There are currently nine A Year In The Country books:
- A Year In The Country: Wyrd Explorations
- A Year In The Country: Threshold Tales
- A Year In The Country: Lost Transmissions
- A Year In The Country: Cathode Ray and Celluloid Hinterlands
- A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields
- A Year In The Country: Straying From The Pathways
- A Year In The Country: The Marks Upon The Land
- The Corn Mother novella
- The Shildam Hall Tapes novella
Click the links above or below for more details.
A Decade Of Wandering Through Spectral Fields
A Year In The Country: Wyrd Explorations collects writing from the first decade of the A Year In The Country project, which has explored and documented the interconnected rise of interest in the wyrd, eerie and re-enchanted landscape, folk horror, the further reaches of folk music and the parallel worlds of hauntology.
The book includes a selection of revised and at times extended writing from the first five A Year In The Country non-fiction books and the first ten years of posts on the project’s website alongside previously unpublished work from the A Year In The Country archives.
It reflects a personal journey through hidden pathways in the cultural undergrowth, a “wandering through spectral fields” that across 52 chapters includes writing on amongst many others the films, television series, directors, writers, books, musicians, record labels etc:
The Wicker Man, Ghost Box Records, Vashti Bunyan, Broadcast, The Changes, The Radiophonic Workshop, Quatermass, Castles In Space, The Hare And The Moon, Excalibur, The Black Meadow, Penda’s Fen, Howlround, Rob Young’s Electric Eden…
The Day Of The Triffids, The Delaware Road, Mark Fisher, Kill List, Jonny Trunk, Gone To Earth, Weird Walk, The Watcher In The Woods, The Heartwood Institute, Detectorists, The Stone Tape, Sapphire & Steel, Peter Strickland, The Book Of The Lost, Wolfen, Benjamin Myers Tam Lin…
Raven, Folklore Tapes, Sproatly Smith, Delia Derbyshire, The White Reindeer, John Carpenter, Curse Of The Crimson Altar, Boards Of Canada, Robert Macfarlane, The Company Of Wolves, Burial, Finders Keepers Records and The Owl Service.
Crossing the Boundaries of Woodland Wraiths, the Uncanny City, Edgeland Expeditions and Frontier Dreamscapes
A Year In The County: Threshold Tales is an exploration of the edgelands, borderlands and liminal places in film; of the places whether literal, in the mind, cultural or amongst the paranormal realm where the boundaries between worlds, ways of life, the past and the future become thin and porous.
The book wanders amongst the overlooked, the hidden from view, isolated spaces and parallel planes of existence in cinema, taking in films that interconnect with both rural and urban “wyrd” culture from the shores of Albion out into the American Deep South and across the snowbound landscapes of Europe.
Amongst its pages, you’ll find a wide-ranging interthreaded journey that takes in the woodland wraiths of Without Name and The Watcher in the Woods, Columbus’ love letter to a time capsule of modernist architecture, Nadja and Vampir-Cuadecuc’s media phantom reimaginings of their genres, Dark Tower’s concrete bound haunting, Ghost Dog’s intertwining of spectral hip-hop with ancient Japanese tradition, No Surrender’s black comedy set amongst 1980s urban decay, the creating and discovering of new worlds of electronic sound in The Shock of the Future and the darkly seductive temptations of a preternatural carnival in Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Elsewhere the book journeys through the American wyrd frontier in Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus and explores the folk horror precursor The White Reindeer, the unearthing of buried secrets in Stephen Poliakoff’s Hidden City and Glorious 39, the rudderless tumbling down the rabbit hole in Kate and Laura Mulleavy’s Woodshock and the thinning of the barriers of time and place in Mike Hodges’ Black Rainbow.
A Year In The Country: Lost Transmissions – Dystopic Visions, Alternate Realities, Paranormal Quests and Exploratory Electronica
The book weaves amongst brambled pathways to take in the haunted soundscapes of electronica, the rise of the occult in the 1970s, cinema and television’s dystopian dreamscapes and hauntological work which creates and gives a glimpse into parallel worlds. It is a recording of a personal journey that delves amongst both the esoteric fringes and mainstream of culture, and which at times holds a shadowed scrying mirror up to the modern world and some of its ills, while also reflecting visions of a hopeful future in its depths.
Alongside other experimenters in electronic sound the book explores Boards of Canada’s invoking of “the past inside the present”; Paul Weller’s visiting of Ghost Box Records’ elsewhere universe; work by Cosey Fanni Tutti, Hannah Peel and the reformed Radiophonic Workshop, and their collaborations across time with electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire; Dominik Scherrer and Natasha Khan’s summoning of “pastoral spook” via a hidden language of angels; and takes a trip in the company of fairground and rural ghosts conjured up on records released by Castles in Space.
Alongside these it examines the paranormal and “worlds beyond” via the semi-lost supernatural-orientated television series Leap in the Dark which included work by Alan Garner and David Rudkin, Sharron Kraus’ contemporary investigations into the preternatural and the conjuring of modern-day phantasms in Luciana Haill’s artwork.
The book also includes an intertwined consideration of the “deluxe dystopias” that can be found in films such as Rollerball and Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca and prescient views of the future’s past and media collusion in film and television including Nigel Kneale’s work and the overlooked corners of science fiction.
A Year In The Country: Cathode Ray and Celluloid Hinterlands – The Rural Dreamscapes, Reimagined Mythical Folklore and Shadowed Undergrowth of Film and Television
This book undertakes in-depth studies of films, television programmes and documentaries and wanders amongst depictions of rural areas where normality, reality and conventions fall away and the landscape becomes deeply imbued with hidden, layered and at times dreamlike stories, taking in modern-day reinterpretations of traditional myth and folklore and work that has become semi-obscured from view through being unofficially available or otherwise having become partly hidden away.
It explores film and documentary hinterlands including, amongst others, the embracing of the ‘old ways’ in The Wicker Man; John Boorman’s creation of an otherworldly Arthurian dreamscape in Excalibur; the alternate retelling of folk legend in Robin and Marian; the unreally vivid seeming snapshots of folk rituals in Oss Oss Wee Oss; the slipstream explorations of The Creeping Gardenand stories from the ‘haunted borderlands’ in Gone to Earthand The Wild Heart.
The book also investigates the hauntological spectral and ‘wyrd’ undergrowth of television, including, alongside other programmes, the unearthing of mystical buried powers in Raven; the utopian meeting of starships, pedlars and morris dancers in Stargazy on Zummerdown; teatime Cold War intrigues amongst bucolic isolation in Codename Icarus; the layering of time and myth in anthology drama series Shadows; Frankenstein-like meddling away from the mainland in The Nightmare Man; the magical activation of stone circles’ ancient defence mechanisms in The Mind Beyondepisode ‘Stones’; and the ‘Albion in the overgrowth’ recalibrating of mainstream television in Mackenzie Crook’s Worzel Gummidge.
“Stephen Prince has dug hard to uncover these gems… A fine, thoughtful and thoroughly researched book… an invaluable guide.” Cathi Unsworth, Fortean Times
A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields – Journeys in Otherly Pastoralism, the Further Reaches of Folk and the Parallel Worlds of Hauntology
Wandering amongst the further reaches of folk culture, “otherly” pastoralism and their intertwining with the parallel worlds of hauntology, the book connects layered and, at times, semi-hidden cultural pathways and signposts, journeying from acid folk to edgelands via electronic music innovators, folkloric film and photography, dreams of lost futures and misremembered televisual tales and transmissions.
It includes considerations of the work of writers including Rob Young, John Wyndham, Richard Mabey and Mark Fisher, musicians and groups The Owl Service, Jane Weaver, Shirley Collins, Broadcast, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Virginia Astley and Kate Bush, the artists Edward Chell, Jeremy Deller and Barbara Jones and the record labels Trunk, Folk Police, Ghost Box and Finders Keepers.
The book also explores television and film including Quatermass, The Moon and the Sledgehammer, Phase IV, Beyond the Black Rainbow, The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, Bagpuss, Travelling for a Living, The Duke of Burgundy, Sapphire & Steel, General Orders No. 9, Gone to Earth, The Changes, Children of the Stones, Sleep Furiously and The Wicker Man.
“A new book caught my eye recently – the title A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields, that goes in search of the darker, eerier side of the bucolic countryside dream by looking at films of a certain genre, books, TV series, music; it is great to have this fascinating subject explored so thoroughly and brought together under one title.” Verity Sharp, Late Junction, BBC Radio 3
The Corn Mother novella
The Corn Mother novella is both a standalone piece of work and also a further exploration of the world, stories and dreamscapes of an imaginary near-mythical film, which first began on an album released with the same name in 2018. It is an exploration and relection “of the whispers that tumble forth from the corn mother’s kingdom”. A place and story where fact, fiction, reality and dreams blur into one:
1878: A villager is forced to flee from her home after rumours begin that she has cursed the crops. Her vengeful spirit, known as the corn mother, is said to visit those responsible in the night, bringing ill fortune and an all-encompassing sense of guilt.
1982: A film called The Corn Mother begins to be made. Although the plot is fictional, it closely resembles the story of the fleeing villager. The film is completed but never released, with all known copies disappearing after its production company collapses.
1984: A lifelong quest begins to find the near-mythical film.
2020: All mentions of The Corn Mother begin to disappear from the world, calling into question if the film ever existed.
“A fascinating and truly inventive novella… This is an original and significant piece of work, not only in its novel, singular and successful approach to folk horror and ‘imaginary’ films but in the creation of its own self referencing folklore.” Grey Malkin, Folk Horror Revival
The Shildam Hall Tapes novella
The novella is both a standalone piece of work and also a further exploration of an imaginary abandoned film that first began on an album called The Shildam Hall Tapes released in 2018. It is set among the cultural hinterlands of wyrd, otherly pastoral, folk, psychedelic and hauntological culture, and follows the journey of a song through time: one that appears to bring disarray to all who hear it. Is this coincidence or something more?
1799: A young woman who lives at the Shildam Hall country mansion writes a lament for a lover she can never be with, and locks it away forever.
1840: The song is discovered by one of her relatives and begins a journey through time. It entrances those who hear it, but does it also lead to their potential demise?
1969: A film set among the decadent milieu of late 1960s counterculture commences production at Shildam Hall, before collapsing amidst potential scandal after the song is rediscovered.
2004: A recording of the song is stumbled upon but all who listen to it seem to disappear…
“Spellbinding… The Shildam Hall Tape releases are… stellar examples of a fertile imagination and of an ability to create a singular, immersive world, one that exists within our own world but is not quite of it, with odd corners and shadows.” Grey Malkin, Moof magazine
A Year In The Country: Straying From The Pathways – Hidden Histories, Echoes of the Future’s Past and the Unsettled Landscape
From eerie landscapes and folk horror to the dysfunctional utopian visions of Brutalist architects via hidden histories and hauntological reimagined cultural memories, the book explores such varied and curiously interconnected topics as the faded modernity and “future ruins” of British road travel; apocalyptic “empty city” films; dark fairy tales; the political undercurrents of the 1980s; idyllic villages gone rogue; photographic countercultural festival archives and experiments in “temporary autonomous zones”.
The book also discusses film, television and books, including: Requiem, Prince of Darkness, The Prisoner, The Company of Wolves, Detectorists, A Very Peculiar Practice, Edge of Darkness, Day of the Triffids, Penda’s Fen, High-Rise, The Living and the Dead, Night of the Comet, In the Company of Ghosts: The Poetics of the Motorway, The Twilight Language of Nigel Kneale, GB84, This Brutal World and The Fountain in the Forest, as well as music that draws from, or interconnects with, hauntological spectres and reimaginings of the past, including hypnagogic pop, synthwave and the work of Ghost Box Records, Adrian Younge, D.A.L.I., Grey Frequency, The Ghost in the MP3, DJ Shadow and Howlround amongst others.
“Chock full of treasures, both well-known and obscure… the twelve chapters tackle their subjects in an accessible yet scholarly manner, never shying away from often weighty concepts but never using unnecessarily complex language when simple terms will do… Simply put, A Year in the Country: Straying from the Pathways is a delight, and will thrill existing seekers of hauntological fare as well as serve as an introductory hit to those yet to sample its enchantments.” Alan Boon, Starburst
A Year In The Country: The Marks Upon The Land
Collects all 104 images which were created during the first year of A Year In The Country – a visual exploration the patterns beneath the plough, pylons and amongst the edgelands, taking in the beauty and escape of rural pastures, intertwined with a search for expressions of an underlying unsettledness to the bucolic countryside dream.
The imagery in the book takes inspiration from and channels the outer reaches of folk culture and hauntology, alongside memories of childhood countryside idylls spent under the shadow of Cold War end of days paranoia and amongst the dreamscapes of dystopic science fiction tales.
“The Marks Upon The Land… converts the bucolically familiar into something more eerie or even sinister, a series of widescreen mutations that create pareidolia spectres through symmetry and layering. Seen in isolation, these images are arresting enough but they gain power by being collected together, fashioning a statement of intent.” John Coulthart, feuilleton
