The Spirit Photographer of Beacon Hill
A Novel of Victorian Occult Horror

About this book:

In the gaslit winter of 1869 Boston, Silas Thorne develops more than portraits. A former battlefield photographer turned master of the wet collodion process, Silas prides himself on chemical rigor and optical truth—until his modified lenses begin capturing thread-like structures coiling in the shadows of his Beacon Hill studio. Not spirits. Not double exposures. Something physical, barbed, and vascular that gathers wherever the living sit long enough to be remembered.

As the city's elite climb four flights of stairs to preserve their dead on glass, Silas finds himself caught between Dr. Elihu Sterling's hunger for scientific immortality and the quiet desperation of mourners who would pay anything to believe the camera sees what the eye cannot. But the anomalies on his plates are spreading—granular, knotted, alive in ways that defy the laws of light and silver. And the longer he watches the darkroom tray, the more certain he becomes: the emulsion isn't recording ghosts. It's recording something that feeds on the sitting.

*The Spirit Photographer of Beacon Hill* is Victorian occult horror steeped in the wet chemistry of early photography—where every portrait requires a ten-minute breath hold, every plate carries the photographer's silver-stained fingerprints, and the line between documentation and invocation wears thin as collodion skin. For readers who love *The Essex Serpent*, *The Silent Companions*, and the slow dread of *The Turn of the Screw*, this is a novel about what develops in the dark when you point a lens at grief.