The Lost District [Paperback]

Joel Lane (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 14, 2006

A collection of fantastic and horrific stories that deal thematically address the core relationships of ones life, be they parental, first loves, best friends, or lovers (of both the hetero and homosexual variety). The decaying industrial backdrop of England's midlands provides a working class context that is both uniquely English, but universally accessible.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Bleak cityscapes dimmed by urban blight and human despair give rise to unique horrors in this virtuoso book of disturbing, cutting-edge tales from British author Lane (The Earth Wire and Other Stories). Lane's sketches of cast-off teens, cruising gays and drug-dependent loners begin in settings rank with gritty realism—pickup bars, abandoned squats, slush-caked alleyways—but gradually veer into strange and surreal territories. In "The Bootleg Heart," a student aroused by sounds of passion from the room above finds himself titillated even more when he learns their necrophilic origin. "Coming of Age" tells of a father who discovers just how estranged he has become from his missing son when a trail of clues leads him to a ramshackle house of Breughelesque nightmares. In "Among the Dead," the modern workplace is so ghoulishly cold and insensitive that it doesn't seem unusual for the office workers to snack at the local cemetery. Even the stories that are not manifestly macabre show Lane's exceptional skill at conjuring grimness through sharp slashes of poetic prose and imagery. (Feb.)
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From Booklist

Lane's fiction is set in the post-Thatcherite English Midlands, rife with unemployment, drinking, drugs, casual violence, and desperate sex. The protagonists are mostly teens, college students, and washed-up or compromised artists and writers who have uncanny experiences to report. In "The Lost District," Simon relates his two grungy, teen couplings with a girl from a terminally down-at-the-heels neighborhood and the hard time he has years later finding the scenes of their passion. The story resembles Lane's corrosively memorable novel, The Blue Mask (2003), in that it's dark and creepy but no more supernatural than, say, The Silence of the Lambs. The other 23 stories are more fantastic. They disclose passages to existential cul-de-sacs that are hard to leave intact and that give hard answers to profound questions, as in "Exposure," where the truth revealed about the afterlife is enough to make atheists despair. This is dark fantasy informed by political anger. In actuality just barely fantastic, it makes China Mieville seem cheery. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Night Shade Books; 1 edition (February 14, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1597800392
• ISBN-13: 978-1597800396
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,753,892 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A master storyteller!, February 6, 2006

By 

Mike Ellis (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Lost District (Paperback)

I've been reading Joel Lane's work for years in various horror anthologies and magazines, and this collection demonstrates why I never miss a book that he's in. Lane is one of the best, most grueling horror writers out there. Brutal, emotionally honest... sometimes erotic, and not for the weak.

Fans of M. John Harrison, or Ramsey Campbell are sure to love this master of the modern horror. From the Midlands of England to the finer cities of Europe, Lane's vision of urban horror and decay with stay with you for a long time.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Pitch Perfect Dark Urban Fantasy, July 5, 2009

By 

John J. Coyne (New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Lost District (Paperback)

In these stories Joel Lane gives us some wonderfully pitch-perfect dark urban fantasy/horror. While his prose isn't as poetic as M. John Harrison's and his characterization lacks the psychological plumb-bob of J. G. Ballard, Lane excels in settings, all of which are dark and dangerous and unreal, and the subtle, often grotesque plot twists.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very Dark & Very Hard to Put Down, February 3, 2008

By 

Jennifer Juday "Working Mom & Cook" (Austin, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Lost District (Paperback)

If you have never tried dark fantasy, THE LOST DISTRICT may be a good place to start. I have never been a big fan of dark fantasy, but found Joel's Lane's writing distressingly compelling. Distressing because I really did not want to spend time with these people and in these places.

I have loved some works of urban fantasy (Charles De Lint, Emma Bull), but found this as dark or darker than De Lint at his darkest moments (his works as Samuel Key can be compared).

Despite my dislike of the world Lane creates, I found THE LOST DISTRICT a hard book to put down. It kept me up quite late one night. I would finish one story, glance at the next page, and find myself hooked again, in just a sentence or two, by the next story -- an unusual experience for me in reading short story collections. THE LOST DISTRICT is a grim but well-written, sometimes poetic book. Not for the faint of heart.