![]() ![]() Besides James, I encountered lots of old friends, including Algernon Blackwood and E. ![]() James, but compared to Edward Parnell I am the merest novice. I thought I was fairly well up on the classical English ghost story, especially as exemplified by M. It is a unique and elegiac meditation on grief, memory and longing, and of the redemptive power of stories and nature. Ghostland is Parnell’s moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists-and what is haunting him. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and Graham Swift’s Waterland to the archetypal ‘folk horror’ film The Wicker Man… James, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood to the children’s fantasy novels of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper from W.G. 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. ![]() ![]() 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. 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 his late thirties, Edward Parnell found himself trapped in the recurring nightmare of a family tragedy. ![]()
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