The main action takes place in the 1970s, but the story is told by the (remaining) members of the band in the present day, each taking it in turns to relate mini. Intermittently rewarding images of the late 1960s and early ’70s music scene take a backseat to repetitive renderings of a well-worn story. Wylding Hall is a very entertaining ghost story about a folk band who decamp to a crumbling, miles-from-anywhere country house (the only kind there is) to record their second album.

Hand’s formidable language rarely emerges in the expository interviews, so the icy sensations, secret passageways, and taciturn locals provide Gothic trappings without even momentary uneasiness. Fast forward to the present, where an aspiring documentarian. But there are plenty of creepy distractions in Wylding Hallespecially when their guitarist vanishes without a trace. Absent from the interviews is the ethereally voiced, astonishingly beautiful lead guitarist, Julian Blake, whose mysterious disappearance or death is regularly hinted at but rather than offering differing versions of events, which would have added a layer of intrigue, the interviews remain unswervingly consistent, describing a ghostly young women lured into the open by Julian’s performance of a haunting folk song. In 1972, an acid folk band sets up camp in an abandoned mansion, hoping the isolation will keep them focused on their second record. The participants-band members, their manager, a psychic, and a journalist, all with disappointingly undifferentiated voices-recount a 1970s summer spent at the titular crumbling manor in rural England, writing music and making a groundbreaking neofolk album. The work is framed as a set of interviews for a documentary film about the band Windhollow Faire. At the top of Henry Mall lies Agricultural Hall, home of the largest lecture hall on campus. Hand ( Available Dark), restricted by her choice of structure, struggles to turn this novella into something more than a comfortably familiar haunted house story.

Wylding hall by elizabeth hand