In honor of the impending release of Midsommar—director Ari Aster’s follow-up to Hereditary—Nightmare Fuel, a dark lit newsletter by Tor senior marketing manager Emily Hughes, has included Wylding Hall in a list of best folk horror.
Hall appears alongside Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney, Thomas Tryon’s Harvest Home, and Kai Ashante Wilson’s The Devil in America.
The book is written as an oral history, a series of interviews with the surviving band members, their manager, and a journalist who profiled the band that summer, which I love as a narrative choice, because you’re immediately plunged into a plethora of narrators of varying degrees of unreliability. Add that to the fact that the interviews are taking place forty years after the events of the story, and you’ve got a nice haze of uncertainty over what actually happened at Wylding Hall.
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