Spiritus Ex Machina

Spiritus Ex Machina collects five tales of science, technology, and creation from author LC von Hessenin a mélange of gothic horror, weird fiction, speculative fiction, and dark fantasy. By turns visceral andambiguous, unsettling and darkly comic, these stories follow artists, performers, doctors, scholars,engineers, and occultists alongside hapless folk who find themselves caught up in theincomprehensible. From 18th-century salon to contemporary suburban home, from fairy tale to thesispaper, from carnival to mortuary to secret society hidden beneath a factory, peer into the GreatUnknown through the eyepiece of a sideshow attraction or the eyes of an automaton.“LC von Hessen deserves your attention. Mordant wit, vibrant fantasy, keen insight into character,artful eroticism, and an authentically historic voice. Every piece in this collection will reward you.”- Michael Cisco, author of The Divinity Student and Antisocieties“Sometimes you encounter the work of a writer whose name you want to shout from the rooftops. LCvon Hessen is such a writer. von Hessen expertly weaves the macabre, the grotesque, and thephantasmagorical into an intricate, artful black web. Count me among their new fans. I suspect there’llsoon be many, many more.”- Matthew M. Bartlett, author of Gateways to Abomination“The fiction of LC von Hessen is like a hand emerging from the grave of the Middle Europeanfantastic, an eye peeking out from the floorboards of a Ligottian house. Machinery, a carnival, adecaying homestead, an alchemical workshop, and so much more emerge as settings of tales that areghoulish, lurid, and as painterly as they are literary. Including tales hearkening back to the works ofE.T.A. Hoffmann and H.P. Lovecraft, von Hessen is an emerging and memorable force in the realm ofdark fiction.”- Farah Rose Smith, author of ANONYMA and book reviewer at Publisher’s Weekly“The stories here meet an easy moment: a turn of the century where social and scientific revolutionarymeet ancient secrets, dark revelations and supernatural knowledge. Gothic stories with gears, gore andfables, von Hessen’s art is as much the focus as tortured artists, zealous students, and tragic machinists.There are things here for fans of Lovecraft and fans ready for something else entirely. Somewherebetween gothic steampunk and cautionary fable, these stories mark one of the most unique voices incontemporary weird fiction.”- S.L. Edwards, author of Whiskey and Other Unusual Ghosts

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