Wylding Hall is a Supernatural Fiction-Gothic Horror-Dark Fantasy novella by Elizabeth Hand. It tells the story of Windhollow Faire, a hippie-era acid-folk band who spent a summer at an ancient mansion located in an isolated patch of English countryside. That summer, they recorded the album that would make their reputation, but the mysterious disappearance of their lead singer Julian Blake meant there would never be a follow-up. The novel is a "Rashomon"-Style Scrapbook Story collecting the accounts of the surviving band members, the manager, and a few other witnesses. What was up with Wylding Hall? What really happened to Julian? And who on Earth was the pale, mysterious girl on the album cover?
Tropes used in Wylding Hall:
- The '70s: The sequences at the Hall take place in the early seventies - early enough that the cultural vibe is still hippies and hash rather than disco and cocaine.
- Agent Scully: Ashton."I'm the one who always laughed or lost my temper when anyone would start to go on about the occult. I believe that there is a rational, scientific explanation for everything."
- Ambiguous Ending: The open-ended fate of Julian. Each of the interviewees are implied to have formed varying conclusions as to what actually happened to him, but none of them know for sure.
- Tom initially thought Julian ran away with the mystery girl. It's implied he now thinks he Julian's disappearance is somehow tied to the burial mound.
- William and Lesley are both implied to think Julian's involvement in the supernatural led to the mystery girl's arrival and Julian's own disappearance. In particular, William seems to suspect the mystery girl was one of the fair folk that local legend warns takes the form of a wren.
- Ashton believes Julian was the victim of a violent crime.
- Jonathan thinks he's still alive somewhere.
- Ambiguously Human: The mysterious girl, at first.
- Animal Motifs: Wrens.
- Campbell Country: Spooky goings on in a very old and isolated patch of English countryside, complete with creepy woods and an ancient burial mound.
- Eldritch Location: Downplayed. The titular Wylding Hall appears to shift layouts as the cast move around inside it, hiding rooms at times and even trapping characters in them in others. Band members describe visible areas of the building that appear to have no doors to their insides, hallways and stairs that seemingly stretch to trap them, doors that lock and unlock seemingly on their own, and rooms and wings that weren't there yesterday and aren't there the next. However, it's noted that the areas that confuse and bewilder are areas they're less familiar with, that the very old building has innately confusing architectural features that can make passages difficult to spot, and that all of the interviewees were intoxicated for most of their stay, leaving this trope open to more mundane explanations.
- Emo Teen: Arianna, the band's first female singer. She's a sad, sensitive young girl who wore black before Goths were a thing.
- Erudite Stoner: Everyone was getting stoned in this milieu, and Julian was particularly interested in esoteric topics.
- Ethereal White Dress: The mysterious girl's outfit.
- The Fair Folk: William implies he believes the mysterious girl to be this.
- Folk Horror: Downplayed. The present-day locals near Wylding Hall are normal enough - one of them even gets to tell his side of things - but it is a horror story set in an isolated rural locale, with many references to old folk songs, rituals, and customs.
- Girlfriend in Canada: William recalls that, before coming out to the rest of the band, Jonathan had claimed he had a girlfriend in Chealsea.
- Ghost Amnesia: Possibly. Jonathan believes he saw Julian and the mysterious girl in Corfu decades after they disappeared, seemingly completely physically unchanged. The man Jonathan believes was Julian looked right at Jonathan but Jonathan emphasizes that the man showed no recognition.
- Hates Being Touched: Julian
- Horror Struck: The undeniability of the Spooky Photographs disturbs the surviving band members greatly, including the usually skeptical Ashton.
- Implied Love Interest: Though he had interactions with each that could be interpreted as romantic, whether Julian was actually romantically interested in Airana, Lesley, or even the mysterious girl he hyperfocused on is never made clear. Many of the band assume Julian was romantically interested in the mystery girl, but Lesley notes that the only thing anyone knows the two did for sure is seclude themselves together.
- Long-Haired Pretty Boy: Julian - long hair was standard for bohemian young men at the time, and all the main characters were young, but Julian is described as remarkably beautiful.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Nancy's psychic abilities. Much of the weirdness about the house and its environs earlier in the book also falls into this trope.
- Magic Music: Possibly. The lyrics of "Thrice tosse these Oaken ashes" sound like a spell, and the band did attract the attention of the supernatural.
- Meaningful Echo: Lesley in Chapter 11 says several sentences that mirror Will's in chapter 3 exactly; this despite the fact that these almost identical passages are eight chapters apart and from different, seperate interviews.William: "I always thought the rehearsal room was the one space that didn't feel like it had a history attached to it. There wasn't the bizarre sense that we were intruding there, like I got in other parts of Wylding Hall. Whatever history that room had, it was our history; we laid it down, made our mark upon the place. Sometimes I feel like we might still be there, all of us, playing together... if it hadn't been for what happened."Lesley: "I always thought the rehearsal room was the one space that didn't feel like it had a history attached to it. There wasn't this weird sense that we were intruding there, like I got in other parts of Wylding Hall. Whatever history that room had, it was our history; we laid it down, made our mark upon the place. I hope it stayed there."
- Meaningful Name: Julian Blake is an artist with a mystical streak.
- More Teeth than the Osmond Family: Ashton claims that the third of the Spooky Photographs showed the mystery girl to have more than one row of teeth.
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Lesley's the first to suspect Julian's absence is serious, and she does her best to alert those who can do something to help. Not only do the police and the rest of the band brush off her concerns, but when the police are finally forced to take Julian's disappearance seriously weeks after the fact, they latch onto Lesley as their prime suspect and apparently give her a harder time than any other witness.
- Official Couple: Towards the end it's revealed that Will's relationship with Nancy ended because he and Lesley developed mutual feelings. It's implied the two are still together as of the interviews, and have been so for decades now.
- Real After All: At first, the mysterious girl is just a beautiful-but-creepy Ambiguously Human teenager, but then the Spooky Photographs come out.
- Scenery Porn: It may be an Eldritch Location, but the country around Wylding Hall is beautiful.
- The Spook: The mysterious girl.
- Spooky Photographs: Of the "Spectral Snaps" variety.
- Straight Gay: Jon, by the standards of late-sixties musicians at least.
- Town with a Dark Secret: William's interview segments imply he thinks the elderly of the town knew about the mysterious girl and her connection to the wrens but didn't want to explicitly tell outsiders, which is why they warned the band away from the woods but took down the photos of the wren hunt once Will noticed them.
- Unreliable Narrator: A central source of tension in the story. Are the interviewees' recollections reliable or is the self-admitted intoxication, personal motives and theories, temporal distance from the events, public interest in the mystery, and other psychological factors affecting how they remember and tell their stories years later? Even the most convincing evidence for the supernatural is subject to these potential fallacies, as the other two Spooky Photographs that the interviewees claim demonstrate the mystery girl's more impossible qualities—unnatural movement and inhuman features—were, by their own admission, only seen by six people decades ago before Tom claims to have destroyed them, with Tom admitting this kind of mystery is good for business.
- Vindicated by History: In-Universe. When Wylding Hall first debuted, it received good reviews but didn't catch on. However, it gained popularity over time, to the point where many famous musicians claimed to be influenced by their album and several characters imply the band would draw an instant commotion were they to show up somewhere and play impromptu like they did in their early days. They also note that Wylding Hall itself—the building—is now famous by association with them. The band's famous enough in the present that the book is framed as a collection of retrospective interviews with them about the creation of their famous album—decades after it was actually created.
- Wound That Will Not Heal: Downplayed. Minor injuries inflicted by nature at the hall (scratches from tree branches or birds' claws) take longer to heal than they should and leave unexpected scars.
