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Spiritus Ex Machina
Spiritus Ex Machina collects five tales of science, technology, and creation from author LC von Hessen
in a mélange of gothic horror, weird fiction, speculative fiction, and dark fantasy. By turns visceral and
ambiguous, unsettling and darkly comic, these stories follow artists, performers, doctors, scholars,
engineers, and occultists alongside hapless folk who find themselves caught up in the
incomprehensible. From 18th-century salon to contemporary suburban home, from fairy tale to thesis
paper, from carnival to mortuary to secret society hidden beneath a factory, peer into the Great
Unknown through the eyepiece of a sideshow attraction or the eyes of an automaton.
in a mélange of gothic horror, weird fiction, speculative fiction, and dark fantasy. By turns visceral and
ambiguous, unsettling and darkly comic, these stories follow artists, performers, doctors, scholars,
engineers, and occultists alongside hapless folk who find themselves caught up in the
incomprehensible. From 18th-century salon to contemporary suburban home, from fairy tale to thesis
paper, from carnival to mortuary to secret society hidden beneath a factory, peer into the Great
Unknown through the eyepiece of a sideshow attraction or the eyes of an automaton.
- GenresHorrorShort Stories
78 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 1, 2021
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About the author
L.C. von Hessen
26 books33 followersLC von Hessen has written stories featured in anthologies such as Pickman's Gallery, Machinations & Mesmerism, and Nox Pareidolia.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 2, 2022
This small collection is stunning. I love the author's neo-decadent writing style and the variety of tales on offer here. The story Heirloom is a great puzzle box with a morbid, tongue-in-cheek take on the fairy tale at it's core. It reminded me somewhat of Kelly Link, which is high praise considering she is one of my favorite authors. Another standout for me was Herr Scheintod which I found to be an utterly unique bit of gruesome Victorian era horror. Also, I didn't know going in that one of the tales, The Medium and the Message, is a sequel of sorts to Lovecraft's Pickman's Model. It's rare to read a mythos story which actually adds to the horror of the original but the inclusion of the "red canvas" does exactly that.
I picked up this collection after reading another great story by the author in an issue of Vastarien and I'm glad I did. They seem somewhat new to the field with this being the only collection I was able to find but I look forward to following their career going forward.
I picked up this collection after reading another great story by the author in an issue of Vastarien and I'm glad I did. They seem somewhat new to the field with this being the only collection I was able to find but I look forward to following their career going forward.
December 18, 2024
SPIRITUS EX MACHINA, the debut collection of weird tales from LC von Hessen, is sure to please those of a Decadent persuasion. Although almost all of the stories contained herein could be considered period pieces, fin-de-siècle fictions embalmed in the grim industrial wasteland of some nebulous and decaying Victorian empire, many of their thematic concerns (dark science, the dehumanization of humanity at the hands of monstrous technology, and so forth) reflect the fears and phobias of our own New Dark Age, and at times it can be difficult to tell the difference between the automatons who inhabit these tales and their ‘soft machine’ flesh and blood creators.
One of the more captivating stories here is “Heirloom,” which is also one of the more complex and experimental efforts. The story seems at first to be a mosaic of smaller tales, and as it jumps back and forth from one narrative to another the effect is like that of channel surfing on a haunted and possessed antique television set, one where all the programs have been selected by THE MAGIC TOYSHOP-era Angela Carter. And yet the story keeps returning to its main spine, a dark and twisted fairy tale that slowly gets more and more detailed with each new telling: it’s fascinating to behold, like watching flesh being slapped onto a skeleton. Equally impressive is “Herr Scheintod,” a death-obsessed chronicle of a watchman employed at a sort of greenhouse for corpses: Teutonic nihilism, Mitteleuropa morbidity and Baudelairian spleen are just some of the flowers that make up this necromancer’s bouquet, and I think SPK’s LEICHENSCHREI album is the ideal background music while reading this one. A few of the stories fall into the realm of Lovecraftian fiction, and while both are accomplished pieces that aim their ambitions far above the commonplace pastiche, my favorite of the two was “The Medium and the Message”: of course, I’m generally susceptible to anything involving the characters and themes of “Pickman’s Model” (which I perennially rank as one of my Top Ten favorite Lovecraft stories). This tale, told in the academic form/voice of a thesis paper, flirts with the notion of Pickman taking up his own peculiar form of Abstract Expressionism, and the prose vividly brings his art to life: the description of a pile of severed heads as seen as a reflection in the dilated pupil of a painted demon was a particularly inspired and ghoulish touch.
LC von Hessen’s fine eye for well-researched historic detail, evocative turn of phrase, and macabre sense of humor makes me very curious to see what future efforts will unfold from the cauldron of their imagination.
One of the more captivating stories here is “Heirloom,” which is also one of the more complex and experimental efforts. The story seems at first to be a mosaic of smaller tales, and as it jumps back and forth from one narrative to another the effect is like that of channel surfing on a haunted and possessed antique television set, one where all the programs have been selected by THE MAGIC TOYSHOP-era Angela Carter. And yet the story keeps returning to its main spine, a dark and twisted fairy tale that slowly gets more and more detailed with each new telling: it’s fascinating to behold, like watching flesh being slapped onto a skeleton. Equally impressive is “Herr Scheintod,” a death-obsessed chronicle of a watchman employed at a sort of greenhouse for corpses: Teutonic nihilism, Mitteleuropa morbidity and Baudelairian spleen are just some of the flowers that make up this necromancer’s bouquet, and I think SPK’s LEICHENSCHREI album is the ideal background music while reading this one. A few of the stories fall into the realm of Lovecraftian fiction, and while both are accomplished pieces that aim their ambitions far above the commonplace pastiche, my favorite of the two was “The Medium and the Message”: of course, I’m generally susceptible to anything involving the characters and themes of “Pickman’s Model” (which I perennially rank as one of my Top Ten favorite Lovecraft stories). This tale, told in the academic form/voice of a thesis paper, flirts with the notion of Pickman taking up his own peculiar form of Abstract Expressionism, and the prose vividly brings his art to life: the description of a pile of severed heads as seen as a reflection in the dilated pupil of a painted demon was a particularly inspired and ghoulish touch.
LC von Hessen’s fine eye for well-researched historic detail, evocative turn of phrase, and macabre sense of humor makes me very curious to see what future efforts will unfold from the cauldron of their imagination.
April 7, 2022
Von Hessen has such fluency with both history and mythos that their desperate characters seem to move in fast-motion around the eternal puzzle-box trap of the life-giving machine. A beautiful bag of guts cinched into corsets and jodhpurs. Definitely check it out!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews