A Mother's Recollection of Terror

Before Sherlock Holmes, there was a secret his mother carried for thirty years.

Eleanor Sherlock always told her son the truth had a shape too ugly to give a child. Now that he is grown, she gives him this instead: the account of the autumn she was nineteen, when her father - a consulting investigator with no patience for ghosts - was summoned to a crumbling house at the edge of a black tarn, to look plainly, as a scientific man, at a horror the local doctors could not name.

The house belonged to the Ushers. The malady belonged to the blood. And when Eleanor's father raised his camera to photograph the dying Madeline Usher, the plate came back with two women in it - one where she was standing, and one, fainter, already somewhere else.

What follows is a mother's confession: of a family entombed by its own house, of a science that kept careful notes on things it could not explain, and of the night a coffin proved lighter going up the stairs than it had going down. Eleanor was there for all of it. She has never told anyone the whole of it - until now.

A Mother's Recollection of Terror is a Gothic prequel that carries Edgar Allan Poe's Fall of the House of Usher and the earliest days of the Sherlock Holmes lineage into the same house, the same autumn, and the same unbearable question: what do you do with a fact your instruments confirm and your reason refuses?