Blog-o-ween 2023: Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand

Since we are heading into the weekend, I thought I would dead-icate (heh-heh-heh!) Fridays here at Blog-o-ween 2023 to longer form stories. We won’t be checking out anything that can’t be read (or listened to for you audiobook fans) in an evening or two. Don’t worry, I’m not going to make you read The Naked and the Dead or anything. I mean, that sounds like an erotic thriller starring Andrew Stevens and Shannon Tweed...

...wait a minute...is The Naked and the Dead the basis for an erotic thriller with supernatural overtones about a high-profile security firm employee (played by Andrew Stevens) who sets up cameras in a swanky mansion in the Hollywood Hills and captures the ghost of a starlet who dances in the nude every night at midnight (Shannon Tweed, natch) and he has to solve her murder so she can find peace and move on but he’s fallen in love with her and can’t let her go? And all this happens against a backdrop of chiaroscuro lighting, neon, and a musical soundtrack made up of saxophone and synthesizers? Is that what The Naked and the Dead is about? Why aren’t we reading that?!

Sorry...got off the main road for a second there.

Anywho, today’s Blog-o-ween entry is a short novel by American writer Elizabeth Hand. It isn’t an erotic thriller set in 1990s Hollywood concerning itself with the surveillance of naked starlets, but it is a folk-horror set in 1970s England and involves a documentary film, a psychedelic folk-rock band, and the supernatural. All these factors come together at an ancient, crumbling house in the Hampshire countryside called...Wylding Hall.

Windhollow Faire, a 1970s acid-folk band with one record to their name and a tragedy in their past, retreats to the country to lay the ghost of the suicide of their lead singer Arianna and to put together enough tracks for their second album. Their manager suggests they take off and isolate themselves from the world at a place called Wylding Hall. Things don’t go to plan, however, when Julian Blake, songwriter, guitarist, and former boyfriend of the dead Arianna, begins acting weird (or is that “wyrd”?) He seems strangely familiar with Wylding Hall and its environs, history, and architecture, even though he tells the group that he’s never been there before.

Then, one day, Julian disappears.

And it’s Julian’s mysterious disappearance that draws a documentary film crew together forty years later to interview everyone involved — the surviving band members, their manager, etc. What happened to Julian? Where did he go? Did the mysterious woman who showed up at the local pub the band was playing in have anything to do with it? Why does every person who stayed at Wylding Hall have a strange story to tell?

The genius of Wylding Hall, I think, is in its construction as an epistolary novel made-up of single person interviews. It reminded me of Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s book Please Kill Me: the Uncensored Oral History of Punk. That book is a fascinating collection of remembrances, anecdotes, and yarns culled from hundreds of hours of interviews with scores of people who were there when it happened. These interviews are then presented to the reader in a seemingly unstructured way. There is very little in the way of scene-setting or context. McNeil and McCain remove themselves from the playing field, so to speak, and let their subjects speak for themselves.

I imagine the documentary film crew doing the same in Hand’s novel. They collected all their interviews, then pulled out the parts that they wanted, the snippets that made the best, most coherent story, and set it down for the reader to take in and make up their own minds about what happened. Hand does a wonderful job of giving each of the interviewees their own voice and point-of-view, so that it really feels like we are hearing from different people from different backgrounds with different desires and who have come to different conclusions. It is masterfully done.

This being a folk-horror story, there are plenty of unsettling occurrences that may or may not involve strange rituals, old folk tales, poems that might be spells, and sacrifice. Hand blends all of these together in a heady brew that is powerful, but not overwhelming. She never hits the reader over the head with anything. Everything is subtle, strange, unsettling, as if it were taking place just out of the corner of the eye.

Elizabeth Hand was born in 1957 and grew up in Westchester County, New York. She sold her first story, “Prince of Flowers,” to Twilight Zone Magazine in 1988. Two years later, her first novel, Winterlong, was published by Bantam Spectra. She has written movie tie-in novelizations for The X-Files, 12 Monkeys, and Star Wars. She is a columnist for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She also created and wrote the 1990s DC Comics series Anima.

Both the novel and its multi-narrator audiobook should be available electronically at your local library. If you’d like a soundtrack to go along with your reading, may I suggest listening to Pentangle? They are a band who would have traveled the same circles as Windhollow Faire, and their music is a beautiful and haunting accompaniment to Wylding Hall.

So, cue up the music, pick up your copy of Wylding Hall, settle into a comfy chair in front of a roaring fire...preferably located in a crumbling, rural manse...and...well...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!