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Dec. 27th, 2019 11:18 pmI tend to really enjoy books that make clever use of epistolary or other documentary conceits; Elizabeth Hand's Wylding Hall in fact specifically takes the form of a series of oral history transcripts, so pun intended, I guess.
It's a quick, eerie little gasp of a book, in which the surviving members of former folk-rock band Windhollow Faire are interviewed about the sinister events that took place during their summer recording session at a weird manor house thirty years ago. The interview format allows character and distinct, variable, untrustworthy perceptions to come through really well for the most part (although there were two band members I could not keep straight, one of them was earnestly into folklore and one of them was kind of a bro but I still kept hitting the middle of their sections and having to check back for their names to figure out which of them was talking) and the actual plot hit, for me, a really good balance with the level of detail provided -- for the most part it's all very low-key unsettling and ambiguous and plausibly deniable, and then every once in a while someone's like "oh yeah I never told anyone about this at the time because we were all stoned but HERE'S SOMETHING COMPLETELY HORRIFYING."
( incoherent spoiler )
I also appreciated this book as an interesting contrast to the kind of folk-rock fantasy one often got in the eighties and nineties. The echoes are for sure there, but Wylding Hall feels like someone took the premise of "what if FAIRIES! met a FOLK ROCK BAND!" and ruthlessly stripped all the romanticism out of it and just kind of let a chilly wind blow through the empty spaces that were left.
It's a quick, eerie little gasp of a book, in which the surviving members of former folk-rock band Windhollow Faire are interviewed about the sinister events that took place during their summer recording session at a weird manor house thirty years ago. The interview format allows character and distinct, variable, untrustworthy perceptions to come through really well for the most part (although there were two band members I could not keep straight, one of them was earnestly into folklore and one of them was kind of a bro but I still kept hitting the middle of their sections and having to check back for their names to figure out which of them was talking) and the actual plot hit, for me, a really good balance with the level of detail provided -- for the most part it's all very low-key unsettling and ambiguous and plausibly deniable, and then every once in a while someone's like "oh yeah I never told anyone about this at the time because we were all stoned but HERE'S SOMETHING COMPLETELY HORRIFYING."
( incoherent spoiler ) I also appreciated this book as an interesting contrast to the kind of folk-rock fantasy one often got in the eighties and nineties. The echoes are for sure there, but Wylding Hall feels like someone took the premise of "what if FAIRIES! met a FOLK ROCK BAND!" and ruthlessly stripped all the romanticism out of it and just kind of let a chilly wind blow through the empty spaces that were left.
