Ghostland

Just finished reading Ghostland, In Search of a Haunted Country by Edward Parnell (William Collins, 2019) a psychogeographic journey around the country seeking out the places where various classic ghost stories were set, or places associated with the authors' lives.

All the usual suspects are present and correct: James (M R), Blackwood, Machen, Aickman, E F Benson, Walter De La Mare etc. The book also covers the recently fashionable 'folk horror' genre and the classics - many of them mentioned in posts on this blog - Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan's Claw, The Wicker Man, The Owl Service and Penda's Fen. While I had read or seen most of them, there are a number of ghostly novels and short stories I wasn't familiar with, some of which I shall now seek out. For example I'm now reading Nine Ghosts by RH Malden who is considered one of the better MR James imitators. See here.

The book's most obvious debt is to W G Sebald's The Rings of Saturn (which supplies the book's main epigraph - the layout of text and pictures is very similar). Obviously, that's a hard act to follow and it's interesting that Parnell tests out some of Sebald's text by revisiting locations and finds much of it more fictionalised than he (and I) had imagined. He also gets down to Cornwall and visits the area around Zennor associated with Crowley and the 'mysterious' death of Katherine Arnold-Foster that I wrote about in recent blog posts. Ghostland is also a meditation on illness, loss, grieving and memory - the journeys were undertaken as a form of nostalgia for the author's boyhood and places visited on family holidays.

I really enjoyed reading it and you might do too. A review from the TLS here.


It's also worth mentioning a recently-uploaded large archive of 'occult' recordings freely available here that also includes recordings of Aleister Crowley and the perennially disturbing Enfield Poltergeist.