THE LOST DISTRICT AND OTHER STORIES is a collection of stories from weird-fiction author Joel Lane. All of them are set in England's Midlands, in or around the city of Birmingham. The Birmingham in these stories is a decaying industrial city, full of protagonists who are trapped in unhappy lives and fall into sinister situations that slowly entangle them -- not really any happy endings here.
There are even a few stories set in a version of the city that's post-apocalypse (in "Against My Ruins") or a Clark Ashton-ian magical setting (in "The Night That Wins"). The stories remind me of Ramsey Campbell, except that Lane is grimmer and gayer: the strangeness creeps in gradually, carefully building the atmosphere of dread.
Stories that were highlights for me:
* "The Bootleg Heart" is narrated by a student who hears the couple upstairs having sex from time to time, which he finds exciting. But what's going on up there is not what he thinks.
* The protagonist of "Like Shattered Stone" is an abstract sculptor, who wakes up one morning to discover he has carved a perfect arm in his sleep. And then another night he carves a head. What does it mean?
* In "Exposure", the psychic protagonist is asked by a friend to get in touch with the friend's dead son. It doesn't go well.
* A children's author has her invented world corrupted by corporate greed in "Beyond the River"; again, no happy ending here.
Now this book will move along, because it's well-written but so bleak that I'm unlikely to revisit it.
