|
Description:
Joel Lane follows his award-winning collection The Earth Wire (1994) with a still darker and more subversive assemblage of strange tales. The Lost District links the hidden places in urban and small-town landscapes to the hidden places in human lives. Set in a post-industrial hinterland of the present, the near future, and the imagined, these stories portray human encounters with the unknown: sexual discovery, drug-inspired visions, the lonely paths of madness, and the shadowy realm on the other side of death.
Here you will read of a porn film actor whose scars reveal the forces controlling his life; an underground factory where outsiders pay a terrible price in order to belong; a musician haunted by the madness of a dead singer; a neighborhood fading into corrupt echoes of itself; and a man who literally follows his ex-lover to the end of the world.
These 24 stories (including 6 published here for the first time) range from grim urban horror tales to weird erotic fantasies and bitter allegories of loss and exploitation. The lovers, loners, fetishists, addicts, and wild talents who haunt these pages have one thing in common. They are answering the call of the unknown. This book is your guide to the lost districts of the body, the mind, and the soul.
Contents:
* The Lost District
* The Pain Barrier
* The Bootleg Heart
* Scratch
* Coming of Age
* Mine
* Prison Ships
* Like Shattered Stone
* Among the Dead
* The Window
* The Quiet Hours
* Exposure
* The Outside World
* The Country of Glass
* The Night That Wins
* Against My Ruins
* The Only Game
* Contract Bridge
* Beyond the River
* The Plans They Made
* The Drowned
* Reservoir
* An Unknown Past
* You Could Have It All
|
