Summoned to the Séance

“Keep still! Keep still! Don’t break the circle!” Through the electric silence around the séance table, the rapping of an unknown hand spells out a horrible revelation. 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 the mid-nineteenth century, public fascination with spiritualism surged, bringing forth a new literary craze for stories of ghost and demon summonings and communications with the dead via a medium. Reviving spectral narratives by Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells and Florence Marryat alongside lost classics of the genre, from the birth of the movement through to its last days of popularity in the twentieth century, this new collection invites you to take a seat at the fragile threshold between the mortal world and the chilling realms of the dead.