Wylding Hall

I have had diametrically opposed reactions to the work of Elizabeth Hand. My first read of hers was Waking the Moon, which I found to be unrelenting silliness. Yet I found her novella, "Cleopatra Brimstone," to be one of the best examples of speculative fiction I've ever read. The third piece I've read of hers, Wylding Hall, falls somewhere in the middle.

Interestingly, this is not the first book I've read about a rock band getting involved with a haunted house. Phil Rickman's December has pretty much the same idea, but told in many more pages. Hand's Wylding Hall is much shorter, a novelette, really, and is much more subtle. Just who is that girl that shows up?

Set in the early '70s, Wylding Hall, a manor that has parts that go back to Norman days, is chosen by a band's manager for them to gather to write their second album. The band is called Windhollow Faire, and they are dubbed acid-folk, so I imagined them as something like Fairport Convention.

The group consists of five people, most prominently the beautiful, tormented genius, Julian Blake. He's the main songwriter of the group, and also has a thing for arcane magic, as he finds books in the old house that contain spells. "Julian was into black magic. Well, okay—he never called it that. But something to do with the dark arts. “Magick” with a K, that Aleister Crowley bullshit. So fucking pretentious. Most of Crowley’s quote-unquote magick was just a way of getting laid—he was a total con man. If you can read his stuff with a straight face, you’re a stronger woman than me." His previous girlfriend, whom we do not meet, was the lead singer, but killed herself. She is replaced by an American singer, quoted above, who seems to be modeled on Stevie Nicks.

As the band hangs out in the house, they find weird things, like a room full of wrens without their beaks (wrens play a great part in the book, and a tradition I've never heard of, Wrenning Day, is discussed. Apparently this is real thing, that on St. Stephen's day it is tradition to stone a wren.

"But back then, Wylding Hall was a mere dot on the ordnance survey map. You couldn’t have found it with a compass. Most people go there now because of what happened while the band was living there and recording that first album. We have some ideas about what actually went on, of course, but the fans, they can only speculate. Which is always good for business." The book is told in several voices, in a documentary style. One of the drawbacks of the book is that many of the voices sound the same. I still couldn't tell you what the difference between Will and, well I can't remember the other guy's name.

Slowly the tension mounts, but it isn't until a gamine-type girl appears while the group is playing at a pub do things accelerate. She goes back to the house with Julian, and eventually both disappear. The conclusion comes when a local boy taking pictures of the band finds something disturbing in the developed photos. This would work great in a movie but doesn't have the full impact in a book, as it relies on an image.

Even if Wylding Hall has no terror-laden climax, I still found it to be well written. It's just not fully cooked. And it does have some amusing lines, such as "It was all very Withnail and I, only without Uncle Monty."