The Black Meadow Archive - Volume 1

 

The Black Meadow Archive - Volume 1 by Chris Lambert
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was introduced to The Black Meadow Archive - Volume 1 through the album of the same name. After getting the digital copy and becoming enamored of it, I sought out the physical LP and paid a good clip of money for it. Sometimes I know what I want and I'm willing to spend what I need to in order to get it. I very rarely buy vinyl, so this tells you how much I like the strange, haunting sounds of this album. So, when I saw this book . . . well, I had to know the tales hidden behind the dulcet horror of these songs. And here they are.

"The Lair of the Coyle" is a great mythic story of a knight who is cursed to poverty all the days of his life. A good little tale, with a touch of the gruesome, as one should expect from medieval stories.

"The Legend of the White Horse" is a beautiful piece of folk-fabulism, mythic and banal at the same time. I could hear this being sung and spoken by a bard of old. Timeless and haunting.

I love blackberries. They are one of my favorite fruits. So, I wondered what the song "The Blackberry Ghost" was all about. Now that I've read the story of the same name, I know. But now I don't know if I want to know. Next time I eat blackberries . . . I shall be very, very careful.

The exquisite subversion of folkloric norms in "A Voice from the Heather" is a spectacularly positive, affirmative, yet ultimately horrific work of art. It simultaneously upends and reinforces the morality tale, surprising at every turn, and there are many turns. Possibly one of my favorite fables in recent memory. Calvino would have loved this, and I love Calvino, thus . . .

More blackberries: "The Blackberry Swim" is like something straight out of Der Struwwelpeter or Grimms' Fairy Tales (the uncensored versions) - gaudy in its gruesomeness. Imagine folk horror meets splatterpunk. I love blackberries, they really are one of my favorite things in the world. But after reading this story, I might hesitate, just momentarily, before eating the next one. But I'll get over it. I hope.

Even more blackberries: "The Heart of the Blackberry Field" is an exquisite example of Folk Horror. It hits all the right notes with careful timing, creating a perfectly sinister, yet innocent tone. We are one with the land, and the land is one with us. You, too, will become one with the land. Trust me, you will. When I think of the term "psychogeography," going forward, I shall think of this tale first and foremost, at least in a rural sense. Perhaps I'm mapping my own definition onto the term, as it was originally coined to describe exclusively urban applications, but this is how I choose to interpret it. Call it rewilding psychogeography.

The bardic poem "He Took Her Hand" betrays its oral storytelling origins by the clever use of mnemonic refrain. Structurally, it reminds me of some of the works I studied while a student of African History. But this is a very British volume. Still, the structures echo each other quite strongly. This is the sort of horrific tale one would hear in a dark pub just before closing. The series of permutations of this refrain render it effective and, yes, memorable.

"A Dead Man on the Moor" is atmospheric, but the lack of any real underlying motive and scant background make for a sparse story. Not a bad story, just not as rich and deep as the others.

A peasant morality tale, "The Ploughman's Wrath" illustrates the virtue of hard work and honesty and the punishment due to the lazy and dishonest. This is, however, just one possible story among many mythical explanations for strange features in the land. It makes one wonder how many unspoken tales might exist to explain otherwise unexplainable phenomena, all lost in the mists of time. Will we ever recapture them?

Okay, a little piece of dark poetry in the middle of the book. Okay. Seems a little weird that there isn't more poetry in here, but this book is all about weird. It's not that "The Song of the Meadow Bird" is out of place, it just seems slightly out of genre. Then again, a few of the stories have a poetic sensibility, if not true mechanical poesis, so maybe it does fit in.

"The Ticking Policeman" is a wonderfully weird story that is oh so very British: well-mannered and potentially violent, should one step out of line in the slightest. The understated humor is like something out of the more refined skits on Monty Python's Flying Circus (yes, there were some of those in the midst of all that insanity).

"March of the Meadow Hags" is my favorite piece in this volume. A diabolical pear tree and skinwalkers feature most prominently in this incredibly weird tale. It is told through a series of seemingly unrelated documents - one of my favorite ways to write and, yes, to read. Wonderfully dark and sinister! This is the sort of story I wish I would have written myself.

"The Maiden of the Mist" is bittersweet and tender. It might make you a little teary-eyed. It did that to me. A touching story.

"The Audire" is an unexpected (at least by me) story about Syd Barrett. The mystery of Radomes on the northern moors is explored. I don't even know what to say about this story. I enjoyed it. But it was strange, even for a man who loves strange stories. Truth be told, I'm a bit jealous that these ideas have been explored and I won't discover them in my own writing. But I'll take the gift.

"The Wretched Stranger" reads as if it had escaped from a deep trough of creepypasta. And I do mean escaped. This story will keep crawling out, smiling the whole time, no matter how many times you kill it. But trusting your hunches might just buy you some time before its inexorable arrival.

"The Village Under the Lake" is convoluted and requires some amateur mental gymnastics to understand. The confusion adds to the intrigue, however. The narrator is restrained in imparting information because the way that the information was imparted was piecemeal and confused. Besides, you don't really want to know everything about the village under the lake! Trust me, you really don't want to know.

I like the story of the "Ghost Planes" as much as the haunting song on the album (if it can be called a "song" proper - it's more like a soundscape). A wonderfully cryptic sewing together of various patches of accounts of Ghost Planes flying above the moors from throughout history.

I also have a digital copy of the album "The Black Meadow Archive: The Lost Tapes". It covers some of the stories in this book that were not covered in the first album. It is equally as moody and grey. Unfortunately, there never was a physical LP done of this one. At least . . . not in this reality.

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