Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand
Young musicians in a British acid-folk band retreat to Wylding Hall, an old rural mansion with its own dark mysteries, following the tragic and mysterious death of one of their founding members. They make their legendary album there, but at a horrifying price: Julian Blake, the band’s lead singer, mysteriously vanishes inside the home and is never heard from again. Years later, a young documentary filmmaker meets with each of the remaining band members, their friends, and lovers—including a psychic, a photographer, and the band’s manager—to hear their contrasting accounts of what transpired that summer. But whose account is accurate?
Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand
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“Elizabeth Hand’s Wylding Hall is not only beautifully written, but also a novel of the ghosts of a bygone era that still prowl the pastoral stretches of England’s countryside. And what actually happened to Julian Blake?” The story that results shows Robert Johnson at a crossroads of British folk, with paganism used more for its ominous and mythopoeic presence than for pure horror. Heaven can be affected, but not by the devil, but rather by the bad spirits of nature.
This is the account of a fictitious 1970s Acid Folk band named Windhollow Faire and how they produced their chart-topping album before abruptly disappearing from the music scene. It’s a paranormal mystery surrounding Julian Blake, the band’s lead guitarist and vocalist, and how his disappearance impacts the other members of the group as well as their friends, associates, and lovers. The book is written in the style of interviews with every party concerned, narrated in flashbacks from a few years afterwards. They switch between one another’s experiences as a way to gradually unravel a mysterious story. The author made a wise choice by selecting this plot because it is the ideal device for creating tension and mystery.
This reader found the inclusion of a list of the characters and their functions at the book’s opening to be a lovely touch.
In order to work on a new album as a follow-up to their modestly successful debut effort, the band’s manager, Tom, has dispatched the group to an old castle-like estate in the English countryside, Wylding Hall. The band members are completely isolated, yet there is a small rural village nearby where they occasionally do impromptu shows in the neighbourhood tavern.
Other than the guitarist Will’s girlfriend, and an elderly local farmer who stops over to provide groceries and other items, the band is on its own until the dramatic conclusion.
The band members present their side of the story in the form of a series of documentary-style interviews about what transpired during the band’s lead singer Julian’s disappearance during their stay at Wylding Hall. The narrative is presented in fragments from the viewpoints of various characters, not all of whom were there or sober at the time. The book has a few unsettling and enduring themes, such as a room filled with dead birds, a library no one can discover, a strange girl, and the unsettling melody Julian can’t stop humming. This book raises more questions than it answers.
