The Witnesses Are Gone

'A masterwork of paranoid, destabilizing weird fiction.'

– Paul Tremblay, author of The Pallbearers Club

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



– Adam Nevill, author of The Ritual

'Stark and thrumming with a forbidden, eldritch energy.'



– Matt Wesolowski, author of Demon

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.