A Year In The Country: Threshold Tales: Crossing the Boundaries of Woodland Wraiths, the Uncanny City, Edgeland Expeditions and Frontier Drea

A Year In The County: Threshold Tales is an exploration of the edgelands, borderlands and liminal places in film, of the places both literal and in the mind as well as culturally and 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: The Way of the Samurai’sintertwining 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 seductive temptations of a preternatural carnival in Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Elsewhere, the book explores the folk horror precursor The White Reindeer, journeys through an American wyrd frontier in Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, Stephen Poliakoff’s unearthing of buried secrets in Hidden City and Glorious 39, a 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.

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The full chapter list is below:

1. Without Name: Stepping Over the Threshold of a Liminal Landscape

2. Dark Tower: Otherworldy Dysfunction

3. Columbus: Stasis and Escape Amongst Faded Utopian Dreams

4. The White Reindeer: A Folk Horror Precursor

5. The Watcher in the Woods and Something Wicked This Way Comes: Disney Darkness and the Curious Shadowed Side Paths of the House of Mouse (and an Intriguing Sidestep to British Housing Estates)

6. Nadja and Vampir-Cuadecuc: Hinterland Vampire Hunters and Spectral Hallucinatory Genre Flipsides

7. The Shock of the Future: Creating and Discovering New Electronic Worlds

8. Stephen Poliakoff’s Hidden City and Glorious 39: Unearthing Buried Secrets

9. Mike Hodges’ Black Rainbow: The Thinning of the Barriers of Time and Place

10. No Surrender and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai: Views and Stories from the Rooftops and Urban Edgelands

11. Kate and Laura Mulleavy’s Woodshock: A Rudderless Tumbling Down the Rabbit Hole

12. Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus: Journeys Through an American Wyrd Frontier

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The book is part of the A Year In The Country project which explores ＂otherly pastoral＂ rural culture and its intertwining with ＂urban wyrd＂ and the parallel worlds of hauntology.