Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country
    Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country
    Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country
    Audiobook10 hours

    Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country

    Written by Edward Parnell

    Narrated by Sam Woolf

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    ‘A uniquely strange and wonderful work of literature’ Philip Hoare

    ‘An exciting new voice’ Mark Cocker, author of Crow Country

    In his late thirties, Edward Parnell found himself trapped in the recurring nightmare of a family tragedy. 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 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. 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. James, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood to the children’s fantasy novels of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper; from W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and Graham Swift’s Waterland to the archetypal ‘folk horror’ film The Wicker Man…

    Ghostland is Parnell’s moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – and what is haunting him. It is a unique and elegiac meditation on grief, memory and longing, and of the redemptive power of stories and nature.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateOct 17, 2019
    ISBN9780008271978

    Related to Ghostland

    Related audiobooks

    Literary Biographies For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Roots Of Horror

      Aug 5, 2021

      The Roots Of Horror
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Warning To The Fortean

      Jul 14, 2022

      A Warning To The Fortean
      9 min read

    • Article

      A Village Affair

      Jul 14, 2021

      AS an attentive aunt, Jane Austen was keen to encourage her niece, Anna, with the novel she was writing. ‘Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on,’ she wrote to her in 1814, adding, ‘such a spot… is the delight of my

      4 min read

    • Article

      Lazy Days

      Jan 12, 2023

      Lazy Days
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Shooting Times Almanac 19 – 26 JULY 2023

      Jul 19, 2023

      The villages of South and North Queensferry, in West Lothian and Fife respectively, take their name from Queen Margaret, wife of King Malcolm III of Scotland. A pious woman, she was the first person to establish a crossing point on the Firth of Forth

      2 min read

    • Article

      Everlasting Lane

      Feb 24, 2022

      SEND FORUM SUBMISSIONS TO THE EDITOR: DRSUTTON@FORTEANTIMES.COM In the summer of 2020, when the first lockdown started to lift, I took up walking again. I was never going to repeat the crazy mile-munching escapades of my youth, like marching to the “

      3 min read

    • Article

      Everlasting Lane

      Feb 24, 2022

      SEND FORUM SUBMISSIONS TO THE EDITOR: DRSUTTON@FORTEANTIMES.COM In the summer of 2020, when the first lockdown started to lift, I took up walking again. I was never going to repeat the crazy mile-munching escapades of my youth, like marching to the “

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Valley of Art

      May 13, 2019

      The Valley of Art
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Requiem For A Devon Farm

      Aug 24, 2023

      A Requiem For A Devon Farm
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Old Un’s Notes

      Aug 25, 2021

      ✻ How quickly time flies! It is already ten years since the death, on 22nd September 2011, of the much-loved British comic actor Jonathan Cecil (19392011), once described by the Spectator as ‘one of the finest upper-class-twits of his era’. Upper-cla

      4 min read

    • Article

      Letters To The Editor

      Mar 24, 2021

      REGARDING the achievements of rural vicars (‘Cut from the country cloth’, February 10), I would draw your attention to Revd John Thorneycroft Hartley. He is the only clergyman to win Wimbledon, in 1879 and 1880, and was runner-up in 1881, despite suf

      3 min read

    • Article

      When I Find Hidden Gems, I Destroy Them

      Jul 28, 2021

      Three people may keep a secret if two of them are dead, said Benjamin Franklin. The sickening truth about travel writers is that they reveal secret locations in exchange for a free trip. It’s a Faustian pact and I must admit I bear some guilt in this

      3 min read

    • Article

      LAND OF Legends

      Jun 10, 2022

      LAND OF Legends
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Spectre Of The Past

      Jan 25, 2024

      The Spectre Of The Past
      6 min read

    • Article

      Around The World In 100 Plants

      Oct 26, 2022

      Simon Barnes (Simon & Schuster, £30) WE have become used, in recent years, to the convention of 100 short essays as a means of raising the reader’s eyebrows and setting away a never-ending series of big ideas from the starting point of an everyday o

      5 min read

    • Article

      Fortean Traveller 135. Black Shuck Festival, Bungay

      Feb 23, 2023

      Bungay will always occupy a place in British folklore and in the annals of forteana for its associations with the Black Dog of Bungay, which is said to have wrought havoc in St Mary’s Church on 4 August 1577 (see FT251:22-23, 424:14-17). The Black Do

      6 min read

    • Article

      Ben Bulben

      Jan 21, 2022

      Ben Bulben
      3 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Jun 4, 2018

      I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me. —Fred Allen I have always wondered, in reading travels, at the childish joy travellers felt at meeting people they knew, and their sense of loneliness when they did not, in

      4 min read

    • Article

      Memories Of Scottish Summers

      Jun 25, 2020

      Memories Of Scottish Summers
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Love Letter To Norfolk

      Apr 27, 2022

      A Love Letter To Norfolk
      5 min read

    • Article

      MYTHS, from Mull to Braemar

      Aug 19, 2022

      MYTHS, from Mull to Braemar
      5 min read

    • Article

      Letters To The Editor

      Apr 24, 2024

      Letters To The Editor
      3 min read

    • Article

      Thicker Than Water

      Oct 16, 2023

      by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape, $37) The savagely funny and ruthlessly observational Irish writer Anne Enright does a fine line in scrutinising and dismantling the wonky mechanics of malfunctioning families. Specifically, Irish families. The Gatherin

      2 min read

    • Article

      Summer Reading

      Jun 7, 2019

      Summer Reading
      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Ghostland

    4/5

    41 ratings4 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Beautiful, haunting and left me with many more books to read.
    • 5/5
      A thoughtful, evocative combination of memoir, travel writing, and literary/cultural appreciation. The author connects tragic losses in his own history with locations related to authors such as M.R. James, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and W.G. Sebald -- all of which pertain to haunting in different ways. Highly recommended, especially if you like those authors and their kind of writing.
    • 4/5
      Losing one family member early to cancer is a tragedy. But losing both parents and a brother to the disease is several levels above that. It is at times like this that looking back over your past for things that were comforting can help. For Edward Parnell, this meant heading back to his bookshelves to look for the stories that he was obsessed with as a boy. 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.

      To relive some of those stories he wanted to get under the skin of his favourite authors, Susan Cooper and Alan Garner, M.R. James and Algernon Blackwood to name a few in the book. That means travelling to the places that the authors placed their stories in. 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. Whilst there here he is trying to find just why the authors rooted their stories there.

      It is a book that defies categorisation really. It is part memoir, part family saga, part travel book and all centred around the books that he is remising about. I have only heard of a couple of the authors that he mentions and must admit to reading very few of them. Yet after reading this I now have a list of authors whose works I want to try at some point. I hadn’t been to many of the places that he writes about, so it was interesting learning about the context of them with regards to the books. However, I do know two of them really well, as they are close to where I live in Dorset. Badbury Rings is an Iron Age Hill Fort, and I have been on and around it at night and it doesn’t feel that creepy. Knowlton though can be really quite sinister at night…

      This is a timely book too, I think that he has tapped into the growing interest in folk horror, that zines like Weird walk and Hellebore are publishing for, and there is that amazing Hookland too if you have the faintest interest the otherworldliness of the British Countryside. Most of all it is touching eulogy to his beloved family members and a fitting memory for them.
    • 2/5
      I enjoyed Parnell's writing, his attention to landscapes, his elegies for deceased family (what a tragic story), but it's unclear just what this book was: memoir, UK walking tour, survey of British authors of "the Weird," etc. It meandered and despite the goodwill I feel toward Parnell, ultimately I was whelmed.