Wylding Hall

Windhollow Faire, a young English acid-folk band, rents Wylding Hall for the summer to write and record its second album. The house is a large, half-ruined country place in rural Hampshire. The year is given only as 1970-something.

Four decades on, the surviving band members, their agent and a journalist take part in a set of interviews about that summer. They recall how easily the music came, the passages hidden in the house, the doors that stayed locked, and the villagers who made them uneasy.

At the centre of their memories is the night Julian Blake, the band's songwriter and lead guitarist, vanished without a trace.

The book is told entirely through the voices of the people who were there, with no outside narrator. It is a slow-burning ghost story that mixes folk horror with nostalgia for the 1970s music scene. Elizabeth Hand's novella first appeared from PS Publishing in 2015. The dread builds gradually, and the question of what happened to Julian hangs over every account.