The Witnesses Are Gone

By Joel Lane

"A poet of misfits, outsiders and the forsaken, his empathy for their suffering ever poignant."
- Adam Nevill, author of The Ritual

"Joel Lane understood and expertly exploited the connection between exterior and interior landscapes like no other. The Witnesses Are Gone is a masterwork of paranoid, destabilizing weird fiction and it will leave you unmoored for days."
- Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Pallbearers Club

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.

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY M JOHN HARRISON

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1910312983
• ISBN13: 9781910312988
• Release Date: January 2023
• Publisher: Influx Press
• Length: 100 Pages