Black Country by Joel Lane (Nightjar Press).

A Sort Of Review: Joel Lane’s ‘Black Country.’

 (The aim of this short ‘sort of review’ is simply to expand on a few thoughts I had on reading the following publication. There will be no spoilers divulging important plot details.)

The Book/The Author (chapbook from Nightjar Press):

Black Country yet again shows why Joel Lane is still one of the most respected, admired and  important writers working in and out of the genre today.

The Plot:

A police officer with an interest in strange cases returns to his home town to investigate a series of juvenile related crimes. Perhaps the local children are behind a spate of break-ins, but identifying the culprits proves more difficult than at first thought.

The Background:

The town is a dying industrialized relic, literally forgotten after becoming absorbed into the boundaries of neighboring regions. It’s demise, already precipitated in memory by the investigating officer, is further echoed in the few, unhappy memories he has of his parents, and the subsequent emotional fall-out. This is not a happy homecoming.

Thoughts:

Lane shows how the oft-used minefield of the literary ‘homecoming’ can be artfully rechanneled into new and surprisingly fresh directions, often wrong footing the reading while delighting them at the same time. 

The story has an honest melancholy about it, rising above the bittersweet irony one might expect. There is something far more penetrating at work in the story, coming impossibly close to realizing how people genuinely perceive their past.

(The cover of the chapbook aptly details a map with pieces missing).

The reader is never forced into the disingenuous territory of over-dramatizing the nostalgia or the hurt, but focuses with intense scrutiny on the things which connect us to the past. Perhaps people of a certain generation might identify more readily with the ‘objects’ and miscellaneous symbols of Black Country,’ but the dark magic simmering in the prose of this beautifully described narrative, surely resonates with anybody over a certain age – that age being one when we are able to reflect with perhaps cooler yet infinitely more honest appraisals of who we once were.

Joel Lane has long been one of my literary heroes. That he has remained one of the genre’s truest pioneers, a deeply intelligent writer, highly principled and highly articulate of everything going on in our world, is always reflected beautifully, honestly and believably in his work.   

Black Country, a story in which memory and the heart might prove to be the same thing, in which capturing youth and childhood and holding them up to the disintegrating light of analysis prove to be their undoing.