BOOK REVIEW: THE WITNESSES ARE GONE BY JOEL LANE

22/9/2022

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.

The Witnesses Are Gone Paperback – 6 Oct. 2022 by Joel Lane

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Influx Press (6 Oct. 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 102 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1910312975
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1910312971

A Book Review by Tony Jones

Triumphant rerelease of a hypnotically brilliant Joel Lane novella

Influx Press are undoubtedly one of the finest literary independent presses in the UK (or anywhere else for that matter) and if they cherry pick a work for rerelease then you can guarantee it is worth further investigation. Joel Lane’s brilliant but brief 80-page novella The Witnesses Are Gone first appeared as a limited-edition hardback, released back in 2009 by PS Publishing and one hopes this new version will bring this near-perfect tale to a fresh audience. Although Lane won many awards, including two prestigious British Fantasy Awards and a World Fantasy Award, when he tragically passed away in 2013 was relatively unknown to the book buying public at large, but was both influential and highly respected in the horror community.

When I first read Lane’s debut novel From Blue to Black (2000) over twenty years ago I was unaware of his reputation as a short story master and over the subsequent two decades have enjoyed periodically dipping into his impressive, truly genre bending collections, some of which have also been rereleased by Influx Press. Simply put, Lane ranked amongst the finest British short story writers of his generation and transcended genre fiction by infusing politics and grim social realism often with a low key dose of the supernatural. From Blue to Black made a permanent imprint on my brain and it remains one of my favourite books about music, art, bands, obsession, drinking and was a beautiful, fragmented memoir of living through the grunge scene of the early nineties. Like most of Lane’s work it is set around the Birmingham area, and he does for this city what Ramsey Campbell did for Liverpool, bringing to life the underbelly, the rundown pubs, empty streets at night and presenting it in a totally unromantic and realistically bleak manner, but with the uncanny often lurking around the corner or hiding in plain sight.

Short story specialists never seem to get their moment in the literary spotlight and it is a shame Lane did not produce a more substantial body of mainstream fiction in the vein of The Witnesses are Gone as it is an outstanding novella. Like much of his shorter work, it is best categorised as ‘weird’ rather than horror, whilst his two novels are slightly more mainstream avoiding genre labels altogether. Lane had the uncanny ability to move between all literary formats from novels, novellas, poetry and short stories, with the latter being the area he was most prolific in, but if you prefer longer fiction this story is a perfect place to start and gives an authentic flavour of his unique style.

The Witnesses Are Gone had me on the hook by the end of its second sentence in which Martin Swann, full of regret, tells us that if he had not followed his obsession then his girlfriend Judith would still be alive. But does he really feel that at fault? Over the course of the story events do guiltily circle back to Judith, but predominately the story digs deeper into Martin’s obsession with discovering as much as he possibly can about an ultra-obscure French film director, Jean Rien. After Martin moves into his new house in the Tysely area of Birmingham he stumbles upon a box of bootleg video cassettes, one of which includes a copy of a morbid and disturbing film called ‘L'Éclipse des Sens.’ Although he cannot really explain why, he fails to shake images of the film from his subconsciousness and begins to research into Jean Rien before being quickly frustrated by a series of internet dead ends. Whilst Swann searches for these films, the USA and the UK symbolically search for the mythical ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ Iraq were supposed to possess. Politics were often a bubbling undercurrent in Joel Lane’s tales.

The Gulf War rumbling in the background dates the story to the noughties and there are lots of other pop culture references, from The League of Gentleman, Urban Gothic, to the characters watching Season 2 of Angel on video (the uncut American version, again indicating Swann was the obsessive type). However, although Martin Swann’s search for Jean Rien uses the internet in patches, the majority of it is refreshingly old-fashioned (the internet was perhaps not yet the beast it now is I guess?) and he scours old film magazines, contacts horror fans/geeks and other oddballs via magazines such as the Fortean Times. Older readers will surely smile at this search/obsession as in the pre-internet days we all remember the personal obsession to track down hard to find cult-classics from the banned (in the UK) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, through Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, to El Topo and even Kurosawa’s The Magic Mountain. Back in the day one had to really put the legwork into finding cult films and Martin Swann truly goes that extra mile!

Events then have an almost surreal quality to them as Martin goes on a bizarre personal odyssey which takes in Gravesend, Paris, Aberdeen and Mexico in the search for Jean Rien and his films. Whilst his girlfriend is the voice of reason he becomes increasingly unhinged and she more distant. However, even if events get weirder the plot has one strong foot in reality with Swann being fully aware of his obsession. The eighty pages are populated with bizarre scenes which veer from gritty realism to unsettling moments in a Paris porn cinema to the drug induced flashes in Mexico which would not have been out of place in an Alejandro Jodorowsky flick.
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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. Interestingly, Simon Bestwick is thanked in the acknowledgements and surely his superb version of the ‘cursed film’ story A Different Kind of Light (2021) makes its own respectful nods to Joel Lane. The whole concept of a filmography somehow deleting itself and luring individuals into their own type of hell was a great idea and shows how obsession can colour and devour our lives should we let it. But then again, your take on this story might take you elsewhere, as nothing is truly cut and dried.

Hopefully, this timely rerelease will help a new wave of readers discover the weird fiction of Joel Lane. It is also worth noting that an anonymously published short story The Vanishing Life and Films of Emmanuel Escobada is also credited in the acknowledgements as the inspiration behind the novella and that might lead to its own obsessive hunt! I am going to resist looking it up on the internet (as you just never know where the search might take you….)

Tony Jones

The Witnesses Are Gone Paperback – 6 Oct. 2022
by Joel Lane

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.