Just read another story from this Egaeus anthology, and it's another contribution by an ST regular. Steve Duffy takes the haunted house theme and runs with it to a place many might find surprising - the US on Christmas Eve, 1944. For those of us who know the man and his work, however, it's not unexpected. And as always, the period detail and the narrative voice are spot-on.
The narrator is a young man recalling a very bad Christmas indeed. His mother, a faded southern belle of uncertain temper, becomes obsessed with the idea that he beloved brother needs to contact her immediately. Given that he is serving in the Pacific, this seems improbable, but the mother is insistent. The boy's long-suffering father is bullied into driving her and their two sons hundreds of miles back to her family's old-style Southern mansion, where the wonderfully-named contrivance of the title lurks in the attic.
If you don't know what a psychomanteum is, finding out is fun! Suffice to say that the story combines elements of Stephen King and Southern Gothic. King's influence is there in the detail, the assured tone, and the grasp of the way families can simply fall apart in a matter of days or hours. The Gothic is manifest in the decaying mansion, the horrors of antebellum attitudes. Then there are the revelations about the mother's younger days, which make Tennessee Williams seem like Joanna Trollope.
Another winner, then. And I'm sure there are more good 'uns to come.
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