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Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country

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This is a tad unfair; Samuel followed in his father’s footsteps as a merchant, specializing in china and crockery, though he was not the success his father had been. Though it doesn't detract from the overall enjoyment of the book, it sometimes feels as though the author drifts off on a tangent. Part memoir of family to two parts brilliant excursion into folk-horror darkness and literary nooks and crannies, almost every page delighted me in some way, fed me with some detail to think about. Parnell quotes Robert Aickman’s belief that Blackwood’s novella THE WENDIGO (1910) is “one of the (possibly) six great masterpieces in the field,” but Parnell explains his own preference for “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” (1912) and “The Willows” (1907), “considered to be the greatest of Blackwood’s supernatural stories.

If you haven't heard of or read some of the authors or seen some of the films/TV you will be seeking them out after reading this.That we continue believing in ghosts despite our rational mind’s skepticism suggests that in these stories lies something crucial to the way we understand the world around us.

With boundless curiosity, Dickey conjures the dead by focusing on questions of the living — how do we, the living, deal with stories about ghosts, and how do we inhabit and move through spaces that have been deemed, for whatever reason, haunted?Having read other reviews here I can understand why some readers have wondered whether too many elements are in play, but personally I think the mixing of the different strands makes for something startlingly original while never losing coherence. Dickey's book is not so much about spooks and goblins, but about tales of them that we tell, and why. The sight of Samuel’s ghost is far more exciting and menacing, after all, if he’s come back from the grave to claim his rightful inheritance. The ghosts who haunt our woods, our cemeteries, our houses and our cities appear at moments of anxiety, and point to instability in our national and local identities.

With time running short and the dead quickly outnumbering the living, the survivors must tap into their knowledge of horror and video games to escape… or become Ghostland’s newest exhibits. Obsessive, possessive, nostalgic, an act of vivid retrieval - this is a uniquely strange and wonderful work of literature. I found so many personal parallels in the book, so many shared or similar experiences, that it allowed me to re-assess my own experiences afresh. Meandering throughout GHOSTLAND like a moorland stream is a sense of melancholy as Parnell chronicles the very reason for his pilgrimage throughout the United Kingdom to spots of importance to his childhood and life-long enjoyment of ghost stories.

It truly is a book that lives up to the promise of the front cover (a visual feast of folk horror references! Ghosts bridge the past to the present; they speak across the seemingly insurmountable barriers of death and time, connecting us to what we thought was lost. By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. He's hunting for meaning, as we all are, and ghost stories are one of the ways we imbue this strange, messed-up, beautiful country with meaning. Dickey visits with Salem's witches, spectral lights at a Nevada brothel and the eccentric widow who designed the sprawling, never-finished Winchester Mystery House.

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