Where Furnaces Burn
Joel Lane
Influx Press, £9.99

 
JOEL LANE was a dissident mythmaker. In his novels and short stories, he reworked the traditions of supernatural horror and noir crime to confront the cruelties, absurdities and horrors of neoliberalism.

Lane’s unexpected death in 2013, at the age of just 50, silenced a voice of considerable intelligence and imaginative power. Fortunately, Influx Press are publishing new editions of his books. Where Furnaces Burn, the latest to be reissued, is a medley of 26 thematically and stylistically linked short stories, each of them an episode from the 24-year career of a West Midlands Police officer. In the opening story, the narrator is a trainee constable in late 1970s Wolverhampton; at the end of the book, and the close of his career, he is a damaged and disillusioned detective sergeant.   

The format is deceptive. The police procedural elements are embarkation points for unsettling, genre-blending expeditions into places neglected by corporations and politicians — West Midlands districts with rotting infrastructure and marginalised people. 

Lane’s influences are apparent. There’s the brutal realism, despair and rage of Derek Raymond’s “factory” thrillers; the weird ambiguities of William Hope Hodgson’s tales of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder; and the laconic precision of Robert Aickman in conjuring psychological depth from atmospheric landscapes and buildings. Somehow, these elements coalesce into a visionary inquest on the death of social cohesion in the poorest places in post-industrial Britain. 

There are uncanny aspects to all the stories — many are overtly supernatural — but Lane seldom puts a traditional demon or monster at the heart of his urban labyrinths.

In The Last Witness a group of people willing to testify against a murderous property developer are coming to grief through suicide, recklessness and the sudden onset of illness. This is archetypal Joel Lane territory: people perish in the shadows of untrammelled capitalism, but the meaning and moral implications of the story are complex and ambiguous. 

Several stories highlight the connection between neoliberal politics and gangsterism more explicitly. Mornings Echo is a tale of oneiric crime scene investigation: the detective works with the lover of a teenage gang leader to reassemble the scattered part of his body. 

In A Cup of Blood an underworld “fence” embarks on a brutal quest for a grail-like artefact with restorative powers. At one point, the detective remarks on similarities in the ideology of organised crime and conservatism: “Most villains are Tories — most successful villains, anyway.”

A murdered woman, an arthouse moviemaker and a stalker with terrifying psychokinetic abilities collide in Even the Pawn, a story that examines the dehumanising impact of sex trafficking and ridicules “artistic” justifications for pornography.  

Lane was deeply suspicious of Britain’s manipulative and reactionary press. He takes a satirical swipe at the media in Beth’s Law, in which journalists use child abduction as a stick with which to beat minority groups. The story climaxes with an unsettling encounter with figures formed from “torn and wadded newsprint” — the revenant spirits of murdered children.  

Wake Up in Moloch is an absurdist riff on the theme of technological determinism — the idea that thoughts and actions are shaped by the tools we use. A series of inexplicable deaths lead the narrator to a disused factory where a machine-worshipping cult enact a frenzied ritual.

The collection’s closest brush with “traditional” fantasy is A Mouth to Feed, in which a suffocating and possessive family maintain a hideous pact with a monstrous worm — a medieval myth relocated to contemporary Bewdley.  

As the stories unfold, we follow developments in the narrator’s police career, witness the erosion of his marriage and pick up hints of a growing psychological crisis. The bleak landscape of the detective’s inner life — his disappointments, losses and traumas — mirrors the disintegration of the communities he set out to serve.

Like James Kelman’s fictional representations of Glasgow, Lane’s reimagined West Midlands is a domain of the dispossessed — people struggling to survive the politically engineered destruction of their communities. While Kelman resists cultural colonisation by asserting the literary value of working-class voices, Lane uses spare, specific and richly symbolic prose to examine every aspect of the damage wrought by neoliberalism.

In his early work, Lane used the vocabulary of horror fiction to express his instinctual outrage at social division, demonisation of migrants and the exploitation of suffering. Later, his anger fuelled a more overt form of political commitment that emerged in his writing and activism. He remixed myth, poetic symbolism, genre and popular culture to produce unflinching portraits of a culture that greed has driven to the brink of chaos. 

In the years since Joel Lane’s death, the crisis faced by Britain’s post-industrial places has become ever more acute. The reissue of this masterpiece of mythopoeic Marxism could not be better timed.