Reviews - Wylding Hall | The StoryGraph

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903 reviews for:

Interesting premise, telling the story through interviews with the individuals. Showing how they are all a bit unreliable due to their own struggles. Can we trust character A, since character B says they had a much bigger drinking problem than A admit to themselves? Or is B, who has some jealousy issues, making it sound worse than it is? Who to trust.

The timeline got a bit muddled at times, jumping perspectives, but my biggest gripe was the ending. While it will probably work for some, it somewhat broke the spell of the book for me.

It honestly felt like they ripped of the ending of the Dark Knight movies, but it being a creepy story about is something supernatural going on or not type of story, it just felt very anti climatic.

lindsayb09's review against another edition

5.0

4.5 stars, rounded up. Once I started this I couldn't put it down. It's short, and I honestly could have read another 100 pages, but it hits a lot of spooky notes in a tight, concise way that I think makes it more impactful. If it took more time to break things down and overanalyze them maybe it wouldn't be as good.
Loved the setting and the cast of characters. It made me want to dig deeper into 60s English folk rock and traditional folk songs. I think I'll definitely reread this at some point in the future and see if I pick up anything new.

ricparks's review against another edition

5.0

Wonderfully written so you feel like it really happened. I read half this short novel late at night in a single sitting. It starts as a slow burn but really gets cooking by the end. I don't get scared by a book almost ever but this one made me a little jumpy about house noises in the middle of the night. I'll be reading more by Elizabeth Hand.

tasha5492's review against another edition

3.0

dark mysterious slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

tombomp's review against another edition

4.0

I really liked this until the end when it whiffed things in giving a sort of explanation but one that didn't really connect with any of the images and ideas otherwise brought up, and that sort of retrospectively made me rethink stuff and enjoy it a little less.

There's lots I really liked here - the early 1970s music scene conjured up has verisimilitude. The house is nicely sketched out and creepy. In general I really, really liked the atmosphere. One particular scene has old photos depicting a peculiar custom on the walls of the pub. For some reason that really resonated with me, pubs having old stuff on their walls that had some connection to local stuff but is barely understood now is common even today. There's a lot of just really nicely done detail to create a great atmosphere that feels very connected to British "folk horror" stuff even though almost everything is merely "sinister" than actually scary.

Nothing really gets explained - it's all about something inexplicable and how it affects a bunch of people. That's fine. I enjoyed that. But there is an attempt to provide a basis for some of it at the end -

Spoiler

decades later a neolithic tomb is discovered under the house

. Which... ok? It feels weirdly like bringing something concrete into something which doesn't need it.

Basically like, the best, creepiest images were around

Spoiler

wrens. The walking into a room and there's suddenly all these dead wrens on the floor. Or when one of them walks into the room the guy disappeared in and finds wrens just flying in and committing suicide

. The whole thing around that feels genuinely creepy and with the

Spoiler

photos of the wren hunting tradition

it builds into a folk horror thing - even if there's no explanation or understanding the images themselves are so good and there's the general atmosphere of "there's this ancient tradition of some kind relating to something Bad but as outsiders it's impossible to understand" that's really great. So that the girl is

Spoiler

like, just some random girl except in a photo she had 2 sets of teeth or something?

and there's no real explanation but also it doesn't really connect to the images is a bit disappointing... it feels a little disconnected. Idk. Basically I really liked it all along and then at the end I was just like ahhh if only this all tied together a little more, you know?

One thing I felt curious about was that right at the start the band members talk a bit about one of their ex-bandmates committed suicide

Spoiler

or possibly was murdered?

which felt like it SHOULD be important and somehow connect or parallel other stuff but I never felt there was any thematic resolution on that... hmm. It's quite possible there's some hints about stuff that I just missed and if you thought it through more there's a little more to the story. But I dunno.