Hookland County Chronicle

Issue 12

If I’ve learnt anything, it is that the hidden soul of England refuses to let the land be reduced to concrete and curated beauty spots. Try to cover in car parks and it will cough up dead kings. Insist it conform to your own tepid aesthetic sensibilities and it will spit feral wonder in your face. Its sleeping knights aren’t waking anytime soon, but we all have a share in their magics. We all have the right to turn the key on the doors of its hollow hills. – Alice Reeves, author of The Wicker King trilogy, speaking at Dragon Con in 2015

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Hello. Welcome to Issue 12 of the Hookland County Chronicle – read by some 2055 souls in 44 countries and 47 US states. In the numerology of Hookland, 12 is often regarded as symbolising a full turn through sunlight, a completion of an outer cycle. As always, Hookland feels incomplete despite the realisation of the first dozen issues of the Chronicle, so I will have to keep spinning. In allied news, I’m enjoying connecting with readers and other writers via Substack Notes. It’s good to have a social space for conversation without the taint of Musk’s pisspuffinry. I realise this issue is unforgivably late. I am blaming Covid atop of existing health conditions as well as a little bit of despondency. Sorry. – David

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The fear of changeling exchange was often linked to the fusing of a child's skull bones and abated when it occurred. In this fact is not only the precariousness of infant health, not only a telling of mortality as fierce force in folklore, but the way in which folklore often scoops up collective medical wisdom and transmits it. Yes the signal may be weak, the noise great, but it is transmission. Even cultures that do not respect, revere – let alone worship – their ancestors, allow folklore to be part of their continuing voice. Anonymised, diverse as the great drifting of people through place makes us all, the tongues of long dead still talk in lore. – Dr. Michael Benn, from the annual C.L. Nolan Folklore Lecture given in 1976 at Woden College, Weychester University

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You Beast You! Nadspeck

When reading mediaeval manuscripts, you often come across images so striking that the only possible response is to pause and gaze in wonder. It may be an armoured cat playing a string instrument or a depiction of the Old King exploring under the waves in a glass barrel. It may be a chimera so incongruous and yet sinister that more modern imagined monsters seem woefully deficient in terms of creative fancy. One such conspicuous cryptid is the Nadspek. With the head and neck of a gigantic snake, the body of a leopard, the tail of a crocodile and the feet of an oversized cock, most depictions of it transcend it being a mere comedy of parts and give sense of the beast as terror generator.

The most famous image of it comes from the 12^th century Bestiaire of Gilbert de Thaon. In its pages it is depicted emerging from a river to lap at the blood of a dismembered knight. Its neck as long as a human body, its skin speckled less like a leopard and more akin the marking of a spotted newt. It is in the same volume that we learn that the Nadspek may project a blast of venom so potent that it ‘will etch metal with sorrow and blind the eyes beyond the cure of the holiest of waters’. Adding to its fearsome reputation was the detail that its bite was said to rip the flesh off of bone and to leave a fatal poison that no-one survived beyond three days.

It may have been its very notoriety as death-dealer that led to apparent extinction of the Nadspek at some point in the late mediaeval when it disappears from most bestiaries of the period. Like the famous Questing Beast of Arthurian legend, with which it had some apparent physical similarities, being renowned as close to the top of predator pyramid brought nothing but trouble for the odd animal. According to contemporary accounts, an almost never-ending parade of knights of no renown seem to have lined up to hunt Nadspeks hoping that a successful encounter with one would catapult them into the tales of troubadours. While such attention may have brought a short-term increase in blood to lap, it seems to have a hugely negative impact on the creature’s breading numbers.

Its viability as a species may have also suffered from the belief that if one of its serrated teeth was ground into a powder it provided a powerful male and female aphrodisiac. While a knight might secure his fame slaying a Nadspek, his fortune was guaranteed if he could harvest its teeth. In 1634, noted Hookland occultist and diarist Dr. Bron recorded: ‘Apothecaries hold only shameful imitations of Nadspek teeth which sell for an amourer’s year of labour. I do not believe a true tooth has been seen in more than 100 years. Certainly no powder from one sold by the Unworshipful Guild of Apothecaries in Bride Lane has ever turned the tide of blood to lust.’

The Nadspeck lived on beyond its exit from traditional bestiaries in folklore. The Hookland pub The Monstrous End claims to have the mummified tail of a Nadspeck on display for more than three centuries (zoologists dispute this, suggesting that the appendage is in fact from an unusually large Nile crocodile). Elsewhere in the county the creature is alternatively known as ‘the Mordant’s Doom’ as it is said to stalk that family, emerging from a form of hibernation every 100 years or so as death omen. The current Marquess of Blaxwich, Henry Mordant has often publicly joked that he isn’t worried about the Nadspeck as: “The beast gave up hunting my family when the Linder Repeating Rifle came onto the market in 1854.”

The great Edwardian fairground sculptor Thomas Justice carved a Nadspek into the Bestiary Carousel at Luna Park, Brighthaven. It is no reflection on his art, but rather a sad commentary on the once infamous chimera’s notoriety, that few who rode upon it were aware of what type of animal it was meant to be. Joseph Lovell, the last attendant of the ride before the amusement park’s current closure due to fire said: “The Nadspeck wasn’t one of the most-loved animals. Most children though it was a spotted Komodo Dragon. I always put them right and told them it was the Mordant’s Doom and to ride it meant you’ll grow up brave.”

‘The witch’s truth’ is a Hookland phrase often taken to mean: ‘Here are the brutal facts that most people will flinch away from stating, but I don’t give a crooked cuss about most people so I’ll speak the harsh truth regardless.’ The 1923 edition of the Hookland Dialect Dictionary has it as: ‘A truth that will cut the hearer and wear their guts for garters’. I recently read in the Hookland Moot & Mysteries zine that some witches find my use of the term offensive. They take ‘the witch’s truth’ as a patriarchal insult. I don’t, I take it as badge of pride. It’s a phrase that celebrates our fierceness, our unwillingness to be cowered into the repetition of easy, polite falsehoods. It’s no insult if it signals a history of men being scared of the witch not jut as soothsayer but truth-sayer. – Emily Banting, 1981

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Is It Worth It? The Wretched

Readers of the Hookland County chronicle will know the Southwell working definition of folk horror – anything that uses folklore in horror as psychic infrastructure rather than gaudy tinsel. So what then to make of 2019’s The Wretched? Is it merely the standard parade of jump-scares and teen-angst wearing the skin of folklore or is part of the genre?

Writers and directors the Pierce brothers offer up a story of 17-year old Ben moving in with father and becoming the opposer of a witch spirit that has taken possession of the mother of two children next door. Partially told through a tired folk horror iconography of stick symbols, scratched sigils and animal skulls, The Wretched looks like an easy classification. Yet that is only the visual veneer. Scratch away in the hope of substance and you will be disappointed.

The largely invented folklore of the film works well enough at first by mimicking established elements of lore. From child-snatching to flower-withering, skin-wearing to the malign corruption of memory – it’s redolent of half-forgotten things. However, it soon becomes apparent that the witch spirit is more MacGuffin than engagement with tradition or legend. You could switch the antagonist for an alien shapeshifter with powers of mental control and almost nothing else would be different. We are not being offered folklore lite, rather just a story draped with folk paperchains coming apart from overuse.

The Wretched is never less than visually slick. Whether in moments of aching beauty – children’s abandoned toys in the rain, the dance of sunlight through forest – or gut punches of shock from the deployment of images such as the witch climbing from the carcass of a deer, it has surface glamours. The direction and Connor Murphy’s cinematography consistently offer not only kicks to the eye, but a more enfolding sense of menace.

The shortcuts to atmosphere take by The Wretched often feel overly recognisable – misbehaving toys that wouldn’t be out of place in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, baby-cam footage that feels straight out of the Paranormal franchise. However, no-one could claim that a deficiency of atmosphere – when it’s turned on – is among the film’s faults. While the choice of pop sunshine songs used often seems jarring, Devin Burrows understated score not only amplifies tension and an underlying sense of eerie, but offers an ambient sense of place. It is another example of a well-crafted element in the film that ends up having to support the broken core.

The biggest problem with The Wretched is its cast of characters. To call most of them bland absences and at best, poorly written, vague suggestions of the emotional complexity of being a teenager would be overstating the positive case. A huge part of folklore and folk horror are the folk themselves. In The Wretched, the folk are flimsy. When characters aren’t hollow, generic archetypes, they are simple generic arseholes. It is hard to care about the doings of a murderous witch spirit when most of its possible victims are so shoddily sketched that you wonder why the Pierce brothers even bothered to give them names. There are no bad performance by the actors, but they are paddling in the shallows with what they are given by the script. Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! did more convincing and engaging teen dialogue in September 1969’s episode A Clue For Scooby.

For all its stick and bone dressing up desires, The Wretched never rises up to be the film its crafting promises. There is no shortage of teen vs. monster flicks, no scarcity when it comes to releases that hit the standard of competently atmospheric. I will happily give a pass to a polished movie that shorts on folk and horror, but only if there’s a sense of something beating at its dark heart. Unfortunately, this a movie without a functional ticker. It doesn’t move me and I suspect won’t move many others either.

5/10 The Wretched is visually strong, well-scored and ultimately unsatisfying. It’ not worth it because creepy without us caring is just a hollow tricks.

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At those margins of the land where sky never comes low enough to scrape itself on trees, where Wood Sprites have few victims to curse at, you can hear voices riding the wind. Gusts of cold languages. Whisks of words old as the great ice going. Amaranthine conversations. In Hookland, locals call them the Dead Winds or Bone Winds. Those who can translate the speech of the air are held in fearful reverence. Not only do they possess the telling of whether a wind is ill or fair, but a knowing of secrets scooped up by gale, a knowing of secrets scoured from the bones of the realm.– C.L. Nolan, the Secret Land, Richard & Horlick, 1912

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Notes From the Wyrd Lab

Accidentally Educational – the Benefits of Trusting Your Audience

One of the key tenets of the Hookland Manifesto – a collection of all the things learned while working in the county – is to trust your audience are smarter than you. It may sound simple, it may sound glib, but like True Faery North on the cunning compass, it guides me. In any navigation, I am going to assume you are cleverer, more informed and definitely savvier than I.

Presupposition is peril. It can put you uncertain, dangerous territory. I know this. However, Hookland has always proceeded on the basis that not only all of you could beat me in a pub quiz, but that in all directions you think harder and faster than I can.

This is not because I believe myself a low benchmark. I acknowledge the damage done by my strokes was cruel-bladed, delivering wounds of absolute absence. I am an exile from my own continuity of thought. I struggle to learn new things, accessing memories and even basic information can be difficult. Yet my imagination still works, I can still write and I’ve enough critical thinking skills left to be both occasionally useful and annoying to my wife.

I trust in my audience to be smarter than me because I have regularly observed it to be the case. I also trust in my audience to be smarter than me because it is good for me as a writer. It pushes me to research more. To be confident in layering, in offering nuance. It allows me to deal in implication and complexity. It liberates me to explore formats. In the Guide itself and on Twitter, I can write fragments and stories confident readers will stitch them together to make larger narratives, make informed judgements on the character of voices such as C.L. Nolan or Emily Banting.

Alongside this, I have developed a trust in Hooklanders’ curiosity. I often get feedback that says: ‘I learnt a new word. Thank you.’ Admittedly, this tends to be in response to some of my favourite, over-worked words such as cicatrix, apotropaic and amaranthine, but that faith in your audience’s curiosity permits you to be accidentally educational. These days, I’ve rarely an internal voice telling me to simplify my language* because I’ve an expectation readers will do just as I did when reading Lord of the Rings or The Atrocity Exhibition at too early an age and look words up they don’t immediately recognise.

I can also trust in that explorative curiosity means readers will find their own rabbit holes. This pushes me to ensure that the ghost soil of the county is deep enough and widely spread for them to dig as much as they want and discover networks of burrows if they need them. If while running the weird warrens of the county, people hit upon the sources of my inspiration – whether a Fay Godwin photograph or the peculiar folklore limited to only one village in England – great! If you don’t it doesn’t matter. Curiosity is it own intrinsic good. It does not need an agenda, but I will always try to reward it within Hookland.

Liberational trust in your savvy, your intrinsic inquisitiveness is part of Hookland’s creative bedrock. It has allowed me a praxis of not only more economic exposition and intimate expression, but experimentation. Not only can I talk of kennings**, but use them without feeling poncey. I can let narratives explode into a thousand, David Lynch approved holographic fragments, in the absolute belief you can put them together if you wish. I can get on with painting the invisible electrical storms in my head with words without ever thinking: ‘Is this too anorak?’

I had to suffer enough management training back when I was newspaper editor to recognise I’m meant to think: ‘When you assume you make an ass of u and me’. However, the indoctrination clearly did not take. Hookland is made from assumptions. It comes from the assumption that authors don’t have to be landlords, that there might be a desire or need for an open source pre-enchanted landscape. It comes from the assumption that I might not be the only person interested in filtering inspirations gifted by Soviet science fiction through the hollow hills of England, that there might be an audience for working class voices when it comes to the writing of place, the sharing of strange stories. It comes from the assumptions that re-wilding folklore is important, that re-enchantment is not only resistance, but a pathway to revelatory joy.

Many of us wear bruise camouflage, have histories where trusting others is an incredibly difficult ask of ourselves. This can apply not only to the deeply personal hollows of our lives, but all the communally constructed worlds we live within through choice or necessity – workplace, city or distant galaxy in turmoil. It shouldn’t have to be a difficult lesson for an author to learn, but in fictions, freedom. Through fiction, a way back to faith in others bringing out the best in us. Thank you for being such ridiculously clever and curious bastards.

*Whenever this voice switches on, it sounds just like Storm Constantine who once told me off for using coruscating in a joint project. She was definitely right on that occasion.

** Bone-house, flood-harvest, death-hall, witch-broken et al.

The English have a terrible tendency to romanticise many of their ghost engines. Instead of seeing the castle as stone symbol of former oppression, its ruins as the broken teeth of an elite’s tyrannical maw, they decorate them with a bunting of colourful stories. Instead of listening for the whispers made by serfdom’s spirits, most insist all towers shelter improbably noble spectres within their temporal shadow. Why would the spectre of a queen who slept only one night in castle’s keep spend a repetitious eternity there? Why would a ruin be haunted by a king whose only connection to it was to sell it another member of fortress-owning class? An endless phantom parade of minor princes and princesses are trotted out in hollow tales – anything to avoid dealing with the psychic cicatrix of place as instruments of oppression. – C. Josiffe, from the article A Shuffling of Spectres, published in The Modern Atlanticist, 1947

The Far Ends

The Far Ends were always rough. Long before the tower blocks with their concrete cancer, demons manifesting through black mould and poltergeist plagued lifts, The Far Ends were rough. I was a child when they were condemning all the old houses, building the blocks. I don’t remember it in the years it took, but in terms of streets going dark. First they’d turn off the street lamps, then one by one, the spill of light from the houses in a terrace would vanish as the council moved people out. Then the corner shops would go dark. No more buying a quarter of pear drops or custard sucks, no more being sent out to pick up Nan’s 20 Embassy. Life wheezing out of the estate like it was wheezing out of Nan.

It wasn’t so bad in the summer with its long nights. We did all the things you’d expect of a gang of little terrors – explore the abandoned houses, light fires in living rooms, go rat-hunting with our catapults. I don’t think we ever thought of it any of what we did as vandalism when a property was empty, jilted by its former occupiers. Our patch – Norton Square – was one of the last to be condemned and we didn’t do any of that stuff on our own doorsteps. Uncle Allen would have killed me and there were still enough neighbours around for their to be an effective twitching net curtain radar going on to ensure someone would see you and grass you up.

All the summers seem like one endless riot, but I know I’m mashing things up in my memory as I’ve got images where some of the gardens had become so overgrown they’d rip us to bits if we tried to pick blackberries or redcurrants from them. Then there was that giant wasp nest we found in one house. It seemed to take up half of a box room and you could just about make out images from the child’s nursery wallpaper that it used for one section of it. Faint suggestions of teddy bears and cats wearing bonnets, the most ludicrous things transformed into something terrible. I’m sure the nest couldn’t have grown to that size in just one year. Red Ronnie reckoned he could hear the nest inside his head and wanted to start leaving offerings of jam and sugar water out for it, but I remember none of the rest of us having that for a second. Then again Ronnie always talked nonsense. It was as if he’d watched Stingray, The Wild Children of Hag Wood and Moon Ranger 97 and thought they were documentaries.

Ronnie was the first of the gang to disappear. I know most of the other kids went bit by bit as their families got moved into temporary homes in other districts, but some of them did actually vanish. You’d go round to knock for them to come out and play and they’d have just gone and their parents were in torment. Ronnie’s dad was the first man I’d seen cry. Just raw bawling. As a child you’d never imagine such sobs, such sounds could come from a bloke who had been in the war and worked the cranes at the Mordant-Zephon Motorcycle factory. At the time I found that as frightening as Ronnie just seeming to evaporate.

Of course the police did next to nothing. It wasn’t just the streets and houses of the Far Ends that had been abandoned. Everyone still left on the estate felt like they’d fallen down the cracks as far as the authorities were concerned. Ronnie certainly did. All the way down the cracks. Years later and still no explanation of what happened. Every time I hear on the news about human remains being found anywhere I wonder. There’s a lot of different ways to be haunted aren’t there?

Even with the gang growing smaller, most of the summer memories are good ones. The sunshine seemed constant and as much as we had enjoyed having the bombsites as playgrounds, a whole row of empty houses to investigate and occasionally smash up or burn down was even better. Some of the old squares had fruit trees planted in their centres. We scrumped the best plumbs and pears – juice-bloated, full of sticky promise – I’ve ever tasted in those summers. However, winter was another matter. Winter was when the ghosts came out.

You noticed the absence of light in winter. No glow leaking from front parlours, no shop windows lit up to make a shrine of canned food or stacks of biscuits and bags of pudding rice. You’d walk home from school through a labyrinth of streets without pavement as the council had turned to all the properties into rubble. We would walk in the centre of the road, untroubled by cars, but wary of an ever expanding darkness that never felt empty.

And they weren’t empty. Not really. It was as if the ghosts, abandoned by people they used to live with, evicted by bulldozers after all those council letters, had taken to the streets. They’d wander like all those cats that got left behind, bemused by the ruin remaking of former homes, hunting for something living. Dispossessed spirits that would approach you if you made eye contact. Call out for directions to Shoe Street or Sorrel Square. All the lost souls of the Far Ends confused, rage roaming. I guess many of us still living there had that in common with them.

It wasn’t just us children that saw them. I know Nan did. One night we were coming back from visiting her cousin Mary – called Hairy Mary behind her back – who lived close to the docks in town. We took a couple of wrong turns after getting off the bus – all those flattened streets made navigation difficult even when you had an Eveready torch and strong moonlight. Disorientated by the new map made by demolition, we drifted till we could see lights in the distance. It wasn’t until we got close to them that we realised they came from the homes of Mayfield Square. That wouldn’t have been a bad thing if Mayfield Square hadn’t been one of the first bits of the Far Ends knocked down.

I never knew Nan to hold my hand tighter than at moment. She dragged me away from there as if it was from the mouth of Hell itself. She didn’t go out much after that – not even for her daily fix of Embassy. Well, not until the council eventually rehoused us out towards Brentlow.

Across the years I’ve tried to convince myself I imagined the phantoms. Remind myself that there were a fair few dissenters who tried to ignore the council’s notices moving them out and on right up until the bulldozers roared against their walls. I try to believe that the ghosts I saw were just stubborn refusers of the promise of tower block living. People like Mrs. Stretford – who seemed to be a mother of hundred forsaken rubble cats – who held out until at least we left. Then I remember the friend-eating dark, the forsaken homes so troubled by the past that no tramp would even squat them. I remember Nan’s grip that night Mayfield Square came back. As I say, there’s a lot of different ways to be haunted aren’t there?0

– Billy Foxworth in conversation with the Hookland Oral History Project for their 1981 programme Remembering The Far Ends

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Bring on the vampires nuns, five centuries of flesh and fang

Bring on the Wicker King, hatred of the lost and found gang

This is the dance of the hollowed horses and broken-hearted

This is the dance of the land’s dispossessed and the departed

She will traces salt sigils upon you skin

She will be the place you end and begin

She will make a tattoo upon your bones

She will be the hiss in your headphones

For she’s your bane messiah

Queen of Not-Quite Right

For she’s your bane messiah

Don’t you ache for her bite?

Bring on the Wishblood Boys, all knives to this city’s hope

Bring on Crossbone Nick, for your neck he’s got good rope

This is the dance of the pale battalion and all half-dead folk

This is the dance of the five-cursed girls doing ghost-smoke

She will traces salt sigils upon you skin

She will be the place you end and begin

She will make a tattoo upon your bones

She will be the hiss in your headphones

For she’s your bane messiah

Queen of Not-Quite Right

For she’s your bane messiah

Don’t you ache for her delight?

– Lyrics to the song ‘Bane Messiah’, by Hookland goth band Emily’s Wand Vs. the Skull of Alice

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Hookland Roll of Kindness

Byron Ballard

Amy Brennan

Scott Campbell

Roger Clarke

April Cole

Lee Ann Day

Nathan Downs

Gordon Peake

Sarah-Jane Farrer

K J Stark

Maria Strutz

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

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