#hookland

Thank you for your note! I love blackthorn too, in all its seasons.

The year is dying. Some trees wear red robes to its funeral, others choose gold. In all the season's acts of solar alchemy, where stored sun is discharged as transformed colour, none weep for the passing. For death is part of the eternal turn and it is beautiful. – Emily Banting, 1982

At the start of the pandemic, I found myself like numerous other artists caught in quicksand, my focus lost for ongoing projects. As I gazed upon the unfolding news reports, local happenings and the experiences of friends, I took what I was absorbing and expressed my feelings and thoughts in the form of a book comprised of a contemporary dance of death and also as reactionary memes. Here is the fruit of the gallows tree.

With a foreword by Hookland's David Southwell.

"Hellebore: A Summoning of Ancient Terrors" Issue no. 1, Samhain 2019

I generally keep to a strict policy of only reviewing "review copies" I receive because the backlog is usually high and the works I paid for I feel much less of an obligation to write about, even when they are very good and interesting volumes. I tell myself every now and then to review this or that work I have just read but if its not a review copy, it almost never will get reviewed.

Yet rules as such are made to be broken now and again and I happened onto this extraordinary new publication I hope to see more things from in the future. Inexpensive but well made, it is part of a growing resurgence of fanzine style publications that our own Folkwitch is a part of.

"Hellebore" is focused on the growing field of "folk horror" that is manifesting in film, music, and literature. An aesthetic art movement with little in the way of dogmatic rules it plays to a theme found most famously in films like the 1970s "Wicker Man" and the more recent "A Field in England" - dark and full of mystery, haunted landscapes and glimpses of nearly forgotten rites common in the ancient past that have somehow survived into the modern world.

Folk horror is in large part an aesthetic salve for the slick modern business of being alive in the early 21st century. It's a brambles slash of your skin push-back against the herbicides and pesticides we use to control the lush green danger that surrounds and infiltrates our modern cityscapes. A half remembered nightmare of another time and place, the once here and now drifted into a past we can only just recognize the outline of in the dark of vague memories and dead gods.

So I happened onto a copy of "Hellebore" and it's a fantastic read. A fun and well conceieved A5 sized volume, 68 pages and designed in an exquisite violet coloured halftone process it is a visual feast. The layout is jammed full of imagery surrounding the text, and old woodcuts are merged into modern horror elements like an Electric Wizard jam conjured into fanzine form.

The lineup is great, with thoughtful articles about bog mummies, stone circles, sacrifice and the landscape as well as a short interview about folk horror with folklorist and author Ron Hutton and a very inspirational short piece from Hookland "landscape punk" and folklorist David Southwell.

It is a wonderful publication I hope to see more volumes from in the future.

Get yourself a copy of Hellebore directly from the publisher: