Local Haunts
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

‘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 classic films to obscure British television, 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 explores 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.


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Praise for Adam Scovell


‘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