Name: The Seance
ISBN: 9780224081863

John Harwood

London, 1881. Constance Langton lives in a gloomy home with a distant father and a grief-stricken mother; seeking refuge and comfort, she secretly attends a séance which has tragic consequences. Left aone, her only legacy is a mysterious inheritance that will blight her life and take her deep into a world of apparitions, betrayal and blackmail, black-hearted villains - and murder.

The Seance

Emmett

I loved it; the mysterious setting of the Hall, the complex characterisation but most of all, Harwood's formal-yet-dream-like writing style. His prose has almost all the markings of a traditional Victorian horror novelist, except for the fact that the layout (broken down into differing perspectives) and his relative reticence (as opposed to the verbosity of the 19th century novelist) was decidedly modern. I was initially annoyed at having to deal with a plethora of perspectives from different characters and the first few chapters made it difficult to guess how they were related to each other, or even to the plot for that matter, but at the end when everything came together to a rather startling conclusion, it is a good thing that Mr Harwood managed to weave the story through all his characters - it certainly made it more enjoyable.

The Seance

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