Synopsis
"As a critic of the macabre, in closeness of reading and clarity of insight, Joel Lane is unsurpassed. As a fiction writer he’s just as intelligent and keen-eyed. His prose is spare and sharp, his vision is bracingly bleak. He’s one of the absolute treasures of our field."
– Ramsey Campbell
"A poet of misfits, outsiders and the forsaken, his empathy for their suffering ever poignant. A cartographer of Birmingham and the Black Country as necropolis and weird edgeland. A chronicler of subcultures and the urban esoteric. An intelligent radical and one of the best British post-war writers of horror and the weird. I would go to considerable lengths to acquire his books when he was alive, but, at last, his new and future readership won't have to. Joel Lane will endure for as long as there is interest in visionary writers of quality."
– Adam Nevill, author of The Ritual.
In midwinter, an aspiring politician finds himself suddenly deprived of human contact.
Newcomers to a town are strangely reminiscent of people lost in a recent flood.
Demonstrators on a peace march see the faces of sleeping children in the snow.
A failed musician meets his own ancestors getting off a midnight train.
The Terrible Changes is a journey through the shadow-realm between reality and dream, between clarity and madness, between the living and the dead. In Joel Lane's fiction, the weird is a symbolic language expressing the chilling beauty, sadness and mystery of real life, combining the supernatural with themes of human loss, passion, solitude and despair, in the tradition of Robert Aickman, John Ramsey Campbell, and M. John Harrison.
From ‘The Brand’ (1983) to ‘Alouette’ (2008), these stories span a quarter-century of writing: urban horror tales, elegiac ghost stories, erotic reveries and psychological fugues. Long unavailable, The Terrible Changes is now back in print for a new audience, adding to Joel Lane’s legacy as a true master of the weird.
Release date: February 27, 2025
Publisher: Diversion Books
Print pages: 184
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