The Lost District: Amazon.ca: Joel Lane: Books

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Product Description

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
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