circus Floor: A brief sketch of a troubled relationship.

Ian waved goodbye through the window at the back of the bus. I watched the bus dwindling in the long view downhill, past the unlit bulks of hotels and warehouses. This was the area where he and I belonged, in transition between the city centre and the suburbs. It was an area made up of derelict buildings, factories, car parks, railway bridges, subways, canals. An area given back to whatever of nature could improvise a living there. An area whose chief landmarks were half-concealed places that had the feel of the past, but were too anonymous to count as history. Ian knew these places, and brought them to life for me. It felt like remembering my own past.

Playing Dead: A man returns decades later to his hometown where his reputation has suffered due to a newspaper story he wrote about the unusual number of blind residents in the town. At his hotel he meets a woman around his age and becomes involved with her, to his later chagrin. This walks a curious line between Aickmanesque strange and cosmic horror. It’s another story I will reread to hopefully tease out more from it than I did on first read.

*The Earth Wire: Another vaguely dystopian story where a man returns to his hometown to look for his parents, whose house was destroyed during rioting. As with many of these stories, the bleak, post-industrial setting here forms the atmospheric basis for the narrative.

In the Brightness of My Day: A young man acts as a surrogate in the outer world for a hyper-evolved being living in his flat. Though still featuring Lane's unique stylistic flourishes, this is very much a cosmic horror story, with the whole 'humans as pawns of an uncaring higher being' theme as a strong narrative force. It’s also unusual for the collection in that there is an actual well-articulated monster present. While I can see many readers enjoying this story, it wasn’t one of my favorites and I actually felt that if the order of the final two stories had been reversed it would have made for a more fitting close to the collection. A minor complaint, though.

On the whole, this is a strong debut collection that is now deservedly back in print, courtesy of Influx Press. Though Joel Lane is sadly no longer with us, he did leave behind a sizable literary legacy: seven short story collections (the first of which—this one—won a British Fantasy Award and another of which won a World Fantasy Award); two novels and a single novella (The Witnesses Are Gone, a finalist for a Shirley Jackson Award); four collections of poetry; and a posthumous collection of critical essays published by Tartarus Press. I very much look forward to reading more of his work.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Checking this out after S̶e̶a̶n̶'s usual thoughtful and detailed review:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Other than the open-ended narratives, I don't sense the connection with Aickman so strongly. The depressing '80s Thatcherite Midlands do remind me of Ramsey Campbell's post-Lovecraft stories from a similar period. Lane seems to show more empathy with his characters and their challenges. Like Campbell's characters, sex (both gay and straight for Lane's characters) is often on the agenda. While the visual and incidental detail is a bit more cluttered than I usually like, he effectively evokes the decaying urban cityscapes and cold, gray interiors; I might be complaining about the writing if it weren't so skillfully executed. (I'd spent some time in Birmingham and New Street Station in the early '90s, and I recognize Lane's descriptions.) And like (say) Brian Evenson, he can slip us the essential details in an artful and economical fashion. "The Night Won't Go" starts like this:

The first real day of winter was the day he put on the wrong clothes. [...] Going back into the dark bedroom, he'd reached into the chest of drawers on the left-hand side of the bed. Daniel's clothes were hardly distinguishable from his own; they often swapped T-shirts or sweaters when one of them ran out.

That immediately says so much about the protagonist, without cliched expository verbiage. A lesser writer would have to moan about the narrator missing his boyfriend, overshare the backstory, emphasize his misery, etc etc. As the story progresses, we are slipped more nuggets about Daniel, and construct a complex picture after meeting Daniel's brother. The ending is genuinely disorienting and unsettling; I can chew on the closing dialog over and over.

"Wave Scars" is another dark, cryptic piece. It starts in a (by now familiar) depressed Birmingham backdrop, with two friends who eventually go on a mysterious road trip. The whole story turns on two lines of dialog:

"What are you looking for?" I asked.
...
"It's not here yet."

And when it arrives, it is of course the kind of uncanny and ambiguous presence that gets under one's skin.

In the stories here that I find most effective, Lane consistently steers clear of horror cliches, and builds disturbing and ambiguous creatures and situations. I can't describe in a sentence the anti-people in "And Some are Missing", but the various encounters are always slippery and unsettling. I love the last two sentences:

But somehow, I still felt responsible. Fourteen stitches are not enough.

The arc of "The Foggy, Foggy Dew" is a common one in horror fiction (two visits to the same house, with dark transformations afoot the second time). But the mysterious loom and the music room keep taking on surprising forms, and the shadow of desire always lurks in the background.

I'm rather surprised that the collection was named after "The Earth Wire"; I thought the exposition was rather stiff and didactic, and read like an early piece (the pub history said '89, the year of the earliest stories in the collection).

But we do end on a high note: "In the Brightness of My Day" had all of Lane's special qualities that I admire. Like a lot of Ramsey Campbell from a similar period, the promise of sexual encounters is enticing, but the outcomes are amorphous and disturbing. Interactions between characters can be intimate and even fleetingly beautiful, but an ominous detail will skew everything in a much darker and dangerous direction. We're never sure about Moth and Matt's motivations, or even their cryptic relationship; it's often unclear what exactly is happening, other than a situation that we should probably flee from. What can we make of this?

When Darren came back out of the bathroom, Moth embraced him silently. He let some of his own face tear away, like cobweb, between Darren's fingers.

And most of this works, uneasy questions and all. This is the kind of weird fiction that I love, even though I have reservations about some of the other pieces.

[Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joel Lane's first collection, first published in 1994 and out of print until this new edition from Influx Press. Like his first novel, the superb From Blue to Black, it seems preternaturally assured and feels like the work of a much more experienced writer. The hallmarks of his whole body of work are already in place: the cool, measured tone; Birmingham locations; political undertones; sense of loneliness; elements of the weird and supernatural accepted as ordinary by the characters. Indeed, the first story, 'Common Land' – in which an artist falls back into a relationship with her ex, only to find herself shut out from otherworldly goings-on with his housemates – is such an exact summation of Lane's style that it might as well be a litmus test for one's appreciation of his writing.

The Earth Wire is so consistently excellent that it's hard to pick favourites; it isn't a novel-in-stories, but Lane's mesmerising tone is so unwavering, and in some ways it feels like a single dreamlike narrative, passing through varying scenes and brushing past different people. One story, 'The Foggy, Foggy Dew' (the earliest in the book, dating back to 1986) could literally be described like this, as its protagonist loses his way in surreal monotony, seeming to step through time. 'Wave Scars' may be an early sketch for From Blue to Black, the mercurial, beguiling Steven mirroring the novel's Karl. 'And Some Were Missing' is an unnerving tale in which a community is tormented by what the narrator calls 'antipeople'. There is, however, an obvious standout: the virtuosic 'The Clearing', a very human dystopian story, eerily apt for 2020, in which the poor and sick are increasingly numerous, and increasingly being forced into inadequate housing.

Has there ever been another writer whose every sentence is a potent distillation of their stylistic approach? Anna Kavan and Fleur Jaeggy are the only others I can think of. As always, I found so many phrases and passages quotable that I stopped keeping track of them after the first couple of stories; I would have ended up with hundreds, if not thousands. In a Joel Lane story, even a sentence that would appear innocuous if encountered elsewhere – such as 'no light came from the window' – seems to stand for everything and mean much more than it says.

More about my love of Lane’s work in this piece I wrote for Sublime Horror: The fiction of Joel Lane – ‘To read Lane is to enter into an unforgettable, beautifully ambiguous landscape’

TinyLetter | Linktree

[Tom Over · Rating 4 out of 5]

That there aren’t any ghosts within these pages doesn’t mean I won’t be haunted by them for years to come.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel a bit bad about reviewing this book, my word knowledge just isn’t good enough to explain what this book does to the reader….but here goes my best attempt.

Lane’s debut collection would have shown anybody who picked up this book just what a good writer he was, such a unique style that will turn your world upside down, make your insides hurt and leave you desperate for more understanding of what you just read. One thought kept popping up in my head during this reading, I kept thinking this is like a pop-up book…without the pop-ups. The background comes across as very flat and grey, at times you almost forget it is there, a large amount of this is because of the characters burning so bright, but then Lane gives you one short line describing something as simple as water droplets hanging in the air around a streetlight and BANG! your eyes are suddenly opened and you see everything that is going on. It is quite disorienting, especially as Lane has filled you with despair up to that point. I doubt that makes much sense.

The standout story here was The Foggy, Foggy Dew, such a creepy story, like the other stories in the collection you will have no idea what is going on, Lane lets the reader’s imagination finish the stories. The foggy, foggy dew was next level stuff, it had me grimacing and saying out loud What The F*** is going on! One clever thing that Lane does is with character names, the stories are different but names are reused and you’re left wondering if they are the same person, a smart way of linking stories without actually linking them. Some odd violent events happen in the stories, the characters just accept them like that is the norm, and after a while the reader will start to think like that, Lane really does get in your head.

Blog review is here: https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2021...

[Bill Hsu · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure why I can't merge my notes from the e-book into this.

More notes here:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've long been a fan of the late Joel Lane's fiction and have almost all of his books, however "The Earth Wire" (originally published in 1994) had eluded me until this new edition from Influx Press. Considering these stories were written over twenty-five years ago I was a little surprised that the quality matched his later input - indicative that Lane was a consistently strong writer through his published career. There are no signs of a fledgling here, but of someone already in full flight.

Despite a similarity in theme throughout his work - urban decay, relationship difficulties, the uncanny at the fringes of our imagination, desolate souls - all of these stories bring something new to the conversation. The writing is great, the observations spot-on. Whilst I'm probably finishing my Lane journey here (unless The Terrible Changes also gets a reprint or becomes affordable), I'd recommend this as a place to start for those unfamiliar with his work. I only wish there was more to discover.

[Netanella · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two stories in and I'm struck by how bleak these stories are. The characters are floating through a gloomy landscape, a near future dystopian vision of stagnation and loss of purpose. The writing is beautiful, but the sense of depression is profound. I'll be reading another novel along with these shorts - a palate cleanser is necessary.

*Update*
I finally finished this collection by reading one story every day or so. Dark and dreary, often set in a post-industrial setting, dealing with abandonment, brokenness, suicide, loss, loneliness. Definitely not a collection to pick up when you're already feeling down.

[Erin Warden-English · Rating 2 out of 5]

I generally like weird fiction, but this was just so desolate. It wasn't bad, but it was a bit of a slog to get through.

[Tyler · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing was pretty good, but I found most of the stories to be pretty strange with some confusing endings. Good enough that I'm gonna check out some more of the author's work.

[Mike Mclatchey · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found the critical acclaim for this volume of stories to be fairly baffling. I had read a couple of Lane stories elsewhere that I enjoyed that led me to this first collection. But I remember feeling after about the fifth or sixth story that if I was going to read another description of a blasted city landscape replete with crumbling brick and strewn rubbish I was going to start screaming. It isn't just that many of these stories start and then stop with me wondering what was supposed to have happened, but they are usually filled with characters so numb to their predicaments that it's hard to sympathize with anyone. Like an array of gray vignettes that barely even have the hope of a dreadful denouement to relieve the tedium. Disaffected, lost, numb, often wandering from one drab encounter to another. Many of these stories barely wear the horror or weirdness you would expect from the description.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading the phenomenal From Blue to Black, I was desperate to read more of Joel Lane, despite his usual genre (dark fantasy/fantasy horror) admittedly not being my thing at all- hence why Gaiman and Lovecraft have always left me cold. I like horror, but I like it more on the "realistic" side, I think.

And yet, I really enjoyed my time in Lane's strange, dreamlike Birmingham. Even in this debut collection, his prose style remains consistent, and consistently good. I'm in love with the cold, precise way he writes, the way it mirrors his backdrop of post-industrial cities with their abandoned factories and counsel estates on the verge of destruction.

Not every story "hit" though. I tended to enjoy the more realistic stories in this collection- "And Some Are Missing", “The Night Won’t Go”, and "Wave Scars" especially were stand-outs, and made me wonder if they were early versions of From Blue to Black. My least favorites were the ones that descended directly into cosmic horror- "Playing Dead", "In the Brightness of My Day", "Thicker Than Water"- but cosmic horror in general isn't really my thing. I also did not really love the first story, "Common Land", which was definitely more on the dark, paranormal fantasy side and made me think of Gaiman. Curiously, the other, more dark fantasy story, "Albert Ross", I loved. Perhaps because it reminded me very strongly of In a Shallow Grave.

It's a shame that, as of now, so few of Lane's work is available. It's a shame how such a promisingly, talented young writer has so badly faded into obscurity.

[Thomas Goddard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't think I've ever read a surreal collection that read so... real

These are very gritty, urban and sharply written stories. They actually overlap, if you're reading closely. There are recurrent images that hold meanings across different stories. Objects that crop up.

They explore isolation brilliantly and even the sexuality explored seemed to do nothing to draw any character closer to one another.

Everything seems to be strangely static and at the same time both rotten/decaying and also growing heavier and more ominous like a living thing.

The nearest I can think is that these are written specifically from memories the author had. They're remembered and recalled over and over by the writer until they have begun to move in slow motion. Every description becomes achingly deliberate. Almost held in suspension.

A slight criticism is that the pacing did falter a little. Sometimes becoming a little too dolorous.

I'll definitely be reading more from Lane.

[William Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Few authors were ever able to incorporate the setting of their stories into the general atmosphere of the story to the degree Joel Lane was able to do so. The industrial wastelands, especially of the North of England, are the favorite location of Lane's dark tales. Profound loneliness is the primary characteristic exhibited by Lane's characters. They are hopeless, searching, and lost in depths of their own despair. If this sounds like a bleak collection of stories, it is. Yet Lane's writing is of such high quality that, if you take one or two stories at a time, they will move you and stay with you long after you finish reading them. If you can find a rare copy of this book, I definitely recommend it.

[Richard Clay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably about as good a short story collection as could have been expected at the time and it seems to hold up even better now, a quarter of a century on. Lane's writing is bound to alienate a lot of people. It's set in a perpetually unfashionable corner of England (Oldbury is rarely more than half an hour away on the bus), frequently revolves around gay characters and, even when there's no overt fantasy or dystopian element, there's a distinctly Lovecraftian atmosphere. All those who love this unique combination love it very much and won't ever stop regretting that JL left us too soon.

[Aiden · Rating 3 out of 5]

Joel Lane once again explores love, death, sex and despair in seventeen brillaint short stories focusing on bleak topics and urban settings, Lane constructs these stories with powerful word choice and distinctive characters.

[Jimmy Dean]

really great collection of short stories, so good at creating a sense of place

loved how empathetic and inescapably sad some of the stories are, you can feel the consequences of Thatcherism in the bones of this books and Lane's vision of Britain

[Tracy Hollen · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars

[Michael Jarvie · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unsettling collection of weird stories set in the Midlands.

[afrijackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 ⭐

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Uneven (and in some ways repetitive), but "Wave Scars," "An Angry Voice," and "The Foggy, Foggy Dew" are strong works of short fiction.

[Sara G · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't love these but they were mostly ok. Don't know what else to say, I don't think these are going to leave a lasting impression. Guess Joel Lane is not for me.

[Riddle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This Lane collection was unexpectedly gay, abstract and symbolic, which made me enjoy it even more
4.95/5 compared to "Where Furnaces Burn", still peak fiction

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Superb collection of stories - long out of print and hard to get hold of - by a writer who, although I didn't realise it, was someone whose work I had long admired and liked when I came across it in anthologies like Stephen Jones's 'Best Horror of...'. Having said that I would stress that the stories in this collection, and Mr. Lane's other writings while they can accurately be described as horror, or weird or fantasy, this should not lead anyone to pass them by as 'genre' - indeed I find some of the most interesting writing I come across in 'horror' anthologies (of course some of the most awful as well) often, I think, because writers in the horror/fantasy fields are working writers earning their living as writers not as 'writers' within an academic institution (I don't mean to criticize how any writer earns a living - I know it is incredibly difficult to make a living simply as a writer - I've just noticed that many writers I admire who do have positions within 'academia' eventually seem to run out of steam as they gradually use up their life experience prior to entering a university setting).

Mr. Lane was also one of the first horror writers to incorporate 'gay' characters, relationships, sex scenes, themes, in a matter of fact way in his horror stories. I don't want in anyway to associate him with the all to numerous writers of mediocre horror stories who tack on a bit of gay sex to make 'gay horror' stories. The gay element is just there, like it is in life, but all the more noteworthy because the horror/weird genres are, like SF/fantasy, traditionally homophobic.

This is fantastic collection which I fail to give five stars too because it is not quite as brilliant a collection as his later ones so I will retain the extra stars for those. One minor point of amusement for me was in the introduction by Nina Allan were she remarks on various themes and subjects that recur in Joel Lane's works amongst others characters constantly using 'telephone boxes' and seeing them as symbolic of - well it doesn't matter - because what Ms. Allan doesn't realise or understand is that back in the early 1990's the only way to make a phone call if you were living in bedsits, cheap flats, the typical accommodation of students, the poor, transients, etc. etc. was to use phone boxes because it was virtually impossible to get a telephone line without a very expensive deposit - thus restricting telephone use at home to the better off. Having lived through those years it is hard to remember how extensive and well, if inconveniently, the system worked.

If you have yet to discover Mr. Lane's work I advise you to get this or any of his other works asap.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

thought I'd already added this. Anyway early Joel, excellent, strange, troubling stories.