Local Haunts
Adam Scovell
‘In this wonderfully eclectic collection of essays Adam Scovell makes a beguiling guide, leading us along numerous haunted byways of British and European literature, television and cinema.’
– Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland
‘Scovell's incisive essays, distributed across space-time, come together in this volume to form a cohesive travelogue through the hinterlands of our cultural landscape and the imaginal topographies of great artists, writers and filmmakers. It's an enriching journey that takes regular pitstops in those enchanted zones where a place and its stories are one and the same.’
– Gareth E. Rees, author of Sunken Lands
‘A splendidly compendious celebration of landscape in film and prose, with a special focus on the uncanny. This treasury of Adam Scovell casts his insightful eye on an enviable range of topics and achieves that best of critical functions - to make us look again at things we may have taken for granted.’
– Ramsey Campbell
‘Adam Scovell is an archaeologist of the imagination, forever unearthing stories like treasure from the soil, raising ghosts, finding links and shining a flickering light into England’s hidden corners.’
– Benjamin Myers
For more than a decade, writer and filmmaker Adam Scovell has been preoccupied by the strange connections between place and culture: curious about the graves of writers, determined to find the locations of iconic films, intrigued by the landscapes that inspired novels.
From obscure British television to European cinema, the poems of playwrights to the psychogeography of Weird Fiction, Local Haunts brings together a collection of essays, photographs, travelogues, and journalism that explores the connections between art and the landscapes that inspire it. With particular focus on several key figures that emphasised place in their work – including W.G. Sebald, Alan Garner, Agnès Varda, M.R. James, and Marguerite Duras – Scovell examines culture that is haunted by locales, rural and urban.
Taken from a range of print and digital publications, including work published by Sight & Sound, Literary Hub, Caught By The River, and Little White Lies, as well as Scovell’s Celluloid Wicker Man site that brought many ideas surrounding Folk Horror and the Urban Wyrd to prominence in the early 2010s, Local Haunts brings together a decade of work treading the ghostways and the corpse roads of film, literature, and art.
Praise for Adam Scovell
‘One of the most interesting and original young British writers about landscape, culture and people that I know; consistently adventurous in his explorations of place as a novelist, essayist, critic and film-maker.’
– Robert Macfarlane
‘A unique, new English voice of its own. It's what I want to be reading right now.’
– Deborah Levy, on How Pale the Winter Has Made Us
‘Nettles succeeds in capturing the very essence of the Wirral, its strangeness… Adam Scovell delves into his own memories, but touches on something deeper, more universal. In doing so he gives us a hint, a brief glimpse, of that which lies beneath the primordial soil of the place he calls home.’
– Psychogeographic Review on Nettles
‘Scovell doesn’t aspire to realism: instead he invests his talents in hallucinatory imagery, haunting atmospherics and prose that again blends the stately melancholia of WG Sebald with the logorrhoea of Thomas Bernhard.’
– Guardian, on How Pale the Winter Has Made Us
‘Restrained, precise, perceptive writing. Fine British weird.’
– Adam Nevill, on Mothlight
‘A fine portrait of grief – and the strange roads it can lead us down.’
– TLS, on How Pale the Winter Has Made Us
About the Author
Adam Scovell is a writer and filmmaker from Merseyside, now living in London. He completed his PhD in Music at Goldsmiths University in 2018, and now writes regularly for the BBC, the BFI and many other outlets. He is the author of Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (2017, Auteur), alongside three novels all published by Influx Press.
Paperback ISBN: 9781914391460
Ebook ISBN: 9781914391477
Publication date: April 2025
Formats: Paperback / eBook