ABSTRACT
Alan Garner, according to Adam Scovell, is one of Folk Horror's ‘key luminaries’. This chapter identifies and discusses a uniquely ‘Garnerian Folk Horror mode’ which, in Garner's 1967 novel The Owl Service, is expressed through a distinctive mystic Celtic medievalism, with the malevolent supernatural events of a medieval Welsh folk story doomed to repeat themselves in the lives of contemporary teenagers in the landscape. Garner's central Welsh characters take on the role of the magical medieval Celt, a much-romanticised figure in literary history, and are placed in opposition against the more rational, pragmatic, and invasive English, or Saxon, characters in the novel. Garner's complex and eerie Folk Horror is created through a combination of Celtic mysticism, medievalism, eroticism, and a unique hauntological conception of ‘mythic time’ as channelled through what Garner calls the ‘folk mind’, with political resonances for Welsh and English national identities.
