Wylding Hall

This phantasmagorical oral history unfolds during one of my favorite time periods, the psychedelic late 60s/early 70s. It also fuses two of my favorite sub-genres, folk horror and haunted houses.

I could easily visualize the setting and the different characters as I read their statements and tried to piece together the reality of what happened during the band’s infamous time at Wylding Hall.

I was previously unfamiliar with Elizabeth Hand but this novella had me hooked.

The story concerns a folk-rock band who, decades earlier, stayed at the historic Wylding Hall to write and record an album. But Wylding Hall is full of secrets and mystery, and things happened there that affected them for the rest of their lives.

One of their numbers disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again. The house itself behaves in ways that…let's say houses shouldn't behave. All these years later, each of the surviving band members tells their side of the story – their own recollections… show more.

An amazing haunted house folk horror novel, about a 60’s folk rock band on the verge of breakup and staying at the titular crumbling mansion of a house. One of the band members sings the wrong kind of song, and attracts something beautiful and terrifying. Fans of the Wickerman will go nuts over this one.

Nothing ultimately redemptive or reconnective happens in the bucolic English country house where the wayward members of Windhollow Faire, a drug-addled early ‘70s folk-rock ensemble very much in the Fairport Convention mold, meet to write and record a new album. These people are spinning away from each other and out of control at different speeds and toward their own ends—not all of them tragic—and nothing that happens in this sun-dappled but crumbling and very possibly haunted shambles is going to slow or reverse that. But, what they do share—what they create, or stumble into, seemingly just by being near… show more.

This is another story with a group of misfits, in this case it’s a band who are in desperate need of a hit and they hole up in a haunted mansion in the British countryside to record a new album. They are indulging in drinks and other mind-altering things to tap into their creativity. One night one of them disappears and poof. Let the infighting begin. There is a common belief that ghosts and spiritual entities can sense turmoil and feed off of it. I think that’s true. In this story that is certainly the case and how the breakdown… show more.

Short, compulsively readable epistolary novel about a 1970s acid-folk band recording an album in an old English manor house. It may or may not be a ghost story, but it’s definitely a snapshot of a magic moment in a golden summer. Hand is underrated and deserves to be more widely read.

Written in a documentary style, this short novel is about an early 70s folk-rock band being interviewed about the summer they moved into a rambling, multi-era English country manor to work on their last album—and the mysterious happenings that occurred. There’s a beautiful musician dipping his hand into spells and metaphysics, a mysterious girl who shows up out of nowhere, and ancient folkloric echoes of a different era and place, manifesting in hidden passageways, time-and-space-bending ancient libraries, and a magic barrow in the woods. Hand is a prolific, award-winning author, and this is my favorite book of hers.

I love… show more.