Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country

Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country
Edward Parnell

‘A uniquely strange and wonderful work of literature’ Philip Hoare ‘An exciting new voice’ Mark Cocker, author of Crow Country In his late thirties, Edward Parnell found himself trapped in the recurring nightmare of a family tragedy. For comfort, he turned to his bookshelves, back to the ghost stories that obsessed him as a boy, and to the writers through the ages who have attempted to confront what comes after death. In Ghostland, Parnell goes in search of the ‘sequestered places’ of the British Isles, our lonely moors, our moss-covered cemeteries, our stark shores and our folkloric woodlands. He explores how these landscapes conjured and shaped a kaleidoscopic spectrum of literature and cinema, from the ghost stories and weird fiction of M. R. James, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood to the children’s fantasy novels of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper; from W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and Graham Swift’s Waterland to the archetypal ‘folk horror’ film The Wicker Man… Ghostland is Parnell’s moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – and what is haunting him. It is a unique and elegiac meditation on grief, memory and longing, and of the redemptive power of stories and nature.

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Copyright (#uf97dc8e2-8fb1-5d72-a832-179bd823c5ec)

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com)

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Edward Parnell 2019

Cover illustrations and chapter initial illustrations are by Richard Wells (www.richardwellsgraphics.com (http://www.richardwellsgraphics.com))

All other images are by the author, or from the author’s own collection. While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material, in some cases this has proved impossible. The publishers would be grateful for any information that would allow any omissions to be rectified in future editions of this book.

Edward Parnell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Emigrants by WG Sebald published by Harvill Press, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. © 1996

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008271954

eBook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008271961

Version: 2019-10-01

Dedication (#uf97dc8e2-8fb1-5d72-a832-179bd823c5ec)

For the ghosts

Epigraph (#uf97dc8e2-8fb1-5d72-a832-179bd823c5ec)

‘And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.’

W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants

Contents

1  Cover (#u25b7f403-8577-57a4-906f-03c1f588a552)

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Epigraph

6  Contents (#uf97dc8e2-8fb1-5d72-a832-179bd823c5ec)

7  Prologue

8  1 LOST HEART

9 2 DARK WATERS

10 3 WALKING IN THE WOOD

11  4 THE ROARING OF THE FOREST

12  5 MEMENTO MORI

13  6 BORDERLAND

14  7 GOBLIN CITY

15  8 LONELIER THAN RUIN

16  9 WHO IS THIS WHO IS COMING?

17  10 NOT REALLY NOW NOT ANY MORE

18  11 TROUBLE OF THE ROCKS

19  12 ANCIENT SORCERIES

20  Epilogue

21  Selected List of Sources

22  Acknowledgements

23  Index

24  Also by Edward Parnell