2023 read #147: Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand.

Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand

146 pages

Published 2015

Read from December 4 to December 5

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

This is the book that I had hoped The Doubleman would be.

It takes the form of an oral history recounting the summer British folk-rock band Windhollow Faire holed up in the titular Wylding Hall to record an album. The Hall is a sprawling countryside manor where the ancient magic, carried in strange melodies, lingers. A place of Neolithic barrows and dead birds and grimoires in the antiquarian library, a place where strange passageways open up one day never to be found again, a place where time itself seems to waver. Julian, the band’s genius guitarist, is obsessed with the occult, with magick: crafting spells in his music, opening doors that perhaps should have stayed shut.

The British folk-rock movement — and the wider folk revival of the 1960s and '70s — have been particular interests of mine for well over a dozen years. Wylding Hall could not have been more of a treat to this hyperfocus, name-dropping Sandy Denny and Steeleye Span and the Middle Earth venue. I love the hippie vibe of bringing back the Old Ways, the deep magic of the land we lost due to industrialization, enclosure, imperialism, Christianity. As much influence as the folk revival had on fantasy fiction, helping it grow away from the Howardian barbarians and into the New Romantic era, I can’t think of another book that captures the folk revival vibe, or reads as much like a love letter to the movement, quite like Wylding Hall. The only book that I can even think of that comes close in its reverence for strange old musical magic is War for the Oaks, and that deals with a punk band in the ’80s.

I was initially skeptical of the oral history format, but Hand pulls it off beautifully, infusing each “interview” segment with character and perspective. Each surviving member of the band emerges as a personality, each marked by the trauma of the Wylding Hall sessions in different ways: some credulous, some calling bullshit, some driven to alcohol, some driven to quit. It’s as fluently written and atmospheric as you’d expect from the author of “Echo” (read and reviewed here).