HuckleBuck411
The author takes the reader back to the early 70s at the tail-end of the “free love” drug and booze-soaked days of folk-rock when music was innovative and meant something, produced on vinyl, and album covers were wonderful art expressions. This story is specifically about an English band made up of four young male musicians and a talented teenage American girl singer who are set the task of creating a second album after their mildly successful first release. Their manager rents the very old Wylding Hall for the summer so the band will be isolated and focus on creating the music for the new album. While a large part of the band's experience at the Hall is idyllic, but with the inevitable sexual tension, there is something else dark that exists within the Hall and around the wooded grounds, especially at the mysterious ancient barrow within the woods. A place the locals warn them to stay clear of. The chapters of the book are broken into the narratives of each individual group member, their manager, a girlfriend, a reporter and a photo taker present day looking back at their experiences, some very strange, from that long-ago summer, as the group wrote and practiced the songs that eventually would end up on their second and last album. The only member not present is the main writing and singing musical talent of the group who is deceased and it may have something to do with a girl who showed up on the scene that summer and with whom he became infatuated with. As the story unwinds, the strangeness grows and moves towards its mysteriously horrific conclusion. This reader found it to be one of the better, creepily satisfying tales within the horror genre.
The author takes the reader back to the early 70s at the tail-end of the “free love” drug and booze-soaked days of folk-rock when music was innovative and meant something, produced on vinyl, and album covers were wonderful art expressions. This story is specifically about an English band made up of four young male musicians and a talented teenage American girl singer who are set the task of creating a second album after their mildly successful first release. Their manager rents the very old Wylding Hall for the summer so the band will be isolated and focus on creating the music for the new album. While a large part of the band's experience at the Hall is idyllic, but with the inevitable sexual tension, there is something else dark that exists within the Hall and around the wooded grounds, especially at the mysterious ancient barrow within the woods. A place the locals warn them to stay clear of. The chapters of the book are broken into the narratives of each individual group member, their manager, a girlfriend, a reporter and a photo taker present day looking back at their experiences, some very strange, from that long-ago summer, as the group wrote and practiced the songs that eventually would end up on their second and last album. The only member not present is the main writing and singing musical talent of the group who is deceased and it may have something to do with a girl who showed up on the scene that summer and with whom he became infatuated with. As the story unwinds, the strangeness grows and moves towards its mysteriously horrific conclusion. This reader found it to be one of the better, creepily satisfying tales within the horror genre.