Customer Reviews

The Seance

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(29)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

John Harwood's "The Seance" is heavily laden with Victorian atmosphere, and should delight most lovers of ghost stories and mysteries.

The tale is told in six parts, made up of narratives by three of the story's main characters. It is a ghost story (or is it?) with a mystery at its heart.

Family secrets abound, along with murder, blackmail, a sinister suit of armor, and a decaying old mansion that holds secrets of its own. The story was interesting enough to keep this reader turning pages (though not anxiously).

A word here about the pace of the story: for me, the most enjoyable fiction adheres to the "show, don't tell" rule. "The Seance" is heavy on the telling, which slows the pace considerably, without necessarily building suspense. Thus, the three star rating.

But this is simply a matter of taste. Many readers may find the detailed descriptive passages add to their enjoyment. Those readers should be especially pleased with this mostly satisfying tale.

A man who believes in supernatural powers and seeks to harness them for his own ends lies at the core of The Séance, a beautifully plotted Victorian ghost story where the craving of power and revenge fuel much of the action. When the poverty-stricken Constance Langton inherits the vast ramshackle Wraxford Hall, the very large but quite uninhabitable manor house that lies on several hundred acres of woodland near the Suffolk coast, she cannot believe that all of the reported terror and cruelty could have taken place there. The house indeed has a dark history, where lightening bolts unexpectedly strike, where a ghostly suit of armour towers among the shadows, where the dark and sinister powers of mesmerism reign, and where the Hall's reclusive owners, Cornelius Wraxford and his only heir, his nephew Magnus, seem to have died in mysterious circumstances.

John Montague, the family solicitor for the Wraxford estate, has sought Constance out to tell her that she is indeed the principal beneficiary and the sole heir to Wraxford Hall. The property is heavily encumbered with debt, the news forcing Constance to reflect on her own difficult circumstances, her estrangement from her uncaring father, her mother dead from heartbreak, and her sister Alma's sudden death. Only through Constance's encounter with the local spiritualist society and the comforts that the séances can bring can Constance lift the burden of guilt and self-reproach. Now living with her Uncle and plagued by an increasing restlessness of spirit, it is not surprising that she is attracted to Montague's strange and sinister tales of Wraxford Hall and that of Eleanor Unwin who was once married to Magnus, but had inexplicably disappeared with her baby daughter Clara on the night Magnus was planning to hold some kind of bizarre experiment.

As the bitter cold and the wind howls around his house as though it would never cease, the narrative of John Montague begins with the tale of a haunted of Monks' Wood: " give the Hall a wide berth, especially after dark," and also of Magnus who has an initially charming personally and at first quite agreeable, but which only compounds the suspicion against him. And then there's Wraxford Hall itself, like a character that lives and breathes within the pages, with its faded tapestries, and its compounding air of desolation, " a cold bleak, echoing place, constantly smelling of damp and decay." The grey mist swirls and the focus changes to Eleanor Unwin whose frightening visions foretell death, particularly that of her fiancé Edward Ravenscroft, "the slender young man in his dark suit of mourning," and her visions of his death before she had even met him, and then her own disappearance and that of Clara.

Restless and unhappy, and separated by time but not necessarily by circumstance Eleanor and Constance's lives steadily parallel as the mystery of Magnus and his strange attachment to Wraxford Hall is steadily revealed. Both women are down on their luck and stifled by the moral strictures of Victorian society. Certainly Eleanor starts out in thrall, coming under the spell of Magnus who seeks to mesmerize her, but he eventually subdues her will and shrouds her perception so that it becomes almost impossible for her to escape from his Machiavellian delights. Meanwhile Constance battles her desire that she may well be Eleanor's lost daughter Clara, drawing on the affinity she feels from the first pages of Eleanor's narrative: "It's as if the voice she heard from those pages was already familiar to me."

With his tale awash with the paranormal and also sinister apparitions, much of John Harwood's novel is seized with a creeping, mortal dread that coils around the black clouds that constantly boil up above Wraxford Hall. Neither Eleanor or Constance are able to control their own destinies as their stories gradually interlock and Constance ends up finding herself at Wraxford Manor, caught up in a terrifying frenzy of ghostly goings-on. As this fine psychological novel moves from the claustrophobic and smoky drawing rooms of London where séances trap the innocent to the wild surrounds of Sussex and the ever-present darkness of Wraxford Hall, the pages are filled with murder and betrayal, the evil machinations of Magnus Wraxford and the spirits of the dead always around, eventually separating Constance from Eleanor "by only the thinnest of veils." Mike Leonard January 09.

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.

This very finely written book is told from three different points of view, that of Constance Langton, a young woman who lives in London in 1889. She's been living her life with her grieving mother, who can't get over the death of Constance's baby sister. Constance talks her mother into a séance and pretends the infant is speaking through her. After a few of these séances, her mother takes her own life, leaving Constance alone and basically friendless.

John Montague is another point of view character and though him we learn about the Mysterious Wraxford Hall, a falling down mansion that Constance inherits from a distant cousin. There are unsolved deaths connected with this house and Montague advises Constance to "sell the Hall unseen; or burn it to the ground." He tells her to never live there.

And the third point of view character is Eleanor Unwin a young woman with a story a lot like Constances, but whose so called psychic powers seem to want to destroy her. And then there are the people from the Society of Psychical Research who want to study the house because of the alleged ghostly events that have happened there. And I should mention the fact that four of the last owners of Wraxford Hall have gone missing and another was burnt to a crisp. Perhaps Mr. Montague was right when he advised Constance to burn the place to the ground, but if she'd have done that then we wouldn't have a story.

And an excellent story it is. An emotional, gripping and tense story that will make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up as you pour through the pages. This is a deliciously spooky tale that cries out to be read on a dark and stormy night.

THE SEANCE starts off well enough but descends into a mish-mash of too many characters and hard-to-follow twists, and when the book runs out of steam at the end, the reader has long since run out of interest.

"The Séance" is a wonderfully mysterious novel set in Victorian England. It is an utterly enchanting read that draws the reader into its magic and then takes them on a ride of apparitions and spooky encounters.

The most striking thing about the book is its voice. Very restrained and personable, the first-person narrative puts one right in the head of the man characters. Told in part through diary entries - much the same way Bram Stoker fashioned his classic "Dracula" - the story unfolds over various generations and through varying viewpoints as we learn about a strange family curse. Stylistically, this is the most delicately written book I have read in a long time, yet at the same time it is exactly this delicacy that makes you shudder at times, as evil perspires through the narrative and the characters slowly dive into the mysterious unknown that lies before them.

I have loved every minute of "The Séance" and cannot stop but shower it in praise. This is heartfelt, atmospheric gothic horror at its best with fine nuances and cool plot twists.

I enjoyed readfing this very much.
I enjoy Victorian stories, & this fit the bill.
Right combination of intrigue, and fright.
Very well written, a page turner.

John Harwood's debut novel The Ghost Writer was one of those novels that will go down as a favorite of mine, so naturally when Harwood's second novel , The Séance, was recently released, I could not wait to read it.

The Séance is set in Victorian England and has all the elements which make for a great gothic mystery. There is a cursed run down mansion, a ghostly suit of armor, lightening bolts that strike out the blue, apparitions and other strange phenomena.

Constance Langton is introduced early in the novel. She grows up in a house marked by death. Constance is a lonely girl living with her distant father, and a mother who has never recovered from the death of her infant daughter. Hoping to help her mother recover from her depression Constance becomes interested in seances. Constance pretends to be the voice of her departed baby sister. Constance hopes her mother will benefits by hearing from the lost child in the afterlife. She then convinces her mother to attend a séance. Unfortunately, this ends with disaster.

Soon after Constance becomes the heir to a mansion. She is advised to sell it sight unseen or to burn it down. Years before a family disappeared at Wraxford Hall and the mansion is believed to be cursed. The story then moves on and the reader learns about the tragic events that happened at Wraxford Hall.

The story is told from three different points of view: Constance Langton, John Montague who advises her to sell the mansion sight unseen. The third point of view character is Eleanor Unwin, a young woman much like Constance with psychic powers that seem to want to destroy her.

The story is full of twist and turns, and sometimes I found it a little tough to keep track of who was who. Despite this The Séance is a chilling, creepy novel to enjoy, preferably in the daylight.

This is the first I've read of John Harwood, and as a fan of paranormal mystery, I was eager to get started on this one. I found the book easy to read, the words seem to flow smoothly and create that wonderful "picture in your head" experience, which is always a sign of great writing in my opinion. The Seance is told by the three characters in their own words, but the flow works well and you don't feel confused as to whom said what. The story begines with Constance Langton, a young woman who tries to help her mother get over her other daughter's death with the help of a Spritualist. The combination of the Victorian era, an old mansion with a dark history, and a few mysterious disapperances create a vivid story that feels right at home with dark woods, things that go bump in the night and nervous anticipation. Wraxford Hall (the old mansion) is described as "the walls were...black with lichen and mildew" and a "profusion of angles and gables, none of them square". The Seance is well worth a read, and if you enjoy Victoria era mysteries mixed with the paranormal, you will find it entertaining.