Book Review: "Ghostland" by Edward Parnell

October is the time for ghost stories and Halloween tales and I always get into the spirit by trying to read something that is a bit different once in a while. Not just the MR James ghost stories or the Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson or Stephen King. I like to see new stuff that challenges what we understand to be horror fiction and ghost stories. Last year, I read a book called “The Monster Show” which is a book about Hollywood Monsters and the way in which Horror Film was made from the early ages of Hollywood all the way down to the 90s and onwards. The year before that, I really enjoyed the workings of the movie tie-in book “The Wicker Man” by Anthony Shaffer and Robin Hardy. So we can definitely tell that during the October season of spooks and ghosts, I like to delve deeply into different ideas concerning the genre, looking at different subgenres such as: speculative fiction, sci-fi horror and of course my favourite, folk horror. When it comes to Edward Parnell’s “Ghostland”, I was very excited to see this newer, more critical and more biographical take on the genre rather than simply focusing on the essence of horror fiction. It was a wildly interesting read filled with beautiful passages and an amazing plot line.

One thing we come to understand about this book is that it can be interpreted as a man in search for comfort in the ideas of what lies beyond the grave. In the midst of tragedy, there have been countless attempts to explain the ideas of what happens when we die and how we can comfort those we know when we ourselves pass away. A brilliant thing that this book does is that it explores those ideas in the contexts of other authors. For example, I quite liked the chapter on M.R James and how he became the ghost story writer we know and adore him as. But that is not all.

In the book “Ghostland” we also get this incredible sense of place. You all know how I feel about descriptions of place in the gothic - they are amongst some of my favourite things to read. Over the country of Britain, there are many places that our storyteller investigates and describes to us: cemeteries, moors, the woods where the folklore characters are, the shores of the coast and much more. In this link between literature, cinema, place and person, we get this almost autobiographical nature of ‘I want to discover’ and ‘I want to be discovered’ coming through our storyteller. It is a brilliant way to explore not only the narrator’s sense of self but also to note the critical analysis of various stories such as “The Great God Pan” by Arthur Machen and analyse the meanings behind some of the greatest ghostly horror films of all time including one of my personal favourites: “The Wicker Man” (1973). I was completely enthralled with this book.

All in all, I think that I will definitely be reading this again some time soon because of the fact I can’t seem to pull myself away from some of those descriptions. For example: in the chapter “Memento Mori” - there is a description right at the beginning of the chapter. I’m not going to read it exactly to you but I think you will love it just as much as I do. There is all that setting of the scene, but including this almost ghostly presence plus the meaning of the name of the chapter - ‘remember you will die’. It leaves, like the rest of the book, a lasting impact.