The Spirit Photographer by Jon Michael Varese

The true significance of this moment, which sets the novel into motion, threatens to swallow up everyone in its wake. The spirit on the negative is Isabelle, and everyone present recognizes her for different and profound reasons.

Instead of revealing the late son they were seeking, Moody's photograph showed a young, beautiful black woman. The Boston-based photographer had been gaining celebrity status until a portrait session with abolitionist Senator James Garrett and his wife Elizabeth. Though Moody, who is based on America's first spirit photographer, William Mumler, may or may not be a fraud. Hudson-based literary historian Jon Michael Varese's debut novel weaves the fictional and the real history imprints on the novel like a spirit on Moody's photographs. Equal parts Southern Gothic, ghost story, and political drama, The Spirit Photographerreveals the past for what it is: loud, unrelenting, and inescapable. Photographer Edward Moody, who has been said to produce images of spirits, has been running from his own ghosts. In the shadow of the Civil War, the carnage and enormous death toll has made many grief-stricken Americans into believers. But more than one person is out to stop him.The year is 1870 and spiritualism has taken America by storm. Is it possible that the spirit photographer caught a real ghost? When Moody recognizes the woman in the photograph as the daughter of an escaped slave he knew long ago, he is compelled to travel from Boston to the Louisiana bayous to resolve their unfinished business-and perhaps save his soul. Instead of the staged image of the boy he was expecting, the camera has seemingly captured the spirit of a beautiful young woman. One day, while developing the negative from a sitting to capture the spirit of the young son of an abolitionist senator, Moody is shocked to see a different spectral figure develop before his eyes. Despite the whispers around town that Moody is a fraud of the basest kind, no one has been able to expose him, and word of his gift has spread, earning him money, fame, and a growing list of illustrious clients.

He lures grieving widows and mourning mothers into his studio with promises of catching the ghosts of their deceased loved ones with his camera. Photographer Edward Moody runs a booming business capturing the images of the spirits of the departed in his portraits.

The Spirit Photographer by Jon Michael Varese