Summoned to the Seance - Spirit tales from Beyond the Veil

Summoned to the Seance - Spirit tales from Beyond the Veil, edited by Emily Vincent / From the British Library's "Tales of the Weird" series, published in 2024 / ISBN 9780712355919 / 304-page paperback

***

You will hear loud raps, you will have your faces touched by cold, damp, unseen fingers—THINGS will be all round you, and a frightful white face will come out of nowhere, and peer into yours!

Through the electric silence of the séance, a terrible, hurtling force draws near. A play with the planchette invites a diabolical visitor to Radley Manor. A medium’s summoning of a lost child pitches them into mortal peril.

In this haunting new collection, Emily Vincent presents fourteen chilling classics and lost gems of séance fiction which evoke the most thrilling and thought-provoking aspects of the popular Victorian movement of spiritualism. Featuring tales by practising mediums, sceptics and ghost-seekers including Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, Florence Marryat and F. Scott Fitzgerald, this volume is a suffusion of spectral frights and satirical skewerings, destined to linger with the reader long after the door to the séance has closed.