[Book Review] Wylding Hall (2015)

It's fitting that Elizabeth Hand's novel Wylding Hall (2015) won the Shirley Jackson Award; her writing echoes and pays homage to the subtle scariness and psychological horror of Shirley Jackson's works. (In fact, Hand's upcoming novel A Haunting on the Hill is the first novel authorized to return to the world of Jackson's terrifying classic The Haunting of Hill House.) Wylding Hall effectively uses an oral history format to delve into the mystery of Windhollow Faire, a (fictional) 1970s acid-folk band. 

The group retreated to an old manor in the English countryside to record their sophomore album Wylding Hall, named after the very place where the group stayed. While everyone knows Windhollow Faire's infamous singer-songwriter Julian Blake disappeared that long-ago summer, no one is quite sure how or why. A nameless documentarian interviews the former band members throughout the novel, trying to unearth the mystery behind what really happened at Wylding Hall.

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Hand expertly builds an entire world out of the house, grounds, and vibe of Wylding Hall. Will, the group's rhythm guitar, fiddle and mandolin player, describes the one-of-a-kind atmosphere:

"It's a cliché to say something's like a shared dream… This wasn't like a dream. It was like being lost; not in the dark but in the light…. You couldn’t see to find your way, we couldn’t even see each other's faces, it was so bright and so much smoke. You could only hear the music and so you followed that."

Wylding Hall evokes the similarly eerie yet creatively fulfilling summer at Lake Geneva, Switzerland, in 1816 when Mary Shelley, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, her stepsister Claire Clairmont and Lord Byron gathered for a vacation that was anything but relaxing. Despite (or perhaps because of) the psychological unease and sexual tensions that strained the foursome, Mary Shelley wrote her groundbreaking horror novel Frankenstein that rainy summer.

The fictional Windhollow Faire musicians face similar issues in their isolation. The band is recovering from the suspicious death of their former singer Arianna; they experiment with drugs and sexuality; and the enigmatic Julian, as a quieter version of Lord Byron, seduces lead singer Lesley before callously ghosting her. At the same time, he is developing an unsettling interest in the occult and trying to get in touch with whatever (or whoever) else is present at Wylding Hall. 

Although the group's manager discourages them from having visitors, Will's girlfriend Nancy arrives for a stay at the manor one weekend. Nancy is a gifted medium, who is tuned into the supernatural just as Julian is. As Will says, "Julian and Nancy were the canaries in the coal mine for that place… Psychics, I guess you'd call them, though that's probably not the right term, either." He explains that Nancy, who was disturbed by the house's energy, was the canary that "got out quickly," however, Julian lasted there until his disappearance. Furthering the metaphor, Will says, "People forget that colliers didn't just bring the canaries into the mines to warn them against the poisonous gases. They took them down because they sang so beautifully, even in the dark."

Beautiful singing in the dark is what provides a turning point during the band's time in the countryside. One night during Nancy's visit, the group begins to drift off to sleep in a darkened room together. Then, as Nancy describes, "After a while, someone began to sing. It was the most haunting song. No words, just a melody." Jon, the group's drummer, also hears a song. Ashton, the level-headed bassist, blames the song on the fact that they were "all fucked stoned." 

Lesley, silently longing for Julian, hears the singing, too; she also hears Julian whisper to Nancy, "I saw it, too." While Lesley is jealous of the bond the psychically inclined duo shares, it's likely that whatever they saw that night isn't something she'd want to experience. 

Later, Lesley tries to explain her state of mind at Wylding Hall as she tells the documentary filmmaker, "The whole time we were there, it was like being in a dream. Everything conspired to keep us from waking up. The weather and drugs and alcohol, the occult talk and crazy books and sexual tensions." Like the writers during the infamous 1816 summer in Lake Geneva, the musicians at Wylding Hall are subject to forces that keep them suspended in this surreal world. 

The group inadvertently ends up recording what would be their second and last album outside. The dreaminess that exists inside the house extends to the land surrounding the manor. Lesley describes the day of the recording:

"The garden was in full bloom, such a magical spot that was! Like something out of a book. Old apple trees and blossoming cherry, stock and delphiniums and primroses. Even some narcissus, and they were long out of season. The garden seemed to have its own climate. Things bloomed whenever they wanted, I think." 

Like the house itself, which has sets of steep stairs that seem to descend too low or too high, and secret rooms full of mysterious occult tomes, logic doesn't exist in the garden. Hand's gorgeous writing – which is sumptuously descriptive without ever being overly flowery – drops readers straight into the band members' world.

Reading Wylding Hall is like being in the dream that Lesley describes. The overlapping of the beauty of the manor and its grounds with the frightening and dangerous energy in the house provides an uncanny feeling that readers won't be able to shake, especially after a late-in-the-novel admission by Jon that upends everything the members of Windhollow Faire know about Julian's disappearance. 

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