Lane WHERE FURNACES BURN

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-914391-10-1
Verlag: INFLUX PRESS
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 294 Seiten

'A poet of misfits, outsiders and the forsaken, his empathy for their suffering ever poignant.' - Adam Nevill, author of The Ritual 'Joel Lane understood and expertly exploited the connection between exterior and interior landscapes like no other.' - Paul Tremblay, author of The Pallbearer's Club

Joel Lane was the author of two novels, From Blue to Black and The Blue Mask; several short story collections, The Earth Wire, The Lost District, The Terrible Changes, Do Not Pass Go, Where Furnaces Burn, The Anniversary of Never and Scar City; a novella, The Witnesses Are Gone; and four volumes of poetry, The Edge of the Screen, Trouble in the Heartland, The Autumn Myth and Instinct. He edited three anthologies of short stories, Birmingham Noir (with Steve Bishop), Beneath the Ground and Never Again (with Allyson Bird). He won an Eric Gregory Award, two British Fantasy Awards and a World Fantasy Award. Born in Exeter in 1963, he lived most of his life in Birmingham, where he died in 2013.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lane, Joel

Leseproben

I grew up in the region Joel Lane takes his readers to. I’ve lived here most of my life: the Black Country – real and imagined. I recognise the eerie and weird in its landscapes and mindscapes. Lane’s horrors could only ever come from this place. A place of breakages, borderlands, disjunctions, and displacements.

The Black Country is a strange place. It’s not found on maps and its borders are under constant contestation. A region known for its Industrial heritage; we’re now haunted by the residues and ruins. Old railway lines and bell pits punctuate an off-kilter landscape built of green and grey. Rewilded spoil heaps cosy up next to large housing estates. Wildflowers and rare insects share space with litter, graffiti, and clandestine behaviours. Not a conventionally beautiful place, but one Joel Lane saw the beauty in and helped me reconfigure my love for.

I came across Lane’s work in my early adult years. I’d just finished my English Literature degree and had returned to my homelands. Like most twentysomething dweebs, I thought everything that was interesting in the world happened somewhere other than my neck of the woods. Then I stumbled on some of his stories and poems in Dudley Library. Oh shit! I thought, I’ve completely overlooked this place and completely underappreciated its strangeness. One of literature’s strengths is its unique ability to remind us and give language and image to that which we’d forgotten we knew. Reading Lane taught me that too. He taught it viscerally.

I’m reminded of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical landscapes here. Like Lane’s regions, conflict and ambivalence are at its core. Distinct parts of our selfhood wrestle, lose traction, crack, and then reform. Self is a site of breakages. Lacan refers to the mirror stage, where one recognises their reflection in the process of becoming a subject. We recognise a distinct individual. We also notice an imaginary, perfect self which is then quashed as we become socialised. This imagined reflection of self is something that one wishes to regain, because it is pure self. We’re afraid of it too – it is our pre-socialised unruliness. This unruly yet beautiful thing is Lacan’s Lamella. Lacan says:

Whenever the membranes of the egg in which the foetus emerges on its way to becoming a new-born are broken, imagine for a moment that something flies off, and that one can do it with an egg as easily as with a man, namely the hommelette, or the lamella.

This thing is a part of our self which is constantly around, always chasing but cannot be fixed upon. It is the result of the very act of passing through the mirror stage, jettisoning the abject or orientating our castration complexes – it hides, haunts, seduces, and sickens. Like Freud’s id – it is the primal, unruly part of our psyche. You’ll catch glimpses of this almost-untraceable, infinite and infinitesimal, equally attractive and repulsive being, which is you and not you, throughout Where Furnaces Burn. Like me, you might be reminded of things lost or best forgotten. It might reignite things long repressed in the dank recesses of your mind.

In Stambermill, my five-year-old self raced bikes through housing estates and around the backs of homes where patches of woods make dens for rodents and gangs of naughty kids. Here, the river Stour’s polluted currents meander past scrap yards, small holdings, and old, barren pubs. The waters run under the blue brick arches of a Victorian viaduct where mosses and lichens rhizome and the ghosts of freight still rumble if you know how to listen for them. A similar in-between and off-kilter landscape is found in ‘My Stone Desire’ and ‘Still Water’. In these tales, rural, urban, organic, and machine conjugate to form erotic and abject hauntings. This refrain runs through this collection, tracking the old case notes of a West Midlands police officer, as he charts his own alienated and disquieted career and personal life, full of unusual sex, dislocated experiences, and a strange sense of lack. A lack that springs out of the liminal and the residues of place-identity.

My fourteen-year-old self wanders up the Thorns Road to meet mates on the top of Quarry Bank. No one knows where the borders are here; we are between different subsets of the DY postcodes. Looking up I see Merry Hill Shopping Centre, a hyperreal, indoor town built on the remains of Round Oak Steelworks. Looking down, the industrial estates and webbed terrace streets of The Lye. This is the land Lane called Clayheath in ‘Black Country’, a place revisited from the looping narrative of ‘The Lost District’ in his earlier collection. The hoard of thefts and vile juvenile criminality in this story springs forth in the liminal and the dreamscapes – literally and figuratively. It seems the culprit is a John Doe, built from the layers of lost childhoods and liminal lives that were never allowed to reach out and fulfil anything.  

My nineteen-year-old self drives out to the Worcestershire countryside on the edges of my region: Hagley, Kinver, Bewdley. These sites seem natural but are more cultured than first appears. These are spaces where the rural and urban mingle – one threatens to overtake the other. Lane uses these edgelands and plays an explicitly Weird card in ‘A Mouth to Feed’, drawing on the primal critters of Bram Stoker’s Lair of the White Worm or Robert E. Howard’s Worms of the Earth. His Lindworm is the phallic lamella, sitting on the rural edge of the urban and modern; the sleeping threat of an encroaching primal force that might envelope and erase our existence.

My thirty-year-old self stumbles home from Turner’s pub to the Sledmere estate in Netherton. I cut through the allotments and down the canal tow path. I navigate the ruins of an old engine house and the dried-up hole of a now defunct reservoir. Spoil heaps have been rewilded by pollen-heavy weeds. The rust of corrugated roofs from the dark industrial estate puncture the skyline. Netherton tunnel eats through one-and-a-half miles of dolerite hillside. Here, it’s easy to envision the shamanic and erotic machine-god of ‘Wake up in Moloch’. In ‘the unique patchwork of urban villages and gravel meadows’ that mark out Netherton, is something ‘like a giant steam engine turned inside out’ which is the centre for a vampiric and pagan orgiastic worship. At the start of this tale, we’re warned that this place ‘grew out of the Industrial Revolution […] It was inevitable that sooner or later, we’d have to give something back’. Again then, this fusion of organic and machine, animate and inanimate, past and present brings forth some peripheral yet overwhelming and inexplicable threat.

In the final case, our detective discusses his retirement. ‘There isn’t a why,’ he says, ‘There’s just what happened. But everything falls apart, so perhaps it doesn’t need much explanation.’ But there is some explanation – inexplicable as the answer may be. The trouble is, as Morton suggests in ‘Slow Burn’, ‘THEY DON’T BELONG HERE. What belongs here doesn’t belong in the world.’ It’s in the ground itself. It’s in the mineral-rich elements that produced the industrial heartlands of the UK. In the deep time and the geological residues of the place.

My thirty-seven-year-old self walks a Staffie around the damp and desolate grounds of Wren’s Nest Nature Reserve. I lived here for six years and know it in all its tiny details; a quintessentially Black Country space. The nature reserve is a lush and beautiful site of protected flora and fauna, home to fossilised ripple beds and Silurian outcrops. It’s also full of industrial relics – mineshafts and old railway lines. One of Dudley’s infamous council estates wraps around the whole thing. This is a place where domestic, industrial, natural, and geological create strange confluences. We are safe and unsafe here, familiar and unfamiliar, attracted and repulsed. The hallmarks of the abject and uncanny. The story ‘Slow Burn’ deals with this explicitly. In Lane’s hands, these Wren’s Nest confluences produce a harrowing genius loci: ‘It had a thin, spineless body, but its hands were wide and reaching towards us with bloodless fingers. Its face was a swirl, a thumbprint, without eyes or mouth’. This spirit of place hollows the community and the people making this queer space their home.

The land is toxic. Its history is toxic. The Black Country is a country blackened. It diseases the area and its inhabitants. Bodiless beings, broken and lacking, are summoned by this. Now, nearly forty, I taste the bitter brambles that thicket the canal tow paths of my homelands. I’m looking for my own lost districts – I cannot help myself.

Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998)

R. M. Francis is a lecturer in Creative and Professional Writing at the University of Wolverhampton. He’s the author of novels, Bella and The Wrenna (Wild Pressed Books) and poetry collections Subsidence (Smokestack Books) and The Chain Coral Chorus (Play...