The Seance

it is a good story - just gets bogged down, a lot. I'm glad I read it but I'm not sure the investment of time was really worth it.

The first chapter led me to believe that this was going to be a good ghost story. Then suddenly it wasn't. I waded through about half of it hoping it would get back on track. When it didn't, I skipped to the last several pages. Nice cover but not a good book. Super disappointed.

If the prospect of curling up with a Gothic novel, set in Victorian England, of course, complete with a crumbling manor house full of dark secrets, an innocent, yearning young woman, several handsome roguish men and a ghost or two, if that prospect doesn't warm the cockles of your heart, then read no further. Harwood, who won accolades and awards for his first novel, "The Ghost Writer," a complex and mesmerizing Gothic ghost story set in modern times, throws caution to the wind and dives directly into the genre with this second novel. Like his debut, "The Séance" also unfolds story by story down the years through a shadowy, blighted family history. The protagonist is Constance Langton, whose 1889 narrative opens the novel: "If my sister Alma had lived, I should never have begun the séances." After a lonely, loveless childhood, Constance's father abandons her and her mother, who has been disconsolate since the death of her younger daughter more than 10 years earlier. Constance, desperate to relieve her mother's grief, pretends to deliver a comforting message from the child and finds herself uncomfortably possessed by the child's voice. But before she can delve too deeply into the medium's art and artifice, her mother dies and Constance is once more adrift. Taken in by a long-lost uncle (whose part in the story is fulfilled by providing a home), she is visited by a lawyer whose startled reaction to her appearance rekindles Constance's long-secret suspicion that she was a foundling and not the natural child of her indifferent parents. The lawyer, John Montague, a lugubrious man, old before his time, has brought her news of a legacy from a distant relative -- Wraxford Hall, "a derelict manor house" with "a very dark history." Unwilling to tell her anything more -- not even who it is she so strikingly resembles -- he goes away. But a week later a parcel arrives. Inside is Montague's own narrative of events as well as the diaries of a young woman. Montague's note accompanying the papers ends with the injunction: "When you have read them, you will understand why I say to you: sell the Hall unseen; burn it to the ground and plough the earth with salt if you will; but never live there." And with that we plunge into the Hall's morbid past -- a monk's ghost that wanders the impenetrable wood nearby and whose sighting is an omen of impending death, the mysterious disappearances of previous owners, including the recluse who dotted the place with lightning rods and delved into alchemy and electrical experiments. The Hall's sinister history reached a climax 20 years earlier and it has remained empty ever since. Montague and the diarist, Eleanor Unwin, who finds echoes in Constance, narrate a story that ends in violence, tragedy and mystery -- a mystery Constance is eager to resolve. Within the constraints of Victorian decorum Harwood has pulled out all the stops in this broodingly atmospheric tale. The hall is dank and huge, full of locked rooms, secret

When Constance Langton was an infant her baby sister Alma died, turning her mother sick with grief, so sick with it that she never left the house. In desperation Constance pretends to be taken over by Alma's spirit and she tells her mother that she is safe in Heaven. But her mother wants more and after a series of seances where Constance pretends to be Alma, her mother wants to actually see her, so Constance takes her to a a group of charlatans where Constance's grieving mother sees her daughter and that night she takes her life. Orphaned and friendless, Constance is left a falling down mansion by a distant cousin. The family lawyer urges her to burn the place down, to never go there, but of course Constance doesn't heed his advice, but she should have, as this house has a history. Twenty years earlier bad things happened there, supernatural things. This is a gothic horror story of the first order, told from Constance's point of view, so it is very easy for readers to feel what she feels, see what she sees and Mr. Harwood uses her point of view to manipulate the reader's emotions with great effectiveness, taking them from a twist here to a turn there, while piling on the suspense in this chillingly good story. This is the kind of story you might want to recount around a campfire on a dark and starless night, it's that good.

I gobbled up this book like it was a piece of chocolate cake. Seriously. 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. It's as if Harwood wrote it especially for me! 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. 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. Constance herself is an almost flawlessly drawn character, and the reader is transfixed immediately by the life of sorrow and loss she suffers at an early age - a lost sister, a hopelessly bereaved mother, and a cold, distant father. Very much alone in a world that wasn't particularly kind to a young girl trying to find her place in it, Constance's quiet courage and determination to find truth, whatever the cost, made her a character worth spending time with. For any lover of a classic and elegant ghost story, this is just what the doctor ordered.

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. I think this is certainly true of the sinister Wraxford Hall. This crumbling manor house has accrued its reputation down the years thanks to its eccentric inhabitants and its location. 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. A pack of vicious hounds is said to roam the area and the ghost of a monk is believed to haunt the woods. Anyone who sees the specter is reputed to die within the month. `The Seance' is John Harwood's second novel and is set in Victorian England. 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. Constance's distraught mother is inconsolable following the death of Constance's sister. In desperation, Constance and her mother attend a seance in the hope of providing some much needed comfort. John Montague is a barrister and amateur artist who is charged with tracing the heir of Wraxford Hall. 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. Eleanor Unwin suffers from blinding headaches and an overbearing mother. Her headaches are the result of so-called visitations from the dead. The social niceties of the time are particularly well drawn in the women's narratives and journals. Unchaperoned ladies and unsuitable husband material are almost as much to be feared as the manor house that binds the various characters. Eleanor's toxic mother is especially outraged when marriage to an artist threatens to heap social stigma on her family. The scenes in and around Wraxford Hall are deliciously creepy. 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. 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'. This is a compelling and highly atmospheric novel from a superb writer.