BleakChesneyWold

                               " What a terrible thing War is "  (attributed to) Napoleon III                                    The village of Solferino, is located in the province of Mantua, Lombardy, in the north of Italy, and lies some 10 km south of Lake Garda. Also the site of a battle that took place on 24th June 1859, the highlight of the Second Italian War of independence, and a key date for  the overall Italian Unification process. The armies of the Austrian Empire were defeated by the French along with their allies, the Kingdom of Piedmont and Sardinia. Solferino was the largest European battle since the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig in 1814. Two emperors, Napoleon III and Franz Joseph, were with their forces at Solferino,as was King Victor Emmanuel II. Certainly from the French side, the railwa...

              Spirit Tales From Beyond The Veil -Edited by Emily Vincent                                                         Summoned to the Seance is one of the larger collections from the 'British Library Tales of the Weird' series, contains 12 stories, a chapter from a H G Wells' novel, and an extract from a Robert Browning poem. Edited with an introduction by Emily Vincent, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in English Literature at the University of Birmingham. Published in 2024.  It not really clear if there is such a genre as 'Seance Fiction', distinct from Ghost Stories or Weird / Horror Tales. A common theme would be a seance with a medium, or perhaps  someone using  a planchette to make a deliberate attempt to contact the Dead. But even then not all the writings on offer here meet the ...