The Witnesses Are Gone
Joel Lane
Publisher: INFLUX PRESS
Summary
'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 <p?WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY M. JOHN HARRISON (The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, winner of the Goldsmith Prize 2020) Moving into an old and decaying house, Martin Swann discovers a box of video cassettes in the garden shed. One of them is a bootleg copy of a morbid and disturbing film by obscure French director, Jean Rien. The discovery leads Martin on a search for the director's other films, and for a way to understand Rien's filmography, drawing him away from his home and his lover into a shadowy realm of secrets, rituals and creeping decay. An encounter with a crazed film journalist in Gravesend leads to drug-fuelled visions in Paris – and finally to the Mexican desert where a grim revelation awaits. The Witnesses Are Gone is a first-hand account of a journey into the darkest parts of the underworld – a look behind the screen on which our collective nightmares play.