The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 13

Joel lane lives in Birmingham. His tales of horror and the supernatural have appeared in various anthologies and magazines, including Darklands, Little Deaths, The Third Alternative, The Ex Files, White of the Moon, Dark Terrors 4, 5 and 6, Swords Against the Millennium, The Museum of Horrors, The Darker Side and Gathering the Bones.

He is the author of a collection of short stories, The Earth Wire (Egerton Press, 1994); a collection of poems, The Edge of the Screen (Arc, 1999), and two novels, From Blue to Black (Serpent’s Tail, 2000) and The Blue Mask (Serpent’s Tail, 2002). Lane has also edited Beneath the Ground (Alchemy Press, 2002), an anthology of subterranean horror stories and, with Steve Bishop, Birmingham Noir (Tindal Street Press, 2002), an anthology of tales of crime and psychological suspense.

‘Influences on “The Lost District” include Fritz Leiber, Ramsey Campbell and The X Files,’ explains the author. ‘It was written for a Leiber tribute booklet that never got published. Then it was accepted for a horror anthology whose publisher went out of business. I began to suspect that it was fated to kill every project it was accepted into, like a paper version of the Red Death. Happily, it appeared in Andy Cox’s excellent The Third Alternative with no fatal outcome for the magazine.’