Publisher's Synopsis
THE CRYSTAL WALL
A gothic fantasy about love, death, and the dangerous pursuit of forbidden knowledge-in a world where Enlightenment collides with repression.
Victorian England, 1845. As science pushes the boundaries of human understanding, a deep undercurrent of fear, superstition, and longing still grips the soul. In the quiet countryside, young chemist Nicolai Irving arrives at a remote manor to assist the brilliant yet haunted Dr. Ernest Goldenthal. But beneath the surface of this new job lies a growing darkness-one tied to grief, alchemy, and the old secrets Nicolai hoped to leave behind.
Haunted by the suicide of Danielle Goldenthal-Ernest's elegant, mysterious wife-the doctor becomes consumed by a single desire: to defy death itself. Nicolai, torn between his devout faith and his family's hidden legacy in the Dark Arts, must confront everything he thought he believed in when his estranged sister reappears... bringing with her the forgotten rites of alchemy and spirit-calling.
What unfolds is a tense and tragic battle between love and obsession, science and magic, fate and free will. And when a doorway to the other side is finally opened, the price for trespassing becomes terrifyingly clear.
The Crystal Wall is steeped in the atmosphere of gothic classics and visionary horror. Influenced by the works of Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Oscar Wilde, Anne Rice, and H.P. Lovecraft, this is a tale of inner monsters, broken ideals, and the cages-visible and invisible-that we build for ourselves. It's a story about mourning in an age of logic, about repression in a time of so-called progress, and about the human heart's refusal to let go of what it loves... even when it should.
