The pacing is slow and steady, blissfully devoid of the booms and tricks so common in ghost stories today, yet so absorbing that you're drawn in as surely as a moth to the flame. Utilizing a mechanism that's been explored many a time and is not as easy to nail as it probably appears, the story is told almost entirely through several first-person narratives, starting with who I think of as the main character, Constance Langton, who has found herself the heir to the manor house in question, Wraxford Hall, to several others who add to the background detail before come back around to Constance. It's as if Harwood wrote it especially for me! I'm already a sucker for anything in the English Victorian setting, especially when it involves dark, haunted mansions, supernatural phenomena, old family scandals and secrets, and a young female protagonist. I gobbled up this book like it was a piece of chocolate cake. This is a compelling and highly atmospheric novel from a superb writer. If you've already enjoyed John Harwood's excellent first novel, The Ghost Writer, or, if Victorian-era mystery stories are your thing, you won't want to miss `The Seance'. The weather-staples of Victorian mystery stories - the bone-chilling cold, swirling mists and lightning - are much in evidence as the protagonists attempt to uncover the secrets that they and the house share. The scenes in and around Wraxford Hall are deliciously creepy. Eleanor's toxic mother is especially outraged when marriage to an artist threatens to heap social stigma on her family. Unchaperoned ladies and unsuitable husband material are almost as much to be feared as the manor house that binds the various characters. The social niceties of the time are particularly well drawn in the women's narratives and journals. Her headaches are the result of so-called visitations from the dead.

Eleanor Unwin suffers from blinding headaches and an overbearing mother. Montague decides to commit the hall to canvas and on taking up his brushes, finds himself suffused with artistic powers that he had not, previously or since, possessed. John Montague is a barrister and amateur artist who is charged with tracing the heir of Wraxford Hall. In desperation, Constance and her mother attend a seance in the hope of providing some much needed comfort. Events unfold through pages of narrative seen from the perspectives of three of the story's main characters: Constance Langton, John Montague and Eleanor Unwin.Ĭonstance's distraught mother is inconsolable following the death of Constance's sister. `The Seance' is John Harwood's second novel and is set in Victorian England. Anyone who sees the specter is reputed to die within the month.

A pack of vicious hounds is said to roam the area and the ghost of a monk is believed to haunt the woods. Its spooky setting amidst overgrown grounds and the surrounding sprawl of woodlands, known as Monks Wood, has caused the local poachers to pursue their game elsewhere. This crumbling manor house has accrued its reputation down the years thanks to its eccentric inhabitants and its location. I think this is certainly true of the sinister Wraxford Hall. It is sometimes remarked that inanimate objects can have such a strong presence within a story that the object almost becomes one of the characters. And she must descend into the darkness at the heart of theWraxford Mystery to find the truth, even at the cost of her life. Years before, a family disappeared atWraxford Hall, a decaying mansion in the English countryside with a sinister reputation.Now the Hall belongs to Constance. For Constance’s bequest comes in two parts: a house and a mystery. It is a world of apparitions, of disappearances and unnatural phenomena, of betrayal and blackmail and black-hearted villainsand murder. So begins The Séance, John Harwood’s brilliant second novel, a gripping, dark mystery set in late-Victorian England. Constance is left alone, her only legacy a mysterious bequest that will blight her life. ” 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. 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.

The seance by john harwood