From Blue to Black

Joel Lane

Mar 2022 · Influx Press

About this ebook

'Lane's prose delivers a vicious blow to our soft, nostalgic places; like finding a discarded gig flyer from years gone by, ripe and brimming with memory. Divine, acerbic and essential.'

– Matt Wesolowski, author of Demon

'A poet of misfits, outsiders and the forsaken, his empathy for their suffering ever poignant.'

– Adam Nevill, author of The Ritual

Birmingham, early 1990s. Triangle are a cult act on the post-punk scene, led by brilliant and troubled vocalist Karl – a man haunted by past violence and present danger, torn between fame and oblivion, men and women, music and silence.

Triangle's bass player, David, is struggling to make sense of Karl's reality as the band start to make waves in the music scene and Karl starts to come apart in a blur of sex and drinking.

First published in 2000, Joel Lane's debut novel From Blue to Black is a story of passion, blood and alcohol, broken strings and broken lives – a piercing voyage through our musical and political past that cuts to the bone.

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY KERRY HADLEY-PRYCE

About the author

Joel Lane was the author of two novels, From Blue to Black and The Blue Mask; several short story collections, The Earth Wire, The Lost District, The Terrible Changes, Do Not Pass Go, Where Furnaces Burn, The Anniversary of Never and Scar City; a novella, The Witnesses Are Gone; and four volumes of poetry, The Edge of the Screen, Trouble in the Heartland, The Autumn Myth and Instinct. He edited three anthologies of short stories, Birmingham Noir (with Steve Bishop), Beneath the Ground and Never Again (with Allyson Bird). He won an Eric Gregory Award, two British Fantasy Awards and a World Fantasy Award. Born in Exeter in 1963, he lived most of his life in Birmingham, where he died in 2013.