Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country - Edward Parnell torrent

Category: Autobiography & Biographies, History
Language: English
Keywords: Geography ghost stories Travel

Written by Edward Parnell
Read by Sam Wolff
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 128 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Release date: October 17, 2019
Duration: 10:18:36

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.

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

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

Reviewer comment…” I thought I was fairly well up on the classical English ghost story, especially as exemplified by M. R. James, but compared to Edward Parnell I am the merest novice. Besides James, I encountered lots of old friends, including Algernon Blackwood and E. F Benson, as well as new acquaintances such as W. H. Hodgson, whose House by the Borderland I may or may not finish. And Robert Aickman sounds most unpleasant. Kipling’s They and Marklake Witches (with the touching Philadelphia Bucksteed) were marvels—I intend an homage to the latter sometime. But I am at a loss to categorize to what genre Parnell’s book belongs: memoir, literary criticism, travel, or spooky psychology. On the back cover the splendid Cathi Unsworth calls it “Psychogeography” and that will do as well as anything.”