Ghostland. In Search of a Haunted Country: Edward Parnell

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.