Reviewed by Travis McDonald

Aimee Parkison's latest novel, Sister Séance, takes place mainly on Halloween night during a traditional dumb supper where thirteen dinner guests and their hostess, Ruby Turner, must eat in complete silence in hopes that this ritual will summon spirits to dine with them. The setting is Concord, MA, shortly after the end of the Civil War, and many of the dumb supper guests are relatives of the Turner and Hayden families, while others are Civil War veterans, freed slaves, or members of the Concord community. Parkison is adept at making this eerie corner of New England come alive with touches of unsettling Gothic imagery and rich characters, many of whom have been deformed in some way by the Civil War or the horrors of slavery.

Though much of the novel takes place on a single night, the past, whether it is the Civil War or the dark secrets hidden by various characters throughout the book, is never far from anyone's mind. Because of this framing, characters and their backstories are introduced in interspersed chapters, and the book moves through the cast of characters, revealing more and more about their relationships with one another and their shadowy secrets.

One of the first things that the reader might notice about this novel is that it is full of twins. Viv and Grace Hayden; their sisters, Aria and Belle; Maggie and Valerie Turner; our hostess, Ruby Turner, and her deceased twin Clara; as well as her brothers Jon and Henry. Not to mention the Underwood sisters, Spiritualists who were invited to the dinner by Henry after learning that the women were once owned by Henry's brother Jon, who ran the family's plantation (aptly named Twin Oaks) until his mysterious death.

Though the theme of twins is compelling and fitting for this neo-New England Gothic novel, the manner in which these characters are introduced often makes it difficult for the reader to remember their backgrounds and how everyone is related to each other. This might be because Parkison has chosen to include so much backstory in a 212-page novel that takes place mainly on a single evening. And while the premise is intriguing (a Spiritualist séance in post-Civil War Massachusetts on Halloween night) the incidences that have occurred in the characters' pasts are so tangled and delivered in such large chunks of exposition that they often thwart the forward progress of the novel.

For instance, in the first chapter we are introduced to Viv Hayden, a photographer who is setting up her camera to take pictures of the dumb supper's partygoers. Here we are given about three pages of Viv taking pictures of some ominous guests dressed in bone masks, then about twelve pages of her life story, before we return to the present scene, which ends a page later. This is germane for almost every chapter in the book, and while this technique is not so unusual for a nineteenth-century Gothic novel, the main issue is that the present action often isn't nearly as dramatic or compelling as what has happened to these characters in the past.

We do find such a compelling backstory, for instance, with Viv. She ran away from her family to join Henry Ward Beecher's Plymouth Church in Brooklyn because of the church's commitment to abolitionism. After ingratiating herself into the congregation, Reverend Beecher convinces her that her talents as a photographer might be best used on a plantation taking pictures of slaves to document the injustices committed upon them. To do so, she must marry the plantation owner's son, Mason, and inculcate herself into the Turner family. During this process, she falls in love with Godfrey, one of the plantation's slaves, who impregnates her, and Sister Séance picks up sometime after this when Viv is trying to decide how she will cope with birthing the child of a Black man.

To make matters more complicated, Viv has come to live with her twin sister, Grace, and their sisters, Aria and Belle, also twins, in Ruby Turner's boarding house, after their mother and father's death in an apartment fire. Ruby is a matchmaker and the sister of Jon Turner, the plantation owner, and her twin sister, Clara, was perhaps also killed in the fire that killed Viv's parents sometime before, though no one is exactly sure. Jon's twin, Henry, shows up to the dumb supper in Chapter 3, where we learn that Jon may have also died in a mysterious fire after a botched lynching conducted to save Viv's honor after her affair with Godfrey. Then there are the aforementioned Underwood sisters, also twins, who were Spiritualist students of Clara, Ruby's twin, and the same girls who Reverend Beecher tasked Ruby with photographing on her mission to Twin Oaks. If this seems like a lot, it is. And keep in mind, all of this is delivered in the first thirty-five pages or so of the novel, almost all through exposition, with other plotlines and backstories of peripheral characters included.

One might argue that this could be Parkison's point here: that the past is an overbearing presence on the here-and-now. However, one wonders throughout the novel if the story might not have been better served by dilating the frame so that the most compelling events of the characters' lives could be delivered to the reader in the present moment. To put thirteen-some-odd characters into a house on a single night, each with a complicated and mysterious past that intertwines with several of the other guests in a less than 300-page novel is, no doubt, a difficult structural task. And while Parkison's novel has its bright spots, ultimately, Sister Séance is stifled by its condensed timeline and constant interruptions of the present narrative by pages and pages of a more compelling story.