The Hookland project has existed primarily on social media for more than a decade but now, finally, has manifested in physical form.
In Hookland Fragments Volume One, David Southwell, the creator of Hookland, an imaginary and particularly haunted English county, tells the story of its genesis. In 2012 he explained the concept to a friend, and his intention to post fragments on Twitter. The friend replied, “Dude, just write a fucking book.”
And it is a puzzle to many people that there hasn’t been a Hookland book before 2026 or, indeed, several.
This wisp of a publication, with just over 60 pages, feels like a testing of the water by someone who seems torn between two impulses. On the one hand, justifiable bigheadedness about the depth of his knowledge, the richness of his life experience, and the fact that his creation is beloved by so many. And, on the other, there’s a certain self-deprecating diffidence: What? This old thing? In a book?
If we buy this, read it, and appreciate it, there might be more, as promised by the presence of ‘Volume One’ in the full title. But, for now, these ‘fragments’ offer plenty of nutritional value for minds stimulated by folklore, hauntology, psychogeography, pastiche and mischief.
The meat of the book is a script for a talk given to the London Fortean Society above a pub in London earlier this year. There’s a certain breathlessness in it, capturing the sense of someone with a lot to say and not much time to say it. It’s dense with ideas and stories that will send you to Google or Wikipedia: Cunning Murell; the Southern Television Broadcast Interruption;the disappearing Dolphins of Westcliff-on-Sea; the six naked amnesiacs who turned up wandering in and around Romford between 1920 and 1923…
A key point is that Hookland owes much to the reality of growing up in Essex. In Southwell’s memory it is every bit as infested with the uncanny as the version of the county presented in the podcast Broken Veil.
Another chapter, or article, or essay – I’m not quite sure how to describe them – is a chunk from the A to Z of Hookland with entries on things like ichthyosaurs, Picnic at Hanging Rock and the Soviet cosmonaut Vyachaslav Zudov.
From a certain angle, this might read like yet another entry in the Haunted Generation, Scarred for Life, “‘oo remembers Noseybonk?” school of nostalgic hauntology. Apart from the fact that Southwell’s connection to many of these media artefacts is unusually personal and idiosyncratic, he also goes out of his way in one short article-chapter-essay to explain his lack of enthusiasm for 1970s public information films (PIFs):
I am regularly asked what part such films played in inspiring Hookland. Surprisingly, people don’t like the honest answer: “Less than Jack All.”
As someone from a working class background who experienced poverty as a child, and periods in foster care, Southwell’s perspective is refreshingly free of tweeness or cosiness. His rejection of PIFs as a source of inspiration is partly on the basis that the dangers they warn against might have seemed scary to middle class bureaucrats but were just facts of life to a poor kid growing up on the margins in 1970s Britain.
If a Hookland book, movie, TV show or prestige podcast had emerged a decade ago, would it have worked? Hookland’s power is that it is never complete and presents itself to us only in snippets of obscure, unattainable texts. A glossy mass market Product would probably have sapped the project of its energy and sense of infinite possibility.
Fragments presented in a series of monographs (or zines, I suppose, in 2026 terms) might, in fact, be the perfect format for exploring Hookland.
Perhaps, ideally, with more illustrations and photography, or even examples of the faux-ephemera that Southwell says he always intended to create to help Hookland materialise more fully.
Disclosure: we’ve never met but David did write the foreword to my 2022 collection Municipal Gothic and has been kind enough to recommend my writing to the residents of Hookland from time to time.
Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart 