@hookland.bsky.social

@hookland.bsky.social

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Phoenix Guide to Strange England: #Hookland. Run by David Southwell #Hauntology Re-wilding #Folklore #FolkHorror #Psychogeography #LandscapePunk Re-enchantment Is Resistance https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1068598123

PISSMIRES AND WARLOCKS STAND ASIDE! THIS IS AN OFFICIAL DOCUMENT ISSUED BY THE OFFICE OF HOOKLAND REMEMBRANCER UNDER DIRECT ORDER FROM THE LORD LIEUTENANT OF THE COUNTY. ALL COURTS AND THOSE WITH TREATY WITH THE COUNTY – INCLUDING ELFLAND – SHOULD NOTE THAT THE INDIVIDUAL WHOSE NAME APPEARS ON THE FRONT OF THIS CARD HAS RIGHTS IN HOOKLAND AND SHOULD BE GIVEN UNHINDERED, FREE PASSAGE ACROSS ITS THRESHOLD. THE REMEMBRANCER HOLDS THAT THE PLACE THAT DOES NOT WELCOME THOSE FLEEING FROM TERROR IS A TERRITORY WITH THE TASTE OF DEATH UPON ITS LIPS AND IS AN APOSTATE FROM THE COMMONWEALTH OF DECENCY.
Distressed brown cardboard on which the words: TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN THIS CARD IS TOKEN GIVEN BY THE LORD LIEUTENANT OF HOOKLAND AS SIGN THAT ……….. HAS BEEN GIVEN RIGHT TO RESIDE WITHIN THE COUNTY AND MAY NOT BE DENIED ANY LIBERTIES, CIVILITIES OR FREEDOMS ENJOYED WITHIN ITS BOUNDARIES.
There are always wars. They end and start again. There are always spirits. They rarely end. There are always văpir. These too rarely end. They go on for 400-years. Maybe we tell stories of văpir because their stories make more sense than these terrors of war. Maybe we tell stories of monsters, because they help us understand who walks among us. Văpir ring church bells to drive us mad. The Serbs shell our churches to drive us mad. I know who is worse.
I am also keen on stories reflecting those other types of being haunted the best in strange fiction can evoke. For example, to quote the original Phoenix Guide: ‘Former Poet Laureate Owen Booth explained the Hookland concept of ‘atch’ in a talk he gave on the BBC Home Service in 1958. Prefacing a reading of his poem about Savage Jem called Returned To Song, he said: “It is kin to the Welsh hiareth and Cornish hireth. Kin also to saudade, the animating spirit of Portugeuse Fado music. Our dictionaries are poorer for it never having made the jump from the logbooks recording dialect. In Hookland, atch is a homesickness for a place that you cannot return to. The brutal weight upon the soul of a yearning to walk in the lost landscape of your past. The warping gravity of nostalgia for a home that never really was as full of sunshine as your memory wishes to paint it.”’
W is for … West Country Tales On first broadcast, West Country Tales made Friday night a childhood territory of fear. Its England electronica soundtrack jarred against landscape of relent less woods, primeval coastlines and villages dammed against time’s full flow. Future music summoning the past, the synthetic sound of a tomorrow that never came, it called old stories from the land. Its tales started so gently you could almost believe that they wouldn’t harm you. Silky narration, incremental ratcheting of atmosphere. A slow weaponising of the everyday, the normal turned inside-out to show its sinister lining. It left you with a scarring sense that outbuildings may contain pig-faced monsters, remote churches hold blasphemies. It told that copses are walked by old gods, any home may house a predatory ghost. A second season, less based on original BBC viewer appeal for ‘experiences of the inexplicable’ rarely delivered, but at its best, it was a school for Hookland.
S is for … Sapphire & Steel Growing up fatherless in the 1970s, I had a few fantasy TV dads. James Garner, the Brigadier from Doctor Who, John Noakes and David McCallum. This last may have been why I first watched Sapphire & Steel, it might have been down to insatiable desire for all things weird. It doesn’t matter. From its opening titles, the show cut into me, left an ongoing infection. It delightfully wounded with a sense of time itself as malignancy. Scarred the psychic skin with map of a universe so uncaring towards humanity it made any later Ligotti-inspired anxiety redundant. It taught that heroes – even ones you’d take as a father – would sacrifice you. Sapphire & Steel gifted an overwhelming sense that the commonplace and mundane held horror. Warned that nostalgia, loss and guilt were doors opening onto malevo lent mystery. The power of enigmas to disturb is I hope, its legacy in the county
S is for … Sapphire & Steel Growing up fatherless in the 1970s, I had a few fantasy TV dads. James Garner, the Brigadier from Doctor Who, John Noakes and David McCallum. This last may have been why I first watched Sapphire & Steel, it might have been down to insatiable desire for all things weird. It doesn’t matter. From its opening titles, the show cut into me, left an ongoing infection. It delightfully wounded with a sense of time itself as malignancy. Scarred the psychic skin with map of a universe so uncaring towards humanity it made any later Ligotti-inspired anxiety redundant. It taught that heroes – even ones you’d take as a father – would sacrifice you. Sapphire & Steel gifted an overwhelming sense that the commonplace and mundane held horror. Warned that nostalgia, loss and guilt were doors opening onto malevo lent mystery. The power of enigmas to disturb is I hope, its legacy in the county.
The coverplate of the book HOOKLAND FRAGMENTS VOLUME ONE by David Southwell featuring a picture of the Ghost Bear of Hookland by Maria Strutz and the following blurb: I firmly believe David Southwell’s Hookland to be one of the great imaginative achievements of our age. One that will one day be spoken of the way Lovecraft’s Mythos is now. Hookland is the folklore of the county that exists on the edge of our vision, an unseen but sensed Britain that is at once familiar and strange. It is the land just to the left of where we live. David’s work is made even more remarkable by his open invitation for all to come and play there. Though of course visitors to Hookland must be wary, the county exacts its price from us all. – R.J. Barker, award-winning author of bestsellers such as The Bone Ships and Gods of Wyrdwood. As a visitor I am more frequently in Hookland than the barrows and chalk downs of my childhood. – Roger Clarke, best-selling author of A Natural History of Ghosts. Hookland is gold standard eldritch world building. – Ian Simmons, Fortean Times news editor. This a shimmering place of deep time, cold wars, old gods and ever renewing mysteries.The heartland and home county of the restless and the outsider, a lamp glow to welcome the lost, a pole star for those who dare to step into the dark and follow its glorious glowing ghostlight. – Rose Ruane. Artist and writer of Birding and This Is Yesterday. Hookland has been called many things. Psychic shrapnel embedded in place. A re-wilding of folklore. The English Eerie told in strange fragments. According to its creator David Southwell, nothing in Hookland is made up, just remembered differently. Hookland Fragments Volume One offers both an introduction to Hookland and an exploration of its agenda of re-enchantment as resistance.