The Lost District

‘Brutal but restrained stories, each one an unusually uplifting feel-bad experience, like you’re sharing a quiet word outside with a friend who’s having just as much of a rough time as you are. It’s a book for when the long nights feel unending and daybreak always comes a few hours later than it should, both emotionally and seasonally.’
– Reactor

‘Nothing ever changes. We just tell ourselves it does.’

Set in a post-industrial landscape of the present, the near future, and the imagined, Joel Lane’s seminal collection The Lost District explores human encounters with the unknown: sexual discovery, drug-inspired visions, the lonely paths of madness, and the shadow realms on the other side of death.

A neighbourhood fades into corrupt echoes of itself; a porn actor’s scars reveal the forces controlling his life; a musician is haunted by the madness of a deceased singer; and a man literally follows his ex-lover to the end of the world.

Ranging from grim urban horror to strange erotic fantasies to bitter allegories of loss and exploitation, the stories in The Lost District link the hidden places in the urban and small-town landscapes to the secret spaces inside all of us.

First published in the USA in 2006, and long out-of-print, The Lost District has never been published in the UK until now, further enforcing Joel Lane’s reputation as one of the most significant and distinctive British writers of the weird.

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY CONRAD WILLIAM