J Sheridan Le Fanu

Uncle Silas J Sheridan Le Fanu

"Perhaps other souls than human are sometimes born into the world, and clothed in flesh." Silas Rutvyn is something of a riddle. To some, including his niece, he is something of a ghost. There are, however, no simple answers. As Le Fanu gradually unfolds the layers of this story, we are irresistibly drawn into his world. From the writer of such works as Through a Glass Darkly, and The House by the Churchyard, this eerie and chilling tale is one of the finest examples of his art. Uncle Silas, subtitled "A Tale of Bartram-Haugh," is a Victorian Gothic mystery-thriller novel by the Irish writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu. Despite Le Fanu resisting its classification as such, the novel has also been hailed as a work of sensation fiction by contemporary reviewers and modern critics alike. It is an early example of the locked room mystery subgenre, rather than a novel of the supernatural (despite a few creepily ambiguous touches), but does show a strong interest in the occult and in the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish scientist, philosopher and Christian mystic.