num_pages: 468
description: 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 childrens fantasy novels of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper; from W.G. Sebalds The Rings of Saturn and Graham Swifts Waterland to the archetypal folk horror film The Wicker ManGhostland is Parnells moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artistsand 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.
language: English
title: Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country
publisher: William Collins