WINNER OF THE 2013 WORLD FANTASY AWARD Episodes from the casebook of a police officer in the West Midlands: A young woman needs help in finding the buried pieces of her lover... so he can return to waking life. Pale-faced thieves gather by a disused railway to watch a puppet theatre of love and violence. Why do local youths keep starting fires in the ash woods around a disused mine in the Black Country? A series of inexplicable deaths uncover a secret cult of machine worship. When a migrant worker disappears, the key suspect is a boy driven mad by memories that are not his own. Among the derelict factories and warehouses at the heart of the city, an archaic god seeks out his willing victims. Blurring the occult detective story with urban noir fiction, Where Furnaces Burn offers a glimpse of the myths and terrors buried within the industrial landscape. First published in 2012, Joel Lane’s World Fantasy Award-winning collection is a true modern classic of weird fiction that cemented his place as one of the most important and distinctive British writers of the weird.

Prizes

Winner of World Fantasy Award 2013

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.