Re-enchantment is resistance.
I think it fortunate (fated?) that my initial order of the Hookland book was returned for ‘unknown’ reasons — at one point there were claims of damage en route, but no substitute was suggested. This allowed me to instead order it from lovely Treadwell’s and receive in addition the much-desired Right to Reside card as well. Now there is only to decide which version of my name belongs there.
If you are not already a fan of Hookland (*surprised look* and you call yourself a friend of mine! [perhaps you do not and yet you are here]), I suggest you hop on Bluesky and give David a follow. You can also follow Hookland on Instagram and Farcebook, but somehow the breadcrumbs are easier to follow on Bsky. That is how I first crossed the border (though on the other place we have all left to the fascists).
Right now one of the neighbourhood magpies is screeching up a storm, which doubtless means to tell me something. I could consult the Hookland A-Z. That’s the effect of the land; opening haunted possibilities in the landscape so you are always cocking your ear for omens, or reading futures in the detritus on the pavement while the leaves in the wind whisper advice. We can speak in learned tones of hauntology and Mark Fisher’s weird and eerie (and indeed I often do) but that would be beside the point. Hookland doesn’t require that seriousness. It’s just requires we drift, that we allow our steps to find their way along disused paths and in dark corners and notice when we find ourselves there. In these troubled times that seems to happen often.
But as this volume — slim and yet dense with thickets so entangled with past, present, myth, and lore it leaves a lot to chew on and over — conveys, Hookland was born (or recognised, perhaps) from the troubled childhood that Southwell survived. The power of that folklore is untameable. ‘It is folklore’s very nature to resist. You can’t burn the books of an oral tradition.’ From local legends, fringe communities, relations, Fortean publications and the undeniably weird 70s childhood in Britain* the doors to Hookland opened for young David and he has walked there ever since. The greatest gift is that he held the door open for all the misfits, changelings, and witchlings wandering lost in the mists. We could come home, too.
‘Where there is a mystery, there is a desire for stories, a feverish aching need for narrative.’ The book begins with the talk Southwell gave at the London Fortean Society in Whitechapel in April of this year on Remembering Differently which traces the genesis of the landscape of Hookland. He then introduces the inspirations behind some of our favourite Hookland characters like beloved Emily C. Banting. Then he offers some of the specific influences on his attraction to the weird and eerie from J. G. Ballard and the haunted television like Blake’s 7 and Doctor Who. But the influences are not the ah-ha! moment. ‘Hookland is misremembered,’ Southwell reminds us, ‘Deliberately misremembered.’ That’s part of what makes it so haunting — and irresistible. It gives you the atch, ‘a homesickness for a place you cannot return to’ but seek in dreams, asleep or waking.
We are all have a cicatryx that won’t heal. Some are visible (I have one around my neck that allows me to joke about piano wires in Jersey) but so many more are invisible. I’m not claiming that wandering the paths of Hookland can cure them, but Emily Banting may offer you some swamp moss soaked in comfrey leaf that soothes for a time, or you can compare the scars with land-lost sailors at the Old Ferry and their ribald stories will make you feel better for a while. Maybe that’s why I always follow the hum to join the Pylon People gatherings, or sing Banting’s Blessing under my breath as I make my way through fens when I am not sure what else treads there. It’s hard to feel like we have an impact on the world as it burns to the laughter of death-driven hungering vacuities, but each spark of magic we throw or rescue lights the way for someone else.
Re-enchantment is resistance. Join the resistance.
*In the US this weirdness was perhaps to a lesser extent just because the media and geography were so much broader, but the occult pervasiveness in media in the wake of Rosemary’s Baby was extensive and on television from The Other, Satan School for Girls, Secrets of Harvest Home, and ‘Salem’s Lot — who doesn’t remember Ralphie tapping at the window? There was a reason The Simpsons had the tradition of Treehouse of Horror.