The Anniversary of Never

by Joel Lane, Nicholas Royle (Introduction), Polly Rose Morris (Cover art)

"It was like a black and white film, or someone else’s memory" — "Crow's Nest"

Joel Lane’s award-winning stories have been widely praised, notably by other masters of weird fiction such as M. John Harrison, Graham Joyce, and Ramsey Campbell. His tales also regularly appeared in the “best of” annual anthologies of Ellen Datlow, Karl Edward Wagner, and Stephen Jones. With this posthumous collection, Lane continues his unflinching exploration of the human condition.

“The Anniversary of Never is a group of tales concerned with the theme of the afterlife,” observed Lane, “and the idea that we may enter the afterlife before death, or find parts of it in our world.” These stories of love and death will burrow deep into the reader’s mind and impregnate it with a vision often as bleak as the night is black.

Contents
"Introduction" by Nicholas Royle
"Sight Unseen"
"Crow's Nest"
"All the Shadows"
"Midnight Flight"
"Ashes in the Water" with Mat Joiner
"For Their Own Ends"
"Bitter Angel"
"After the Fire"
"The Annniversary of Never"
"The Messenger"
"For Crying Out Loud"
"All Dead Years"
"Some of the Fell"
"Acknowledgements"

Joel Lane (1963-2013) was born in Exeter, but lived most of his life in Birmingham, where many of his stories are set. In addition to two novels, From Blue to Black (2000) and The Blue Mask (2003), Lane was the author of numerous collections, including the British Fantasy Award-winning The Earth Wire (1994), The Lost District (2006), and The Terrible Changes (2009). Where Furnaces Burn won the World Fantasy Award for best collection in 2013.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

130 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2014

About the author

Joel Lane was a British novelist, short story writer, poet, critic and anthology editor. He received the World Fantasy Award in 2013 and the British Fantasy Award twice.

Born in Exeter, he was the nephew of tenor saxophonist Ronnie Scott. At the time of his death, Lane was living in south Birmingham, where he worked in health industry-related publishing. His location frequently provided settings for his fiction.

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading a Joel Lane collection is an immersive experience. Even if not every story is a total stunner, his distinctive style carries you along in its stream. Admittedly the stream is composed of dark, oily water steeped in a foul Birmingham canal, and when you emerge from this liquid despair days later—as a blind fish flopping helplessly onto a forever barren shore—its residue will linger as a greasy sheen on your flesh for weeks afterward, leaving you sluggish and disconcerted. Plodding through the following days with leaden feet, you may soon develop a slight tic above your left eye—this is nothing, really, and will likely fade in a month or so. What is not likely to fade, though, is the devastating sense of longing that will begin to descend daily upon your person in the early evening hours (i.e., the gloaming). The experience will be discomfiting at first, to be sure, but in time you will come to recognize this yearning emptiness within yourself as your natural state of being. You may even welcome its stealthy arrival hidden in the folds of dusk’s cloak, calling for you to escape the stale air of your filthy bedsit into the broken streets of your anonymous town, compelled by the hunt for connection, however tenuous it may be. You will rather shamelessly search for Joel Lane, perhaps thinking you glimpse him in the back of some dank crowded club or in the shadows of an abandoned car park, but he is gone and never coming back, like so many others. So you cannot ever find him, but you can honor his memory by reading his stories, and by quietly embracing the hollow ruin your life is destined to become.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Back in print! Finally!

In his introduction, Nicholas Royle quotes a line from email sent by the author to the editor:

The Anniversary of Never is a group of stories concerned with the theme of the afterlife and the idea that we may enter the afterlife before death, or find parts of it in our world.

"Sight Unseen" appeared earlier in Ellen Datlow's Lovecraft Unbound anthology. It's an affecting tale about the narrator dealing with his father's death, with a few hints of cosmic horror that are rather less over-chewed than the usual. I like Lane's descriptions of Midlands bleakness, but the reveal/encounter involving the father didn't have Lane's usual panache with the creatures. (But that's a high bar.) More Birmingham bleakness in "Crow's Nest". I like the dream-like encounters, but it's probably an average Lane story. Beautiful open-ended close though.

The narrator of "All the Shadows" is in a tender but troubled relationship with a boyfriend who sees (supposedly) psychic traces of the dead. Hints are dropped that this is not just a tale of a doomed affair, but the buildup to the surprising concluding event and reveal is gentle but effective.

"Ashes in the Water" (with Mat Joiner) is the kind of dark, melancholic tale that Lane does so well. The narrator is trying to process the death of his boyfriend, wandering through various barges and boats on the Grand Union Canal (I assume this is the section in Birmingham). The small supernatural intrusions just add to the overall melancholy. What the narrator is after is never explicitly stated, and we have another beautiful ending with no answers:

Then he walked on. There was no moon, but the clouds and traffic fumes held the city's light like a dusty crystal ball. In the distance, he could make out the long black shape of a narrowboat. He hoped it was the right one.

So much is packed into the five pages of "Bitter Angels": brief thoughts on politics, dealing with the death of loved ones, dreams of flying. Another beautiful, tender, melancholic piece, another lovely and sad ending.

The collection ends with "Some of Them Fell", one of Lane's affecting and ambiguous stories. We follow the narrator on his meandering and unpredictable path over the years, through teenage misadventures, a queer and sometimes troubled love affair, and brief but disturbing supernatural intrusions. Again, a departure that is tender and beautiful:

I knew our affair was over, but it didn't matter. For him, it had only been a means to an end. Maybe that's true of most people. If you accept that the end is more than the obvious things.

When the bus came, he touched my cheek and said, "Thanks. I couldn't have done that on my own." Surprised, and briefly upset, I watched the lights of the bus diminish as it sped downhill and on through the night. If I could, maybe the city would let him go.

Update: reread Feb 2025
"Bitter Angels" is so beautiful.

[Karl]

This is copy 52 of 100 numbered copies from a total print run of 350. The book also contains a numbered postcard in an envelope.

Contents:

v - Introduction by Nicholas Royle
1 - "Sight Unseen"
14 - "Crow's Nest"
23 - "All the Shadows"
32 - "Midnight Flight"
43 - "Ashes in the Water" with Mat Joiner
54 - "For Their Own Ends"
61 - "Bitter Angel"
66 - "After the Fire"
76 - "The Annniversary of Never"
81 - "The Messenger"
89 - "For Crying Out Loud"
99 - "All Dead Years"
111 - "Some of the Fell"
129 - Acknowledgements

[John H · Rating 4 out of 5]

"'Eamonn, did you ever, you know... hear one of those voices again, the cries?"

The white head shook slowly.

'Me neither. But why?' Mike realised his voice had risen, though no-one reacted.

The old man drained his glass, his eyes closed. He beckoned Mike to lean over, then said very softly: 'I don't know. But I think... they called. That was all. They called and nobody answered.'"


I went into reading this collection, my first by Joel Lane, expecting more of a horror collection. What I got, after my initial surprise wore away, was a collection of excellent tales of the weird, morbid, and the afterlife. Simon Strantzas mentions him as a "miserablist", an apt description of the writer of these sad tales.

In regards to the writing the first thing that came to mind was how it reminded me of Raymond Carver and William Gay, albeit with some weird, supernatural, and horror thrown in. For how short this collection is ~130 pages there is a surprising 13 stories within, length being between a brief 5-20+ pages. The ability of Lane to fit so much into such short stories is amazing, a lot of writers could learn something from that. Last, don't expect for each story to be neatly tied up and explained at the end, don't be surprised when you're baffled upon conclusion.

For the sake of brevity I'll name a couple of my favorites and include a link to one of the stories and let Joel Lane speak for himself. Every story being good it's hard to decide my favorites, if forced I'd have to probably say Sight Unseen, Crow's Nest, Midnight Flight, After the Fire, and The Anniversary of Never. Excellent collection, luckily I have The Terrible Changes on my shelf to look forward to.

https://spectralpress.wordpress.com/2...

[Richard Clay · Rating 5 out of 5]

In general, Joel Lane's short stories do a better job of conveying what it felt like to be alive in England in the years around the millennium than anything else I've read. That sense of having your life shaped by unsympathetic historical forces of which you only have the most tentative understanding. Tolstoy talks about this sort of thing in a very abstract way at the end of War and Peace but does not attempt to capture the visceral experience. Is there really any supernatural element in any of these stories or are they extremely detailed and realistic accounts of perceptions distorted by mental illness or societal pressures? Lane's refusal to give a pretend answer to this question lies at the heart of his creative integrity - an integrity approaching that of Howard Barker or Virginie Despentes at their best. Absolutely essential reading.

[Des Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

An under-the-skin, Lane-like threnody, where various people, two in particular who hook up, hear cries of despair in various place, but they don’t mention the g- word. Sounds too glib or gauche to do so, I guess, to describe these important cries for help, all to the backdrop of the serious urban city riots also shown in ‘Bitter Angel’ and — “At least winter meant things would stop changing…” — the encroaching omissions between reality of “The Anniversary of Never.” Those riots started with “eyewitness” accounts of a police shooting of a black man…
The ‘listening community”, those grouping together as having heard those crying refrains. With a desperate irony…

“The this community, the that community, every website, every Yahoo group, every bunch of people with a hang-up or a shoe size in common is a community. It’s all just a way of disguising the fact that there’s no community, not any more.”

The ending of this story is a genuine masterstroke, as is so often the case with this author’s work.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Peel once said of The Fall that they're always different and always the same, and in some respects this could be applied to Joel Lane's short stories: decayed urban landscapes, the fragility of relationships, loneliness amongst people, a matter-of-fact oddness breaking the veil between worlds. This is completely different from stating they are repetitive, of course, Lane manages to bring something different to the table each time, his characters are well-defined, the sadness they inhabit being endemic to their surroundings, with patches of hope shining like sunlight on oily water. This is another good collection of such stories and well worth your time.

[Sophie · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a genuine gentleness in Joel's prose. A soft rawness. Honest. Real. Pure. My first introduction, I'll definitely be seeking out more.