The Witnesses Are Gone
Joel Lane

‘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. The Witnesses Are Gone is a masterwork of paranoid, destabilizing weird fiction and it will leave you unmoored for days.’
– Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Pallbearers Club

‘In The Witnesses are Gone, Joel Lane's skill at writing the short novel is showcased at its absolute best. His strong emotional and personal commitment to writing set in Birmingham is only equaled by his particular diligence afforded to the rising horror of loss that can only be described as “Lanean”.’
– Kerry Hadley-Pryce, author of The Black Country

‘Stark and thrumming with a forbidden, eldritch energy; The Witnesses are Gone slides under your skin. Not a single word is wasted in this sublime volume.’
– Matt Wesolowski, author of Demon

Moving into an old and decaying house, Martin Swann discovers a box of video cassettes in the garden shed. One of them is a bootleg copy of a morbid and disturbing film by obscure French director, Jean Rien.

The discovery leads Martin on a search for the director’s other films, and for a way to understand Rien’s filmography, drawing him away from his home and his lover into a shadowy realm of secrets, rituals and creeping decay. An encounter with a crazed film journalist in Gravesend leads to drug-fuelled visions in Paris – and finally to the Mexican desert where a grim revelation awaits.

The Witnesses Are Gone is a first-hand account of a journey into the darkest parts of the underworld – a look behind the screen on which our collective nightmares play.

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY M JOHN HARRISON

Praise for The Witnesses Are Gone and Joel Lane

‘The Witnesses Are Gone is an unsettling dreamlike first-hand account of a journey into the darkest parts of the underworld which totally turns the trope of the ‘cursed film’ on its head. Ramsey Campbell’s The Grin in the Dark might be a notable point of reference or even Hideo Nakata’s Ringu.’
– Ginger Nuts of Horror

‘You will not find a more unsettling dreamlike first-hand account of a journey which totally turns the trope of the ‘cursed film’ on its head. Formidable stuff from an absolute master of the weird.’
– Horror DNA

‘Lane’s writing is exquisite. His descriptions of a rusting and decaying Birmingham are vivid, immediate and unforgettable. Whether describing an industrial landscape or a surreal nightmare realm, Lane brings the landscape to life. His finding of poetry and beauty amongst tower blocks and concrete ruins, and his revealing of the uncanny hiding in wait just underneath, put him in the same league as The Fall’s Mark E. Smith and Arthur Machen. The language of The Witnesses Are Gone alone makes the novella a joy to read, even as it takes the reader on a bleak and unsettling journey.’
– Fantasy Hive

‘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.

‘The reader of a Lane story can never escape the feeling of being located squarely in banal reality. It’s this that makes any intrusion of the supernatural so shockingly effective – because the picture he creates is so palpable, and because we recognise some version of these lonely streets from our real lives.’
– Sublime Horror

‘Readers of dark literature would do very well to snag this one, and join Martin Swann in a trip down his sepia-tinted rabbit hole. I couldn't recommend this one enough.’
– The Arkham Digest

‘Perhaps the book’s biggest achievement is that you’re left wanting to see the films described, despite the inevitable consequences for your sanity.’
– Theaker’s Quarterly

'A master of urban noir whose stories also have a brittle poetry and a deep humanity. We may find ourselves among wastelands of disused factories, derelict houses and shuttered shops, but we also encounter there an uncanny beauty.'
– Wormwoodiana

‘Stories as urgent and uncomfortable and ultimately transcendent as they were when they were written.’
– Nina Allan, on The Earth Wire

About the Author

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.

Paperback ISBN: 9781910312971

Ebook ISBN: 9781910312988

Publication date: January 2023

Formats: Paperback / eBook