Hookland was made by Soviet science fiction and cosmonauts. It was made by pulp novels my mother didnโt want me to read, but that my Aunt Barbara still lent me. Made by countless bad films surreptitiously watched on an old black and white TV. It has been shaped by a refusal to sneer at the work of Stephen King because Salemโs Lot was brilliant when I read it at 11 and still is. In fact, it has been shaped by a refusal to sneer at anything that generated a sense of sublime, awe and terror in childhood โ even being forced to perform interpretive dance to Tomita. It has been made by brilliant writers โ Aickman, Machen, Jackson โ and it has been made by bad ones. It owes large debts to comics, goth, punk and movie soundtracks that is will never repay. Its substitute parents are free public libraries and Radio 4. It comes with a childhood place soaked with fear of ghosts and UFOs, it comes from a place of love for those exact same engines of terror. It comes from a revulsion for how psychogeography has increasingly became an academic and art language that excludes people from their own primal experience of landscape. It comes for a raging dislike of commodity writing about place and nature. It comes from an absolute refusal to allow fascists to easily occupy their cherished grounds of myth and folklore. It comes from the cunning, the ghost soil, the landscape of England as experienced by this broken body for five long decades. It comes from being a Fully-grown Changeling. Fay Godwin, Paul Nash and Dame Laura Knight are always muttering about it with disapproval in the imagined afterlife. Nothing in it is made up, just remembered differently. It was designed to be a permissive space, a common ground where people could explore and find their own hauntings. You all own it, you all make it. You are all marching with the spirits of dead spaceman, wood sprites and a thousand lost childhoods. You are all scuffling up your memories, your own stories as you navigate across thโฆ
Today's answer to What is Hookland?
