By Jim Mcleod 
They Fear Not Men in the Woods by Gretchen McNeil: Gateway to Folk Horror
Tip to tail, Wylding Hall is unsettling, eerie, and askew, leaving me with delicious ambiguities and shudder-inducing moments. I love the tone, the characters, the way the mystery is teased and unfolds, but mostly, I love the way the story is so grounded in the land, as if centuries of history have steeped into it then bubbled up into the present narrative. Suddenly, I began thinking of a story, also inspired by a poem—Kipling’s “The Way Through the Woods”—that would bring the ancient and the modern together with potentially deadly results. Wylding Hall inspired me to explore a new path in my writing, and for that I am eternally grateful.
I cut my teeth on British fiction. Ainsworth or Austen, Dame Agatha or du Maurier, some of my earliest memories of reading were of novels and short stories from a country I had never visited. The moody moors and the fogs of London aren’t a far cry from the damp and misty San Francisco Bay Area where I grew up, and something always pulled me toward the dark, the gothic, and the singularly bloody. I especially loved anything tied to the land: Sherlock Holmes tracking a hound across Dartmoor, Manderley ablaze in windswept Cornwall, children led on mysterious twilight rambles through the Welsh countryside.
So when it came to scary movies, of course I was instantly drawn to folk horror. I’ve devoured it all, anything with a dark ritual, a pagan cult, or a landscape saturated in blood, but for some reason, I hadn’t made the leap into folk horror fiction—or thought about writing it myself—until I read Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand.
Don’t get me wrong. I’d written plenty of horror and horror-adjacent novels, inspired by my favorite tropes: exorcisms, revenge from beyond the grave, comedy slashers. Folk horror felt distant, old, and outside of my immediate experience, but there was something about Hand’s tale of a folk music recording session gone horribly wrong that sucked me in, and though the setting is a secluded English country estate, and the time period is partially historical, the story felt contemporary, a beautiful merging of ancient beliefs and the shifting moralities of the mid-20th Century.
The story unfolds through a series of interviews with surviving band members and supporting personnel of Windhollow Faire, a 1960s progressive folk music band who rent an old manor house in Hampshire for the double purpose of recording their next album and recovering from the death of their former lead singer. The house, Wylding Hall, is remote and atmospheric, supposedly pre-Norman but sitting atop a Bronze age site, and perfect for the magick-with-a-k hijinks some of the band members. Jealousies and secrets, fueled by drugs and alcohol, it’s the perfect setup for horror.
From the opening quote – Thomas Campion’s “Thrice Toss These Oaken Ashes” – I was pulled into the off-balance world of superstition and profane traditions. The house is at once a musical inspiration and an oppressive antagonist, with rooms full of dead birds and a Tudor wing that no one should enter alone. As the band settle in and begin working on new material, time seems to stretch and warp around them, and the grounds of Wylding Hall appear impermanent. A barrow they can only stumble upon occasionally, a ruined tower they can see but never find. Even the locals are uncanny, with Wren Day photos in the pub and villagers seemingly trapped in an older age.
And then the nameless girl shows up.
I won’t say much more because spoilers but there is one image in Wylding Hall that has always stayed with me. The photo shoot for the album, a girl with her mouth open as if screaming. I’ll leave it there. You need to read that part for yourself.
Tip to tail, Wylding Hall is unsettling, eerie, and askew, leaving me with delicious ambiguities and shudder-inducing moments. I love the tone, the characters, the way the mystery is teased and unfolds, but mostly, I love the way the story is so grounded in the land, as if centuries of history have steeped into it then bubbled up into the present narrative. Suddenly, I began thinking of a story, also inspired by a poem—Kipling’s “The Way Through the Woods”—that would bring the ancient and the modern together with potentially deadly results. Wylding Hall inspired me to explore a new path in my writing, and for that I am eternally grateful.
They Fear Not Men in the Woods is my first foray into folk horror but certainly not my last.
They Fear Not Men in the Woods by Gretchen Mcneil
When Jen Monroe hears her father’s remains have been found, she returns home to disprove his death, only to find the forests of rural Washington are hiding horrors beyond imagining
Seven years ago, Jen Monroe left behind her hometown of Barrow, Washington after her father, a forest ranger passionate about protecting old trees from the aggressive logging business that runs their small town, vanished seemingly into thin air. She vowed never to return…until she gets a text from her estranged mother. Her father’s remains have been found.
It seems impossible to Jen who has always believed her father is still alive, and she returns home, determined to find out what really happened. When her ex-boyfriend proposes a camping trip into the woods in her father’s memory, it feels like the opportunity Jen had been hoping for: to find her father. To find the truth.
But what she finds lurking in the ancient, impenetrable forest may be deeper, darker and deadlier than she could have ever imagined. And it has no intention of letting her leave.
Deeply unsettling and thoroughly creepy, this is feminist horror for those who have always known there’s something waiting in the woods.
Gretchen McNeil
Bio:
Gretchen McNeil has been a published young adult novelist since 2011, currently with Disney-Hyperion. Her latest YA novel is Four Letter Word, which came out in March of this year. Gretchen’s novels have been published internationally in over a dozen languages. Ten: Murder Island, the film adaptation of Ten starring China Anne McClain (Descendants 2, Black Lightning) premiered on Lifetime in 2017, and Get Even and Get Dirty have been adapted as the series Get Even and Rebel Cheer Squad: a Get Even series for BBC and Netflix. An adult horror short story she wrote for Assemble Media last year has already been optioned by a major studio. This is her first adult novel.
Website Links:
- Title Page: https://astrapublishinghouse.com/product/they-fear-not-men-in-the-woods-9780756420086/
- Author Website: https://www.gretchenmcneil.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gretchen_mcneil/
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