“Where Furnaces Burn” by Joel Lane

An excellent, and exceptionally bleak, collection of short stories about a cop in the West Midlands of England (Birmingham & environs) between the late 80s and early 00s. The stories here are very short, often just a couple of pages - most of them took me less than 10 minutes to read through. I’d call them vignettes more than short stories.

It’s the most industrialized area of England - the American analogue would be the Rust Belt - and living there during the Thatcher years, the post-industrial period, and into the Iraq War is not a pleasant time. And if you’re a cop working there, you’re naturally going to see the bottom of the barrel - the most depressed areas, the prostitutes, the gangs. Hence the “bleak.”

This is a horror book, and all of the vignettes deal with the supernatural in some way. They’re all dark, all dangerous, and generally pretty nihilistic. It’s not bad things happening to good people, but neither is it bad things happening to bad people - it’s bad things happening, and there’s usually no rhyme nor reason to whom they happen to.

They range from creepy to disturbing - there’s not much actual violence here, for all the protagonist’s vocation. That being said, this is a cop and he deals with all the trigger warnings you would expect that go along with being a policeman.

It was an excellent book, and a very creative one. The final vignette was the perfect ending for the protagonist, I have to say, and one I never saw coming. But it’s not a book that left me feeling good at all. It’s a book that made me want a drink.