Wylding Hall

Hand (Available Dark), restricted by her choice of structure, struggles to turn this novella into something more than a comfortably familiar haunted house story. The work is framed as a set of interviews for a documentary film about the band Windhollow Faire. The participants—band members, their manager, a psychic, and a journalist, all with disappointingly undifferentiated voices—recount a 1970s summer spent at the titular crumbling manor in rural England, writing music and making a groundbreaking neofolk album. Absent from the interviews is the ethereally voiced, astonishingly beautiful lead guitarist, Julian Blake, whose mysterious disappearance or death is regularly hinted at; but rather than offering differing versions of events, which would have added a layer of intrigue, the interviews remain unswervingly consistent, describing a ghostly young women lured into the open by Julian’s performance of a haunting folk song. Hand’s formidable language rarely emerges in the expository interviews, so the icy sensations, secret passageways, and taciturn locals provide Gothic trappings without even momentary uneasiness. Intermittently rewarding images of the late 1960s and early ’70s music scene take a backseat to repetitive renderings of a well-worn story. (July)