At times pleasantly discomfiting, as befits a real dungeon or seance, at others sooty and hellish as a 19th-century mill.
Electronica by gaslight. Outside overcast, the damp raising shivers indoors. Seance is a Norwegian’s very English steampunk audio novel. Andreas Brandal has conjured eight creepy early-electricity tableaux, oscillating between mad Frankensteinian reanimation experiments in a dungeon laboratory and polite evenings in an over-furnished Victorian lounge spent with the local Spiritualist Society attempting to raise the dead by other means. At times pleasantly discomfiting, as befits a real dungeon or seance, at others sooty and hellish as a 19th-century mill. A heady contrast, just as the Victorians, witness to remarkable leaps in technology, nurtured a queer fascination with death and surrounded themselves with momento mori. And I swear somewhere deep in the background, you can hear the hound of the Baskervilles barking across the heath.
Seance is available on Twice Removed.
