Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand

Published digitally by Open Road Media on July 14, 2015

Wylding Hall is sort of a gentle horror story, if that’s possible. What kind of horror? Demons? Ghosts? Witches? Monsters? All I will say is that this is neither a zombie novel nor a “space aliens who look like lizards” novel. Which is fine because the world has too many of those already.

Wylding Hall combines a supernatural/horror novel with a band story. The band (Windhollow Faire) became famous after their Wylding Hall album but it was once a bunch of kids playing folk songs in London pubs for fun. We learn early on from Lesley, the American singer who joined the band as Arianna’s replacement, that Arianna, after being replaced, fell to her death from guitar player Julian’s window. The producer decided the band should recover from her death by spending the summer in the country recording their second album at Wylding Hall, an old Tudor full of strange rooms, surrounded by spooky woods. In retrospect, it is one of the most influential albums in the history of progressive folk, or so the producer claims.

The novel is told in the form of a documentary. Band members, the producer, and occasional outsiders talk to a documentarian about the summer that the Wylding Hall album was made (and, to a lesser extent, about the backgrounds of the band members).

During the first half of Wylding Hall, characters mention, without actually describing, an event that occurred during the band’s stay. They also make references to dead birds, the disembodied voice of a child singing, an occasional apparition, warnings from a local farmer to stay out of the woods, and other foreshadowing of a horror to come. But most of the time, the characters are talking about themselves, their relationships, and the process of making music. It is in the second half that something unexpected and unexplained occurs.

I called this a gentle horror novel because no people are torn to shreds, or turned inside out, or have their blood sucked out. If violence is what you want, Wylding Hall will probably bore you. If you’re looking for a good band story, the kind of story that allows relationships to develop among people who are forced by circumstances to spend a lot of time together, you’ll probably like Wylding Hall. I don’t know that the supernatural element adds much -- it isn’t particularly frightening -- but it does provide the glue that holds the story together.

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