The Terrible Changes

In midwinter, an aspiring politician finds himself suddenly deprived of human contact. Newcomers to a town are strangely reminiscent of people lost in a recent flood. Demonstrators on a peace march see the faces of sleeping children in the snow. A failed musician meets his own ancestors getting off a midnight train. The Terrible Changes is a journey through the shadow-realm between reality and dream, between clarity and madness, between the living and the dead. In Joel Lane's fiction, the weird is a symbolic language expressing the chilling beauty, sadness and mystery of real life, combining the supernatural with themes of human loss, passion, solitude and despair, in the tradition of Robert Aickman, John Ramsey Campbell, and M. John Harrison. From ‘The Brand’ (1983) to ‘Alouette’ (2008), these stories span a quarter-century of writing: urban horror tales, elegiac ghost stories, erotic reveries and psychological fugues. Long unavailable, The Terrible Changes is now back in print for a new audience, adding to Joel Lane’s legacy as a true master of the weird.

In midwinter, an aspiring politician finds himself suddenly deprived of human contact. Newcomers to a town are strangely reminiscent of people lost in a recent flood. Demonstrators on a peace march see the faces of sleeping children in the snow. A failed musician meets his own ancestors getting off a midnight train. The Terrible Changes is a journey through the shadow-realm between reality and dream, between clarity and madness, between the living and the dead. In Joel Lane's fiction, the weird is a symbolic language expressing the chilling beauty, sadness and mystery of real life, combining the supernatural with themes of human loss, passion, solitude and despair, in the tradition of Robert Aickman, John Ramsey Campbell, and M. John Harrison. From ‘The Brand’ (1983) to ‘Alouette’ (2008), these stories span a quarter-century of writing: urban horror tales, elegiac ghost stories, erotic reveries and psychological fugues. Long unavailable, The Terrible Changes is now back in print for a new audience, adding to Joel Lane’s legacy as a true master of the weird.