Originally published in 2009 – this reprint by Influx is a posthumous one, author Joel Lane having died in 2013 – The Witnesses Are Gone delves into life and death, gaslighting, the occult, film, and nuclear power in its modest page count. The protagonist moves into a dilapidated house, where he finds a series of VHS tapes containing ominous and unsettling films by a director called Jean Rien. This sets in motion a quest to uncover more information on the mysterious director and his work, which leads from the West Midlands to London, Scotland and eventually South America.
There’s a strong leftist message opposing the war in Iraq, nuclear energy and the policies of Blair’s Labour, which ties the search and subsequent lack of evidence of WMDs to the search for truth behind the mysterious nature of Rien’s films. The overall feeling of the story is one of lingering dread and uncertainty for the future, life and death and the search for the truth.
Though The Witnesses Are Gone is not a horror in the more obvious sense, there is a weird undercurrent of the characters operating in a liminal space somewhere between life and death, with the only people able to shed any light, the witnesses, nowhere to be found. The story ends with more questions than answers and a feeling of not belonging anywhere.
The Witnesses Are Gone, Joel Lane (Influx)
Price: £8.99. Info: here
words GARETH MOULE
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