I have only heard of a couple of the authors that he mentions and must admit to reading very few of them. It is part memoir, part family saga, part travel book and all centred around the books that he is remising about. It is a book that defies categorisation really.
Whilst there here he is trying to find just why the authors rooted their stories there. Whilst these places are not specifically haunted, he is not looking for ghosts per se, but seeking the places that have a creepy element about them. That means travelling to the places that the authors placed their stories in. James and Algernon Blackwood to name a few in the book. To relive some of those stories he wanted to get under the skin of his favourite authors, Susan Cooper and Alan Garner, M.R. This was ghost stories from a raft of favourite authors and the other weird fiction that was generally found nudging up against these books in the library. For Edward Parnell, this meant heading back to his bookshelves to look for the stories that he was obsessed with as a boy. It is at times like this that looking back over your past for things that were comforting can help. But losing both parents and a brother to the disease is several levels above that. Losing one family member early to cancer is a tragedy. 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. He explores how these landscapes conjured and shaped a kaleidoscopic spectrum of literature and cinema, from the ghost stories and weird fiction of M. 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. ‘An exciting new voice’ Mark Cocker, author of Crow Country ‘A uniquely strange and wonderful work of literature’ Philip Hoare SHORTLISTED FOR THE PEN ACKERLEY PRIZE 2020
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