Wylding Hall in Do Better: SFF without Sexual Violence

Apr 17, 2015 Cobwebs-Iced-Across-SpaceTime rated it it was amazing

Shelves: a1-i-own-books, a1-netgalley, tbr-challenge_2015, author-r-elizabeth-my-challen, july-2015_reads, armchair-london, 2015_july-ca_us_author_lop, armchair-arcane-esoteric-london, armchair-england, 2015_horror-challenge

Review: WYLDING HALL by Elizabeth Hand

WYLDING HALL is one of those perfect books that don't appear often enough. Its surface framework is interviews for an American documentary, of a 2-hit wonder London acid folk band which dissolved three decades ago. After the first successful album, Windhollow Faire took up a summer retreat in the currently empty, isolated, rural Wylding Hall mansion, an eclectic mixture of Norman, Tudor, and Victorian architecture, plus a barrow. Preparing a new album, and g ...more

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Apr 27, 2018 Silvana rated it really liked it

Shelves: female-nonbinary-authors, scary-stuff, z-sff-2018-female-challenge, z-sff-2018-standalone-challenge, reading-with-friends, stand-alones, mine-mine-mine, novella, short-story-novelette-novella, z-sff-2018-reading-challenge

Literally and figuratively haunting. But this is not your typical horror book. It is about a teenager folk band who stayed in an old manor to record their sophomore album. Imagine the summer in English countryside with the flowers, the birds and the sunshine. Everything was so heavenly beautiful and the creative juices were flowing like crazy. Everyone was young, spirited and gifted. Until something happened.

The writing just grabbed me from the start. The author uses a documentary style - inter ...more

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Oct 31, 2020 Amanda at Bookish Brews rated it really liked it

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Wylding Hall was such a great read! It is written in a documentary format, which initially seemed like it wasn't going to work, but it's quickly very obvious that this is actually the best format for this story. Hand really pulls it off. She creates such a cinematic experience by writing in this way. It is exactly like watching a supernatural documentary. She really captures the tone of an acid-folk band in a haunted ancient country house perfectly.

I was impressed in the development of each cha ...more

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Nov 07, 2019 Lona rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

This is one of the best books I read this year, it had everything I liked: interesting characters, it was well written, it had the absolutely right vibes, at least for me.

Windhollow Faire, a young acid rock band, is sent to Wylding Hall by their manager to write and record some new music and come to terms with the suicide of a band member. Uncanny things happen and years later the band and some involved friends/lovers tell us what they think about the time at Wylding Hall...

After reading so much ...more

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Apr 15, 2023 ♥Xeni♥ rated it really liked it

Shelves: gothic, paranormal, horror, novella, fantasy, 2023-books-read, music, ghost

I read the first half of this novella 7 months ago, and ended up putting it aside when life got the best of me. It didn't help that the first half is incredibly long-winded, plodding, setting-up the rest of the tale. It made it hard to want to continue.

But I am incredibly glad I did.

Picking it up again set me right back into this fun-yet-bizarre world of 1970s hippies making music in a ramshackle, moldering English country mansion. The setting is a huge part of the gothic atmosphere. Since it' ...more

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