James and a visit I took to the place where he grew up, in Suffolk.
“Ghostland came about after I wrote a blog post about M. The place was full of odd stories and local village legends – there was said to be a bottomless pit, for instance, called the Devil’s Pit – and these things obviously fed into my childhood imagination and remained with me into adulthood. In that way I suppose I was quite like the protagonist in that novel. I grew up in the barren, treeless Lincolnshire fens, but at my grandmother’s I could go and wander off all day in the woods, surrounded by nature. “The Listeners was borne out of my memories of my grandmother’s house, which was in a tiny village near Swaffham. Since then he’s published two books – a novel, The Listeners, that he started during his time at UEA, and a new work of narrative non-fiction, Ghostland, published this month.Įdward has lived in Norfolk for the past 20 years and starts by explaining how the landscape of his home county has influenced the two books he’s written. It is a unique and elegiac meditation on grief, memory and longing, and of the redemptive power of stories and nature.Edward Parnell graduated from the MA in Creative Writing in 2007. Ghostland is Parnell’s moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists - and what is haunting him. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and Graham Swift’s Waterland to the archetypal ‘folk horror’ film The Wicker Man.
James, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood to the children’s fantasy novels of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper from W. He explores how these landscapes conjured and shaped a kaleidoscopic spectrum of literature and cinema, from the ghost stories and weird fiction of M. In Ghostland, Parnell goes in search of the ‘sequestered places’ of the British Isles, our lonely moors, our moss-covered cemeteries, our stark shores and our folkloric woodlands. For comfort, he turned to his bookshelves, back to the ghost stories that obsessed him as a boy, and to the writers through the ages who have attempted to confront what comes after death. In his late 30s, Edward Parnell found himself trapped in the recurring nightmare of a family tragedy.
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