The Seance

A haunting tale of apparitions, a cursed manor house, and two generations of women determined to discover the truth, by the author of The Ghost Writer Sell the Hall unseen; burn it to the ground and plow the earth with salt, if you will; but never live there . . .” Constance Langton grows up in a household marked by death, her father distant, her mother in perpetual mourning for Constance’s sister, the child she lost.Desperate to coax her mother back to health, Constance takes her to a séance: perhaps she will find comfort from beyond the grave. But the meeting has tragic consequences. Constance is left alone, her only legacy a mysterious bequest that will blight her life.So begins The Séance, John Harwood’s brilliant second novel, a gripping, dark mystery set in late-Victorian England.It is a world of apparitions, of disappearances and unnatural phenomena, of betrayal and blackmail and black-hearted villains—and murder. For Constance’s bequest comes in two parts: a house and a mystery. Years before, a family disappeared atWraxford Hall, a decaying mansion in the English countryside with a sinister reputation.Now the Hall belongs to Constance. And she must descend into the darkness at the heart of theWraxford Mystery to find the truth, even at the cost of her life.

Washington Post Book World

“Elegantly paced and delightfully macabre, [The Ghost Writer] celebrate[s] the Victorian school and its obsession with the past’s authority over the present, the thin line between affection and obsession, the glimpse of the lurid from the corner of the eye.”

New York Times Book Review

“The Ghost Writer manages to evoke both the confident past and the more anguished present of the genre, and even to suggest, slyly, that although the illustrious tradition of the genteel British ghost story remains with us, we need to be very, very careful about disturbing its rest.”

From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Many of the creepy late Victorian familiars abound in The Seance: the dark woods of the English countryside, the ruined mansion with secret passages and hidden chambers and fog on the moors. There's even a sarcophagus in a dead fireplace, a tricked-out suit of armor and some apparatus for collecting electricity when lightning strikes. Drafts blow out candles at the most inopportune times. The literary conventions of the Victorian suspense novel are present as well: the nested narratives that arrive in mysterious packets, abandoned diaries and even a family tree -- complete with married cousins. Australian John Harwood, whose Ghost Writer won an International Horror Award in 2004, writes with Poe and Dickens peering over his shoulders, shaking their wizened heads perhaps over one modern twist: The strongest characters in The Seance are two women of action. Constance Langton, the narrator of the story, has known little but grief in her young life. Her younger sister dies of scarlatina at the age of 2, and her mother goes into perpetual mourning. Poor Constance is ignored and abandoned by her distant father, and her only succor becomes the chance that a medium at a seance might provide a way for her mother to contact the dead child. But the dead rarely answer our calls, and when Constance pretends that they do, she brings down even greater sorrow. Her salvation seems to come from a sudden bequest by a distant relative. She inherits the foreboding Wraxford Hall and with it a packet of papers that reveals some of the reasons behind the disappearance, 25 years earlier, of Eleanor Unwin, her infant daughter and her mesmerizing and villainous husband. Eleanor's secret journal hints at the truth, and the two stories -- Constance's and Eleanor's -- mesh in the thrilling conclusion, the result of happy coincidences that devotees of Victorian novels may relish. Indeed, the ways in which Harwood plays with the conventions of the form provide the main source of delight. Curiously, however, the seances themselves undermine the witty fun. The novel's epigraph gives away the trick of making a luminous vapor appear, and the seances to which Constance brings her mother are exposed as frauds. The final seance in the book hoodwinks us as well, elaborately revealing the man inside the monster, the spooks made out of fine gauze and suspended disbelief. Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

About the Author

John Harwood is the author of two previous novels of Victorian Gothic suspense. Aside from fiction, his published work includes biography, poetry, political journalism and literary history. His acclaimed first novel, The Ghost Writer, won the International Horror Guild's First Novel Award. He lives in Hobart, Australia.

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