Brian J. Showers.com - Joel Lane Interview

ALL HALLOWS TALKS WITH . . . JOEL LANE

Conducted by Brian J. Showers, © February 2005

This interview was first published in All Hallows #40, October 2005

Joel Lane was born in Exeter in 1963. He grew up in Birmingham, where he still lives and works as an editor and writer. His short stories in the weird fiction genre have appeared in many magazines and anthologies over the past 20 years. A collection of stories, The Earth Wire, was published by Egerton Press in 1993. Since then, he has published two mainstream novels, From Blue To Black (Serpent's Tail, 2000) and The Blue Mask (Serpent's Tail, 2003), as well as two collections of poems, The Edge of the Screen (Arc, 1999) and Trouble in the Heartland (Arc, 2004). He is currently writing a third novel, Midnight Blue.

Your first published story: What was it? And in which publication?
'The God of Clay' in Dark Horizons magazine in 1984. I was 19 when I wrote it. It's a sort of metaphysical fantasy, severely overwritten.

Do you have something new coming out? What and where?
Night Shade Books in the USA will shortly publish a collection of my supernatural fiction written over the last decade, The Lost District and other stories. It contains 22 stories, 7 of them previously unpublished.

What's your favourite film? Novel? Short Story? Poem?
Film: Running On Empty. Novel: Funeral Rites by Jean Genet. Short story: 'Running Down' by M. John Harrison. Poem: 'Grendel' by Edwin Morgan.

What are you currently reading?
I'm re-reading some of the best stories from three Brian Lumley collections: 'Fruiting Bodies', 'Haggopian' and the like.

What short story/novel would be a good introduction to your body of work?
'Common Land' in The Earth Wire and 'You Could Have It All' in The Lost District are relatively good examples of the kind of story I'm trying to write. And my first novel, From Blue to Black, has ghostly elements.

Recommend a title by someone else.
The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison is a modern classic of supernatural horror, juxtaposing the unknown with the shadows of urban and rural life. His sense of the unease provoked by landscape is exceptional.

Do you think that contemporary writers in the supernatural genre need to approach their writing differently to their Golden Age counterparts? If so, how?
I think they need a comparable approach in terms of seriousness and intention to undermine the reader's world-view. However, if they try to mimic the language or specific thematic elements, it won't work. They need to create new myths for a changing society, new supernatural metaphors for the way we live and die. What needs to stay basically the same is the attitude.

What advice would you give to fledgling ghost story craftsmen?
As well as reading in the genre and analysing what you read, cultivate experiences of places that have a spectral atmosphere. Practise the visualisation of these places. Listen to the night. Develop your imagination at a personal level, independent of the actual writing process.

Who are your primary influences?
The biggest influences on my adult writing have been Robert Aickman, Ramsey Campbell and M. John Harrison. Those writers have defined what I want contemporary weird fiction to be: imaginative, complex, aware of the modern world, psychologically informed, numinous and very scary indeed.

When did you start writing and what prompted you?
When I was about nine, I heard a reading of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein on the radio. It impressed me deeply. I started writing some very short pieces about ghosts, vampires and zombies. As I recall they were more hysteria than narrative.

What was your first publishing experience like?
I placed two short stories in small press magazines, but the first publication that really changed things for me was when Mark Valentine published 'The Foggy, Foggy Dew' as a booklet with illustrations by Allison Cottee. Such effort and creativity being expended by other people on my behalf meant a great deal.

What ghost story and/or writer is the most overrated, and why?
It's tempting to say that M.R. James is overrated, because his narrative framework is so limited. That type of plot-driven ghost story lacks the metaphysical scope of, say, Machen or de la Mare. But in fact, there's more to James than that: his work has visionary qualities and elements of psychological unease. He had the talent to deliver over and above what his own formula dictated. But many authors who've adopted James as their model have just been writing to the formula.

If I had to single out one ghost story author as being overrated, it would be H.R. Wakefield. Not because he isn't skilful--some of his stories, including '"Look Up There!"' and 'The Frontier Guards', are superb. But his work shows a kind of callousness and arrogance: a contempt for women, for people outside his own social class, for human nature in general--and ultimately for the reader, whom he regards as being worthy only of being scared. I expect more than that from weird fiction: I expect vision and insight.

H.R. Wakefield once famously said, "I believe ghost story writing to be a dying art." What did he mean by this? And was he right to say so?
I think he meant 'Nobody's any good but me.' But there is an element of truth in his statement. By the 1960s, when he wrote that, the key moment of cultural importance for the weird fiction genre had passed. However good the writers that followed might be, they could never shake the reader's world in the way that the old masters had done. The newcomers were climbing a mountain that already had flags at the top.

But Wakefield was wrong in an important sense: neither the commitment nor the literary skill had disappeared. In the years that followed, Robert Aickman and Fritz Leiber wrote their best supernatural stories; and new authors such as Ramsey Campbell and Charles L. Grant produced weird stories of tremendous evocative power. They've combined their inheritance with what they as individuals can bring to the table.

Joel Lane's recent book, The Lost District and Other Stories, is available from Night Shade Books.