Hookland County Chronicle

Issue Two

For Faery is the Realm of Peril. All who explore it and come back are changed. Some see the signs in a slight silvering of the eye which makes it as mirror, claim it comes from having spent time under a sky with strange stars and two moons. Others come back with an ache for a quality of light that can never be fulfilled. Every summer day is grey as ash for them and they wear this wound like a veteran rubbing at the bullet that was never taken out. In many returning travellers, the impacts are less subtle.

– Rev. H.R. Fade, Elfland Explored, 1898

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Welcome to the second issue of the Hookland County Chronicle (HCC). Extreme Musk seems to be in full effect already. Amongst the casual chaos and extortion racketeering, the bullying clique of Twitter’s folklore side are also running rampant. This has made the HCC project even more a refuge. After this issue, I am going to make it fortnightly to give myself space to develop it further. One of the things I hope to do is include more reviews of Hookland adjacent things, so if there is something you want included in Was It Worth It?, feel free to contact me. Though as will be obvious of my treatment of A Haunting At The Rectory, there will be no undue kindness even if we are good friends. I also hope to line up some guest posts and more exploration of the actual folklore and places behind the misremembering of them in the county. As always, Hookland belongs to you, so all feedback is welcomed.

– David

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You Beast You! The Herancle

Also known as the Hairy Hob or Hearth Hob, the Hernacle is a house sprite that most often takes the form of a diminutive humanoid figure with a somewhat pointed head, covered in thick brown or red hair and equipped with a prehensile tail. A fierce house guardian, good relationships with it are developed by leaving it regular gifts such a slices of bread and bowls of milk. While it usually remains invisible to humans, it is able to be seen by other creatures such as cats. If it is heard singing, good fortune is on the way, but if if it is heard drumming or ringing a bell, ill-fortune or death is walking down the lane towards the home. In his 1898 opus mapping the history of Faerie and its inhabitants, Elfland Explored, the Rev. H.R. fade noted: ‘Of the many household sprites, the Herancle is possibly one of the most difficult to live with. It take a long view of time and as such is not directly attached to a family or a building, but rather the place on which the structure has been built. Appeasing it requires persistent gifting and constant cleaning given its displeasure at dirt and disorder. Many a property owner has had reason to call it a ‘harsh hearthside judge of slovenliness.’ Its annoyance at the state of a property is most often told in a persistent scratching sound which investigation always proves cannot be attributed to mice, the theft of small household items and the banging of cupboard doors.’

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Here comes a flaming bowl
Alight with the Devil’s oil
Snip! Snap! Dragon!

Care you don't take too much
Move only with a light touch
Snip! Snap! Dragon!

With his blue and lapping tongue
Many of you will be stung,
Snip! Snap! Dragon!

He snaps at every clutching hand
Burning to give you his brand
Snip! Snap! Dragon!

You’ve one moment to steal his gold
Snatch it before his flames are cold
Snip! Snap! Dragon!

– trad. chant that accompanied the bringing in a flaming shallow bowl of apple brandy for the playing of the seasonal parlour game Snap-dragon

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Is It Worth It? A Haunting At The Rectory

As a writer of strange stories, I know there is meant to be an unspoken code to be kind about independent horror films. I absolutely know how much work goes into every production we get to see, how ever movie made is the visible manifestation of thousands of hours of labour. However, from my days as a paid film reviewer, there is a bond that trumps the ‘be nice about indies’ code. It is the one the reviewer has with their audience to not only signpost wonders, but warn them from wasting their time and money. This is my bond with you and I will always act upon it.

Avoid A Haunting At The Rectory. It has almost nothing to recommend it. A turgid period drama that clearly wants to echo erotic noir love triangles, even its gratuitous nudity is as alluring as a cup of cold tea with a cigarette butt floating in it. Given that Borley Rectory had a reputation – however bogus – as one of England’s most ghost-soaked places, merely throwing some ominous shots of scarecrows and failed jump scares at the screen feels both cheap and cheating. Even the soundtrack creeks and then collapses from the heavy-lifting it is forced to do while attempting to cover for the total absence of atmosphere and anything resembling tension.

While it is not the worst movie made trying to trade off the engorged name of Borley, A Haunting At The Rectory is still so egregious that try to watch to it until its tepid, predictable end feels like an act of self-torture. The gory but risible looking body parts that are disposed off in the last few minutes feel symbolic for the whole enterprise – unconvincing, unnecessary and ill-conceived.

1.2/10 The only haunting feeling inspired by the film is pity for its actors who have all been better than they are allowed to be in this.

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When the witch walks the old pathways of the dead, it is not out of some hope at ghost gawping. The whole business of trying to provoke spirits into manifestation for amusement seems to be a developing issue within our wider culture. It speaks of both entitlement and a colossal failure of respect. The enfolding otherworld of the dead doesn’t exist purely as a resource to be mined by the living and it’s certainly not there to be a theme park of cheap thrills. When the witch walks a corpse road or lych way, she does it in communion with those that travelled before. A movement in which the intimate exchange of thoughts and feelings is possible. A travelling not of trespass, but shared journey. We must always have the manners to know that you do not poke those walking beside you.

– Emily Banting, 1982 from her postal correspondence course in witchery

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Notes From the Wyrd Lab

Foundations of Hookland – folklore beyond bullet, folklore as balm for wounded soul

I cannot review the beautiful new Watkins’ edition of Neil Philips’ English Folk Tales because he says nice things about Hookland in its 2022 introduction. However, I can tell you how much this book means to me and others, tell you how it is both balm and inspiration. I can also share the story of how my approach to folklore got radicalised.

In the early 1990s, not coping with the death of my fiancée, I lied my arse off in an interview and got a contract as a very junior production person for an American broadcast company covering the Yugoslav Wars of Dissolution. Strangely enough, I soon found out that having a breakdown is not helped by doing journalism/being a gopher in a war zone. Any free time I had was spent collecting folklore on Croatian and Serbian vampire traditions by getting drunk with locals who had stories which could be loosened from their stuck place in the throat by application of biska*.

While nothing compared to what most people in Wars of Dissolution went through, being marched at gunpoint through woods, the close-calls while being shelled and witnessing snipers shooting someone in the femoral artery so they would bleed to death while calling out for help that would be killed by the sniper left me with PTSD. I also came back to England with my approach and understanding of folklore completely remade.

Up until that point I don’t think I’d appreciated how the living current of lore delivers so much for people. Superstitions and traditions survive because they not only offer the practical warnings of parental scarelore, but also a comfort for those craving justice against the powerful, a connective sense of wonder to place. When you see folklore celebrated during a war, you get a sense of its power to not only transmit values, but to be a continuity of hope beyond bullet erasure.

Shaken, eaten by grief for both love and any faith in goodness, I turned to my newly transformed folkoric gaze towards my homeland for solace. I did not find much. Instead I saw everything from Morris dancing to traditional songs being grasped at by the far-right while a certain strata of academia** sucked the joy from the subject as efficiently as a Croatian vukodlak drains life. Then, bullied by rain into Foyles on the Charring Cross Road, I found Neil Philips English Folk Tales.

Have you ever experienced a moment of connection with a book where you’ve only furtively read a couple of its pages in the shop and yet you know it’s speaking to you? When you randomly flick ahead only to find it more relevant, its voice so loud you half expect other browsers in the shop to turn your way to find out what the noise is about? A book you so resonant that you almost run to the counter, clutching it hard in case someone tries to take it from you? That was this book for me.

By the time I was on the Misery Line back to Essex, I’d gulped down a third of the book. While I had no way of knowing then that it was the best single volume of English folktales, I knew this was the book I needed. Philips’ scholarship added not only context and revelation, but delight. It didn’t only demonstrate the connective muscle of storytelling, but the role of folklore in holding hands with the past, walking it into the now and tomorrow. All of the living folkloric power I’d recently seen was in its pages without any ink poisoning.

Yet there was something else within its pages. Having just seen the devastating impact of unchecked nationalism, here was a collection that stitched the universal power of folklore into an English landscape without any rancid blood and soil numptiness. Tradition without toxicity. English Folk Tales became a portal into my own culture’s mythic landscape which actually felt welcoming to a fully-grown changeling. It offered the psychic salve of connecting to the commonwealth of folk tales, being enfolded within all the wisdom, wild strangeness and collective magic they hold. It has never stopped being a comfort to me.

Some rare titles have a generational impact, opening up the folkloric landscape that many of us have never stopped exploring. English Folk Tales is one of them. It was a profound influence on me and Hookland, because it not only mapped much of the DNA of English literature, but it gave blueprints for building within a living tradition. Books that give you new eyes on a subject are important, books that simultaneously provide balm for a wounded soul and kick you up the creative backside are as rare as faery lucks.

The latest edition is a physically handsome thing, enhanced by Neil Gaiman’s fine foreword and the extra insight Neil Philips has acquired since its first publication. It remains a vital transmission of England’s folk tales as well as a manifestation of the intrinsic power of stories. In his new introduction Mr. Philips talks about the rewilding of folklore and kindly mentions Hookland as example of this. That made me cry. The rewilding of folklore is exactly what Hookland is about and it may not have been that way without English Folk Tales.

*Fair disclosure. Drinking green mistletoe brandy while collecting vampire lore may not be the biggest goth cliché of my life.

** Thankfully, this segment of folklore academia is much reduced these days. Folklore academics such as Owen Davies, Amy Hale and Jeff Tolbert are among the best of people and following them online will enrich not only with knowledge, but delight.

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For this is the nature of story. Someone comes across a wounded Bentley 3-litre tourer abandoned at the wooded bottom of the Devil’s Trough and tell their unbelieving fellow drinkers in The Old King’s Head. One of the company of the pint decides to check the veracity and spies the vehicle from a distance. He not only backs up the first teller in the pub, he shares his adventure with his children and speculates it must have been used in some criminal enterprise to be left like that. The story now leaps from pub to pub, playground to playground, till all who tell of it claim it a Countess of Ravenstone’s getaway car containing either jewels or a body in its rusting remains. Five years on, the Bentley is mud-sunk and bramble tangled, but has generated new ghosts for Devil’s Trough who haunt it with flickering headlight and skeleton at the wheel.

– C.L. Nolan from his 1934 BBC National Programme radio talk On The Getting of Ghosts

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Hookland Roll of Kindness

Byron Ballard

Scott Campbell

Roger Clarke

Lee Ann Day

Nathan Downs

Gordon Peake

Sarah-Jane Farrer

Icy Sedgwick

Paul Wilson

In kindness there is connectivity, an impulse for good and a better world that is not denied. Kindness is a refusal of darkness. In its graceful light friendships have been found, lives saved and hope restored. – C.L. Nolan