The Sepia Mechanist

von Bryan D. S. V.

420 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

Paris, 1899. While the city tears open its streets for the coming Exposition and prepares to enter a new century of electricity, photography, and machines, automaton restorer Lucien Vautrin still believes in one comforting truth: every movement has a cause.Then La Veuve arrives.The eighteenth-century mourning automaton is built to perform exactly thirty-one movements. Lucien dismantles her, traces every cam and linkage, and confirms the mechanism completely.After the spring stops, she performs a thirty-second.Two fingers touch her throat. One foot drags. Her head turns toward an empty chair. Three knocks sound against the table.Days later, a man dies repeating the same sequence.Determined to prove that someone has tampered with the machine, Lucien joins forces with physician Madeleine Aubert, whose understanding of the human body is as exacting as his knowledge of clockwork. Their investigation leads through private collections, forgotten workshops, behavioral experiments, and a hidden mechanical theatre where life-sized automatons rehearse the movements of real people.Then Lucien finds a figure that should not exist.It reproduces the private habits of Léonie, his younger sister, who vanished twenty-six years earlier.As the line between imitation, manipulation, memory, and the impossible begins to disappear, Lucien must determine whether the machines are predicting human behavior, being used to manufacture it, or preserving something no mechanism should be able to hold.Because almost everything La Veuve has done can be explained.Almost.The Sepia Mechanist is an atmospheric historical Gothic horror novel blending psychological suspense, murder mystery, mechanical obsession, and restrained supernatural dread in the rain-dark streets of fin-de-siècle Paris.

• Reihe: Independently published
• ISBN: 9798172701344
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 09.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Independently published