Some gardens remember everything.
The cypress tree at the Perles Mansion has been drinking blood for nearly two hundred years. Juliet Blackwell’s The Séance Garden plants you beneath that tree and dares you to explain away what you see.
This paranormal mystery follows Harper Grae, a skeptical historian of the occult who discovers that some things cannot be rationally explained. Set against Monterey’s fog-laden historic streets, the novel blends Gothic horror with supernatural suspense, building a quiet, insistent dread that accumulates with every page. For readers who want their ghost stories to mean something, this is the book.
Blackwell builds her horror not through gore but through accumulated wrongness, placing you in a garden where the past refuses to stay buried. This is a ghost story for sceptics and believers alike, a meditation on what it costs to admit that some things cannot be explained away. Subtle, insistent, and deeply unsettling.
Blackwell builds her horror not through gore but through accumulated wrongness, placing you in a garden where the past refuses to stay buried. This is a ghost story for skeptics and believers alike, a meditation on what it costs to admit that some things cannot be explained away. Subtle, insistent, and deeply unsettling
The Séance Garden | Juliet Blackwell | Berkley | 28 July 2026
The cypress tree at the Perles Mansion has been drinking blood for nearly two hundred years, and Juliet Blackwell wants you to stand beneath it.
That’s the quiet horror of The Séance Garden: not the ghost itself, but the ground it haunts. The tree is the novel’s silent centrepiece, a sprawling witness that has watched two women die in identical fashion, separated by centuries, and done nothing but grow. Blackwell plants you in that garden and dares you to explain away what you see.
This is not a book that announces itself as horror. It arrives as a mystery, wears the comfortable clothes of a supernatural thriller, and only gradually reveals its teeth.
Forty year old history professor Harper Grae is new to Monterey, a specialist in folklore and the occult, and a lifelong non believer. She loses a bet and finds herself on a cheesy nighttime ghost tour. The kind with lanterns and dramatic pauses and guides who know exactly when to lower their voices.
But when the tour stumbles across the body of local artist Delilah Mason, murdered in the gardens of the near two hundred year old Perles Mansion, the cheesiness evaporates. Harper sees something in that house she cannot rationally explain.
And then the investigation reveals that Delilah is not the first woman to die beneath that cypress tree. The first was Isabel Perles, nearly two centuries ago. Same tree. Same circumstances. Same silence from the dead.
What makes this book work is what it does to your nervous system. Blackwell doesn’t go for the jugular; she goes for the hair on your arms. The creepiness is subcutaneous, building not through gore or cheap shocks but through accumulated wrongness.
A detail that seems innocuous on page fifty returns on page two hundred with a different valence. A character’s offhand comment becomes a key. The ghost, when it appears, is less a monster than a wound that never healed.
The Séance Garden feels like walking through a house where every room is slightly colder than the one before. You can’t quite pinpoint when you started shivering, but by the final chapters you’re bundled up against something you can’t see.
The pacing deserves particular attention. Blackwell moves at a steady, almost stately pace that never tips into boredom. One reviewer noted they were “never bored” while reading, and that’s the achievement: the book sustains tension without exhausting it.
There are no false scares, no gratuitous bumps in the night. Instead, Blackwell builds suspicion in the reader’s mind with the same care a historian builds an argument. Each new piece of information complicates rather than clarifies.
Each supernatural suggestion is immediately counterbalanced by a rational explanation, and then that rational explanation is quietly undermined. You find yourself doing what Harper does, desperately trying to hold onto your skepticism while the evidence accumulates against you.
Blackwell’s prose is clean, unfussy, and deceptively simple. She doesn’t strain for poetry; she trusts the material. The dialogue is natural without being slack. The descriptions of Monterey, its fog, its historic architecture, its particular California melancholy, are precise enough to ground you without overwhelming the plot.
But the real craft is in the structure. Blackwell alternates between the contemporary murder investigation and the historical mystery of Isabel Perles, and she manages the transitions with the kind of invisible skill that makes it look easy. The two timelines don’t just parallel each other; they bleed into each other. You start to feel, as Harper does, that the past isn’t really past. It’s just waiting.
The book’s central theme, and the source of its genuine depth, is the relationship between belief and knowledge. Harper is a historian of the occult. She knows everything about witchcraft, ghosts, and medicinal poisons except whether any of it is real.
Her academic career is built on treating supernatural beliefs as cultural artefacts, interesting, significant, but ultimately not true. Then she encounters something she can’t file away. The novel asks: what happens when your expertise becomes your liability? When the frameworks you’ve built to understand the world can’t accommodate what you’ve seen?
This is not a trivial question. Blackwell, who holds master’s degrees in anthropology and social work, understands that belief systems are not simply true or false. They are lived. Harper’s crisis is epistemological, but it’s also emotional.
To admit that the veil between the living and the dead might be crossed is to admit that everything she’s built her life on is incomplete. It’s also to admit that the dead are not done with us.
The ghost of Isabel Perles is not just a spooky presence; she is an unresolved injustice, a woman whose murder was never properly addressed, whose story was never fully told. Harper’s investigation becomes, in a sense, an act of restorative justice, not just solving a crime, but giving the dead their due.
There’s a real world resonance here that Blackwell handles with a light touch. The novel is set in Monterey, California’s oldest town, a place where history is literally layered into the landscape. Ghost tours are a genuine tourist attraction, and they trade on the frisson of standing where something terrible happened.
But Blackwell is interested in something more uncomfortable: the possibility that the terrible thing isn’t over. That the past doesn’t just inform the present, it inhabits it. Two women, murdered in the same way, nearly two centuries apart. Same tree. Same garden. Same family name. The novel suggests that some violence doesn’t end; it echoes. And the only way to stop the echo is to listen to it.
This is where The Séance Garden fits into Blackwell’s career arc. Her previous novel, Asylum Hotel (2025), was also a paranormal mystery set on the California coast, and it demonstrated her gift for atmospheric scene setting.
But The Séance Garden goes deeper. Where Asylum Hotel was “a fun read” with “a sweet element” of romance, this book is more sombre, more insistent. The supernatural elements are not decorative; they are central to the novel’s moral inquiry.
Blackwell has always been interested in history. Her historical novels like The Paris Showroom and The Vineyards of Champagne explore how the past shapes the present, but here she brings that interest into direct confrontation with the supernatural. The result is a book that feels like a culmination: everything she’s learned about atmosphere, character, and historical weight, brought to bear on a ghost story that refuses to be just a ghost story.
In the broader horror landscape, The Séance Garden occupies a specific space. It’s not folk horror, there are no pagan rituals or isolated rural communities. It’s not cosmic horror, the terror is personal, not existential. It’s Gothic, but a California Gothic, where the haunted mansion is less a crumbling European pile than a nearly two hundred year old house with good bones and bad memories.
Its natural neighbours are Simone St. James (The Sun Down Motel), Darcy Coates (The Haunting of Ashburn House), and Jennifer McMahon (The Winter People), writers who treat the supernatural with intellectual seriousness while never forgetting that the first job of a ghost story is to be scary.
Where Blackwell distinguishes herself is in her protagonist’s professional expertise. Harper is not a random woman who stumbles into a haunting; she is a scholar of the occult, and her training both illuminates and blinds her. The novel is, in part, a critique of academic detachment, the assumption that you can study something without being affected by it.
Readers want ghosts that mean something, hauntings that are about something, terror that has intellectual weight. The Séance Garden delivers that. It’s a ghost story for people who don’t believe in ghosts, and for those who desperately want to.
The cypress tree is still standing, of course. It will outlive us all.
The Séance Garden by Juliet Blackwell
After a cheesy ghost tour in one of California’s oldest towns stumbles upon an actual haunting, a skeptical historian of the occult becomes entangled in solving a murder case.
When Professor Harper Grae loses a bet with a friend, she finds herself on a local nighttime tour of “haunted” locations in Monterey. Harper’s a lifelong non-believer in the occult, though her academic career is devoted to the historical and societal significance of witchcraft, ghosts, and medicinal poisons of all sorts. But her skepticism immediately gets tested when the tour stumbles on the body of local artist Delilah Mason—who’s found murdered on the grounds of a nearly two-hundred-year-old mansion, once home to the infamous Perles family.
On the night Mason’s body is found, Harper catches sight of something in the house that she can’t shake, something that’s impossible to explain, at least not rationally. Soon the murder investigation reveals that this is the second time a woman has been found murdered beneath a sprawling cypress tree in the gardens of the Perles Mansion. And when Harper’s closest friend is questioned by the police, Harper fears the authorities will fail to uncover the real killer.
As Harper asks questions around town and digs deeper into the supernatural speculation and rumors surrounding the murders—two women killed in similar circumstances, separated by nearly two centuries —she sees evidence she can’t ignore that the notorious mansion truly is haunted by the ghost of Isabel Perles.
What will it cost Harper to rethink everything she’s always believed to admit that the veil between the living and the dead might actually be crossed?
Ginger Nuts of Horror: The Heart and Soul of Horror Reviews
Looking to get your horror book or film in front of the genre’s most dedicated audience? Ginger Nuts of Horror is one of Europe’s largest independent horror review websites, with over 30 contributors publishing horror book reviews and horror movie reviews almost every single day.
We offer far more than reviews. Authors, filmmakers and publishers can promote their work through in-depth horror book reviews, horror film reviews, comic and video game coverage, news features, and our popular author and director interviews like Five Minutes With. Our guest feature series, The Horror of My Life, Childhood Fears, The ? That Made Me and more, let creators tell their story while promoting their latest release.
Every feature is built to sell your work. We include backlinks to your website or Amazon author page, a full synopsis, and a universal purchasing link that sends readers straight to their local store. Add a large, engaged social following and an 18-year archive of trusted horror coverage, and you have a platform genuinely built to grow your readership.
Whether you’re an established author, an indie filmmaker, or a debut voice in indie horror, there’s a way for us to help you reach more fans. Explore our horror book reviews and horror movie reviews, then get your horror book or film featured today.
