As an American, I was lost most of the time (there’s no map in the book). It seemed like he covered the breadth of England from East Anglia to Penzance, from Southampton to the Lake District, with even a dip into Wales for good measure. I would accompany him on a road-trip anywhere. Moreover, Parnell made me want to pursue some of their books and films as well. But Parnell enthusiastically introduces us to names that have, for the most part, become forgotten and lost, names like M.R. Some of their names might be familiar, like Walter De La Mare, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Machen, or F.W.
Parnell is not an academic and he makes no claim to be covering an entire field, although he writes about scores of nineteenth and twentieth century writers and filmmakers.
As we ride next to and walk alongside the thirty-something Parnell, making pilgrimages to locations where, for example, The Wicker Man was filmed or where some of the tales of Algernon Blackwood were set, we also learn bits and pieces of Parnell’s own life, how he came to love these kinds of books and films, of the difficult deaths of his parents, and the shock when he learns his own brother has a lymphoma that will eventually kill him, too. To do this, he guides us through large swaths of Great Britain in search of the sites depicted in these books and films. I don’t think he ever uses the word but I felt as if he were trying to demonstrate how various terroirs affect the ghost stories and the strange folk lore that then show up in the fiction and cinema that he has loved since childhood. But as in so many things, it’s the blending that counts and Parnell is an expert bartender. It’s also a bit of travel guide, a dash of history, and a family memoir. Edward Parnell’s Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country is a highly personal exploration of the idea of “haunted” in literature and film.
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