Elizabeth Hand's Wylding Hall
“Thrice tosse these Oaken ashes in the ayre;
Thrice sit though mute in this inchained chayre;
And thrice three times tye up this true loves knot,
And murmur soft shee will, or shee will not.”
Thus sang the exquisitely talented Windhollow Faire, this 17th century lyric. But are Thomas Campion’s words a love verse, or a summoning spell?
It certainly sets to the tone for the eerie and evocative novella by Elizabeth Hand, Wylding Hall,
New York : Open Road Integrated Media, 2015.
Locus Award Nominee for Best Fantasy Novel (2016), Shirley Jackson Award for Novella (2015)
The novel is structured through the lens of a documentary. The interviewees create the threaded narrative, handed off from one unreliable witness to another, a tale of folk horror, bookended by two losses: the tragic death of one of a young band's members at the story's beginning and then the mind-scrambling vanishing of another at the story's end. These disparate characters gather once more in order to resolve the disapppearance of their erstwhile mercurial, melancholic, elusive lead singer.
Two elements that particularly captivated me:
Part of the novel's efficacy depends on a double recession into the past; one of those pasts exists in living memory. The interviewees call back to mind their connections near or far to a mid-70s setting of a folk band holing up in a countryside manor to write and record their second album.
The other is the mansion's own, with its deep roots climbing back and always further back (we know it has a a Victorian wing, a Tudor wing, a Norman wing, and even perhaps a fairy barrow in the nearby wood). It is this time-out-of-mind antiquity that becomes threaded into the destiny of Windhollow Faire. And it demands its due.
Among many other things this novella, fantastic in both senses, is a meditation on what musical creation at its finest can conjure up -far more than we realize- and what we can lose, or indeed sacrifice, the price paid for that creation and to what entities.
Haunting as well as haunted, I cannot recommend this poetic novella enough. A wonderful read for October or, for aficionados of the weird and the otherworldly, anytime.
Part of the novel's efficacy depends on a double recession into the past; one of those pasts exists in living memory. The interviewees call back to mind their connections near or far to a mid-70s setting of a folk band holing up in a countryside manor to write and record their second album.
The other is the mansion's own, with its deep roots climbing back and always further back (we know it has a a Victorian wing, a Tudor wing, a Norman wing, and even perhaps a fairy barrow in the nearby wood). It is this time-out-of-mind antiquity that becomes threaded into the destiny of Windhollow Faire. And it demands its due.
Among many other things this novella, fantastic in both senses, is a meditation on what musical creation at its finest can conjure up -far more than we realize- and what we can lose, or indeed sacrifice, the price paid for that creation and to what entities.
Haunting as well as haunted, I cannot recommend this poetic novella enough. A wonderful read for October or, for aficionados of the weird and the otherworldly, anytime.
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